“WHY DID HOMES GET SO UNAFFORDABLE?” JD Vance wondered aloud in a televised cabinet meeting late last year. The question was entirely rhetorical. Vance had a ready-made scapegoat. “Because we had twenty million illegal aliens in this country taking homes that ought by right to go to American citizens,” he continued, inflating the number of undocumented immigrants.

It’s a claim the vice president had made before, including in his 2024 debate with Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz. Back then, Vance cited a “study” from the Federal Reserve—which in reality was a short speech prepared for an official—that supposedly showed immigration, especially illegal immigration, increased house prices. Linking immigration and affordability is a key part of the forgotten-man shtick Vance has been peddling for a while now, turning real anxieties about the cost of living into support for Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Here’s the catch: that mass deportation push isn’t helping lower the costs of housing, it appears to be driving it up.

In the first year of the second Trump administration, new-home prices rose sharply in the Northeast and West—the two U.S. regions most dependent on immigrant construction labor (23 percent and 25 percent respectively). The rise in cost was almost certainly a result of ICE enforcement actions.

That’s because construction is an enormous source of jobs for immigrants, documented and otherwise. Estimates developed by the immigration-reform group FWD.us put the number of immigrants in the U.S. construction industry at...