As debates over immigration rage around us, I would like to propose a simple metric for resolving disputes over whether immigration benefits a particular region or city. It is an imperfect standard, but it has the virtues of being measurable and quantitative and weighing pluses and minuses against each other.
I suggest looking at whether real estate prices in a particular locale have been rising or falling. If immigration is “ruining” a particular city, we would expect homes and other property values in that place to become much cheaper.
Home values have historically served as a strong indicator of the health of a city. Consider Detroit. It was one of the premier American cities in the mid-20th century, but the region lost a lot of its automobile industry to foreign competition, and crime rose precipitously. The city also was poorly managed. The result in real estate markets was a collapse in prices. If anyone asked you to point to quantifiable evidence for the decline in Detroit, it was easy to do so.
Detroit has undergone a renaissance since its nadir. New businesses have opened, crime rates have fallen, and the city feels more lively again. And since that turn of fortune, often dated around the 1990s, Detroit real estate has made a major comeback, putting aside the price collapse of the Great Recession in 2008. Home prices are not a perfect measure of how the city is doing, but they do pick up major and radical trends, both on the downside and on the upside.
