Housing and Immigration are related.
Americans view housing not as a commodity, but as an investment. Given that, housing crises will naturally occur since the best way to protect the value of an asset is through scarcity.
This creates a problem. Given that the majority of jobs do not (and will not ever) allow younger generations to save up and buy houses, they will delay family creation (or eschew family creation altogether) until they're qualified for better paying jobs in order to afford housing.
This creates an additional problem. Stalling family formation means less young people who could take on lower paying jobs. The people who work at Starbucks, take your tickets at the movie theaters, clean the bathrooms at your gym, take care of your kids while you work, take care of your elderly parents while you work, stock the shelves in your grocery store, work as cashiers at your grocery store, etc., all of these people need a place to live. They do not manifest out of the ether. They all need shelter. Shelter, as stated earlier, is deliberately made scarce over time in order to inflate their investment value.
(Quick side note: No. AI and Robots are still decades away from replacing service workers at scale.)
What's needed is a population of people willing to live in sub-standard housing and work these service sector jobs. Enter undocumented workers and migrants. They're willing to clean the toilets at your favorite restaurant bc our level of poverty here in the U.S. offers a higher standard of living than their level of poverty.
So, if you want the only way to prevent this would be to give dignity to service work by building more quality housing for them. We have to get rid of this notion that housing needs to always be scarce and build more housing so that all workers can live in dignity.
Otherwise, shut up about migrants and undocumented workers.
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