Do Democrats Really Care About Immigrants?
Their housing policies often make it hard to tell
Masked ICE agents now arrest people without warrants and detain American citizens. Riots erupted in downtown Los Angeles in response to the unauthorized use of the national guard against civilians. Peaceful No Kings rallies spread across American cities protesting authoritarian overreach. California Governor Gavin Newsom is busy doing the important work of starting a Substack.
U.S. politics is mid shit storm yet here I am with a rant about housing, co-written by my friend and fellow housing advocate Alex Melendrez.
Beyond being inhumane and often lawless, the ICE raids will devastate the homebuilding industry across the country. In California, immigrants make up as much as 41% of the construction workforce, most of them lawful residents. The raids must stop if housing will ever be built at adequate scale to bring down costs.
But long before the ICE raids began, Democrats faced a more fundamental question: Where were new immigrants supposed to live when the cost of housing remains so high and the availability of housing remains so low?
The nativism that has taken over the Republican Party exists among Democrats too, it just manifests in different ways.
What do Democrats believe?
Blue states, sanctuary cities—many of the places that claim to love immigrants most enact elaborate policies that limit the number of new residents who can live there. Sociologist Matthew Desmond has described the “invisible walls” many Democratic communities erect against new homes.1 Nobody needs a border wall when they can produce the same effect with a housing shortage.
For example, strict zoning laws ban denser housing in the vast majority of urban and suburban neighborhoods. Outdated environmental laws in much of the country add years to the approval processes for housing located in even the most sustainable places. Fees, “community benefits,” and other barriers stack up until the spectrum of what is possible to build becomes incredibly narrow or, oftentimes, nonexistent.
Fundamentally, it has little impact when your community says you love immigrants. If your community does not build new housing, then few new people can live there.
The artificially induced housing shortage turns housing policy into a zero-sum game. When the supply of housing cannot increase as new people move to an area, then new residents cause housing prices to rise. When Vice President J.D. Vance blames illegal immigrants for driving up housing prices, he’s only wrong in the sense that anyone moving to a new place, regardless of immigration status, also drives up housing prices so long as the amount of available homes cannot correspondingly increase.
As prices rise, fewer and fewer people can afford to move. In places like California and New York, the housing shortage has pushed more and more people out of state entirely. Recent Californian emigrants cite housing costs as the number one cause for leaving.2
However, J.D. Vance’s argument is one sided. He assumes we live in a game of cruel musical chairs. New people show up, there are fewer chairs for the people who were already there, ergo new immigrants displace existing Americans.
Some Democrats have a similar philosophy, though biased against different populations. Left-coded organizations spent much of the last decade protesting tech workers in San Francisco, arguing they were parasites on the city. However, there isn’t a real way to ban housing for tech workers while allowing it for everyone else. Either cities can have enough housing to welcome everyone, or they can’t.3
Undocumented immigrants and tech workers typically have different housing needs, but the parallel between parties arises over the idea that existing communities should get to choose who is deserving or undeserving of housing in the artificial zero-sum game. Zero-sum thinking, which has taken over much of the modern Republican Party, need not exist in the Democratic Party as well.
Cognitive dissonance
In reality, we can build enough houses for everyone. New people aren’t really the ones causing the housing prices to rise; the rules preventing new housing are. We have a choice: Leave the number of proverbial chairs the same as more people join the game, pushing those with the lowest incomes from diverse backgrounds into homelessness or displacing them from the region entirely. Or we can allow more homes for everyone.
Many Democratic leaders suffer cognitive dissonance. The incoming leader of California’s State Senate, Monique Limón, recently released a statement saying “I am outraged by the ICE raids in LA.” Meanwhile, Limón hasn’t voted for a single major pro-housing bill in at least five years. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass worries the ICE raids will leave “nobody to do childcare.” Last year, she exempted single-family neighborhoods, almost 80% of LA’s residential land, from a city policy that streamlines affordable homes childcare workers can afford to live in.
While CA Governor Newsom has frequently spoken strongly in favor of more housing, he hasn’t put enough weight behind pro-housing policies to unlock a meaningful building boom. In fact, rates of multi-family housing production today are still dramatically lower than prior decades. Local resistance to state initiatives undermines efforts to change the status quo.4
Democrats’ dissonance on housing and immigration goes well beyond what’s happening right now with the Trump Administration’s ICE Raids. During the collapse of Afghanistan’s prior U.S.-backed government, refugee organizations struggled to find permanent housing for Afghan evacuees in regions of America where they could effectively integrate.
For example, in the East Bay Area in California, home to the largest number of expat Afghans in the U.S., the median house costs $1.1 million, the median rent $2,400. California and other Democratic states betray their progressive values, such as LGBTQ+ protections and women’s right to bodily autonomy, when high housing costs prevent persecuted members of those communities from moving here.
Restoring opportunity by welcoming new neighbors
To their credit, many Democrats genuinely do support housing abundance. YIMBY Democrats for America exemplifies groups bringing together elected officials and citizens to “Build America, Defeat Fascism, and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance, where people and governments alike are empowered to build and create for all of us.”
New coalitions, often consisting of counterintuitive partners, have arisen among legislators and portions of the party’s base to support housing abundance. Democratic-led cities like Austin, Texas and states like Colorado have pursued bold housing reforms.
The entire party should take note. Blue states can only be the land of opportunity, welcoming all with open arms, if they allow homes for new residents. America was built by successive waves of immigrants. We benefit when we encourage more immigrants to come here and keep building with us. But in order to build our nation, we must literally build the housing in which people live.
Authoritarian antics cannot distract me and Alex from supporting housing for all who need it. No matter what the federal government does, Democrats writ large should support building homes for more people, creating more opportunities in our movement and in our communities.
Alex Melendrez supports housing affordability throughout California. He’s a prominent Democratic activist, former party delegate, veteran organizer, and social media photo-sharing virtuoso. Follow him at @acmelendrez across all handles.
Desmond's book “Poverty, By America” describes the barriers liberal cities erect against new homes in detail.
Though it’s worth noting, despite the critics, California is so desirable that its population has fully rebounded post pandemic despite the absurd cost of housing. The state should want more people to live here!
To their credit, some lower-income communities justifiably grew frustrated that a disproportionate amount of development occurred in their neighborhoods while wealthier areas stalled growth. But displacement largely occurred because of the absence of housing in wealthy neighborhoods, not the presence of housing in low-income ones. Modern local politics face a fundamental problem, whereby the irresponsible use of local control over land use continues the legacy of segregation and fails to address our housing shortage in wealthier communities.
For example, in my hometown, Lafayette, California, hundreds of residents came out to No Kings rallies opposing Trump and ICE raids. Meanwhile, Lafayette’s city council—in a city that votes 75%+ Democratic!—is fighting major state housing legislation as “government overreach.” One council member, a person who I still want to think of as pro housing, argued to me that he is “a big fan of building housing” but also that a state law allowing 6-7 story buildings within a half mile of transit “doesn’t make sense” because it would affect some low-density residential neighborhoods. The bill in question passed the state Senate by just one vote and faces a perilous path through the Assembly. If Democrats cannot support substantially more homes within the half mile of major transit stops, the party will continue failing to support immigrants and economic mobility writ large.
 | A guest post by
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The point of a system is what it does
Pretty clear that many liberals care more about promoting the idea of immigrants than doing the work of housing them, and other people who need places to live.
I suppose you would be betraying your pro housing horse by not putting up three homeless people. The argument is a poor one. It seems the sole solution advanced by the Abundance/YIMBY crew is remove all restrictions on development, create an overabundance of housing so prices collapse.