A 1 percent increase in unauthorized workers in a given area was associated with a 2.2 percent rise in home prices and a 1.4 percent increase in rents. That's not a campaign talking point. That's the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, publishing the math.

During the 2024 vice presidential debate on CBS News, Governor Tim Walz and the moderators treated JD Vance like he'd made the number up.

Vance said — on national television, to an audience that was already being told he was lying — that "25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices." The fact-checkers pounced. The headlines wrote themselves. Vance was "misleading." Vance was "without evidence." Vance was a guy who made up a number to scare suburban voters.

Except now the Federal Reserve has entered the chat.

According to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, as reported by Breitbart, unauthorized immigrant worker flows between March 2021 and March 2024 — the Biden administration's watch — "accounted for about 30 percent of employment growth, roughly 30 percent of home-price growth, and about 20 percent of rent growth." Thirty percent of home-price growth. Not some rounding-error contribution. Not a marginal blip buried in a footnote. Nearly a third of the reason your house costs more than it did three years ago walked across the border while Joe Biden pretended the border was secure.

Vance also said during the campaign that housing was "way too expensive" because the country had been "flooded with 30 million illegal immigrants who are taking houses." At the time, the smart set treated this like a conspiracy theory with a combover. The New York Times ran their usual "context" pieces. The cable panels had their usual "experts" explain why supply and demand apparently doesn't apply when the supply in question is people without legal status.

But the Dallas Fed's numbers don't care about cable panel consensus. A 1 percent bump in unauthorized workers correlating to a 2.2 percent jump in home prices is a mechanical relationship. It's not ideology. It's arithmetic. More people competing for the same housing stock means higher prices. This is the kind of thing they teach in introductory economics courses, which may explain why so many journalists missed it.

The administration's response during those years was roughly what you'd expect — deny the scale, dispute the numbers, and change the subject to "root causes." The media obliged. When Vance made his housing argument, the coverage wasn't about whether the claim was true. It was about whether it was acceptable to say.

A Vance spokesman put it plainly: "the mainstream media is nothing more than a propaganda arm for the Left." You can quibble with the phrasing, but when the same outlets that called Vance a liar are now quietly noting that the Federal Reserve confirmed his thesis, the quibble gets harder to sustain.

What makes the Dallas Fed study particularly inconvenient is the timeframe. March 2021 to March 2024. That's not some generational trend you can spread across three presidencies. That's one administration. One border policy. One set of decisions that produced 30 percent of the home-price growth Americans are still paying for every month in their mortgage statements and rent checks.

Thirty percent of home-price growth. Twenty percent of rent growth. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Published July 2026.

Somewhere, a fact-checker is updating a rating from "Mostly False" to "We'd Rather Not Talk About This."