[timoth3y]

The research is impressive in its granularity.

However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.

[glimshe]

This is a detailed study performed by experts. Do you believe they would overlook such obvious explanation?

I'm sorry, but your argument sounds like the typical HN oversimplification that leads people to say they could build Dropbox in a weekend.

[phyzix5761]

> This is a detailed study performed by experts. Do you believe they would overlook such obvious explanation?

Yes, they could have possibly overlooked things that appear to be obvious in retrospect. Happens all the time because it may or not have been the focus of the paper, or the time constraints may have not permitted this level of research. This is why we usually have multiple papers, each building on each other over time, on the same data sets/topics.

[timoth3y]

Said experts do not seem to have included this core analysis in the report.

Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.

That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.