Fact Check: Does viral map prove Biden immigration surge, not Trump, spiked housing prices?

A viral post by conservative commentator Tara Bull is reigniting debate over the causes of America's housing affordability crisis.

The post shares an animated map claiming to show illegal immigration into the United States in 2022 and suggests the Biden administration's immigration policies - not President Donald Trump - are responsible for today's soaring home prices.

But does the evidence support that conclusion? Here's what the data actually shows.

Claim: Map suggests Biden's immigration policies responsible for soaring home prices

The viral map presents 5,356,750 illegal immigrants in 2022, implying this Biden-era influx, not Trump, is responsible for today's housing crisis.

Fact Check: Mixed

The first problem is the map itself.

The figure 5,356,750 does not match any widely accepted measure of illegal immigration for 2022.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States as of January 2022. Pew Research Center reached virtually the same estimate.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded 2.77 million southwest border encounters during fiscal year 2022. Those encounters are not unique individuals; many involve repeat crossing attempts, making them an entirely different metric.

The viral map's figure falls almost exactly between those two datasets without matching either one.

No publicly available methodology explains where the number originated, and it cannot be traced to DHS, CBP, Pew Research Center, the Congressional Budget Office, or another recognized source.

Until the creator publishes supporting data, the map's headline figure should be treated as unverified.

The broader economic argument is more complicated.

A March 2026 working paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that unauthorized immigrant workers did contribute to housing demand between 2021 and 2024.

The researchers estimated that each 1 percentage point increase in unauthorized workers as a share of a metro area's workforce corresponded with approximately a 2.2% increase in home prices and a 1.4% increase in rents.

Nationally, the paper estimated unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30% of home-price growth and about 20% of rent growth during that period.

But those findings have frequently been overstated.

President Trump and several allies cited the paper as proof that illegal immigration caused home prices to rise by 30%. That is not what the study concluded. 

It attributed about 30% of the increase in prices to unauthorized immigration, not that prices themselves rose 30% because of immigration.

Independent economists also caution that immigration is only one piece of the puzzle. MIT urban economist Albert Saiz argues that pandemic-era low interest rates, inflation, remote-work migration, chronic housing shortages, zoning restrictions, and rising construction costs remain much larger drivers of today's housing affordability crisis.

The Federal Reserve paper itself is also a working paper, meaning it has not undergone the full peer-review process. The paper explicitly states it does not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

The map's figure of 5,356,750 cannot be verified against official immigration data. At the same time, it is inaccurate to claim immigration did not affect housing costs.

Evidence suggests unauthorized immigration contributed to higher home prices and rents, but it was only one factor among many, and political figures have repeatedly exaggerated what the underlying research actually found.