[yukinon]

I don't disagree with your message, but-

> coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing

I've seen a few comments talk about this, but this doesn't affect my day-to-day literally at all. This never crosses my mind because there aren't illegals I come across or maybe just don't ever cross paths with. Is this primarily a border state thing? If so, wouldn't that limit it to just CA, TX, NM, AZ? And only one of those is a swing state.

[cryptonector]

At what rate of illegal crossings would you be affected?

[consteval]

Impossible to say, but as someone who lives in Texas and has actually lived on the border, it's simply not a real problem. Nobody notices, or cares, about it. What happens is people attribute seemingly random events to illegal immigration.

Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices). Crime? Immigration! (never mind crime continues to go down and has been for decades). Your shoes untied? Immigration!

It's just such a stark disconnect from reality. They're just used as scapegoats, enemies of the American people.

[cryptonector]

> Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices).

One argument I often see is that housing costs are increased by the large increase in population. Can you speak to that?

Can you imagine a rate that might be too high? 1 million/year? 10 m/y? 20 m/y? 50 m/y? There must be a limit, even for you.

[consteval]

They aren't buying houses, they're very poor.

The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.

[thehappypm]

No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.

Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.

Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue

[consteval]

Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.

Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).

We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.

[cryptonector]

> They aren't buying houses, they're very poor.

I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.

[consteval]

I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.

I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.

In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.

You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.

If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.

The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.

[valval]

You have people looking out for your future regarding topics you don’t know to watch out for. This happens all the time everywhere around you, that people are fighting silent battles so you don’t have to.

[hackernewds]

You are clearly not representative, as so isn't most of HN, of the average demographic that has to worry about their blue collar jobs (whether that be a real risk or not)

[cutemonster]

People who worry about immigration, have their own job security in mind, rather than worrying about crime, you're saying?

(Makes sense to me I guess, just sounds different from what Trump seemed to be taking about: crime and eating people's pets. I'm in Europe and don't know much.)

[thehappypm]

Middle America sees immigration as:

Outsiders coming in and changing the society. People who don’t speak English sending their kids to their schools. Moving into their neighborhoods and making it more competitive for their friends and family to move into their neighborhoods. Creating “bad neighborhoods” and increasing crime.

[cutemonster]

Lots of different things then (you're saying), thanks