The Brookings Institution has released a study confirming what basic economics predicted: flooding a housing-constrained country with millions of new people drives up rents. The report, covering 2021 through 2024, estimates that major U.S. metropolitan areas absorbed roughly 6.5 million people above pre-pandemic trends. The result: rents rose by an estimated 1.4% to 1.6%, and average hourly wages across the workforce may have dropped by up to 1.5% as new arrivals entered the lower end of the wage scale.
Not all the numbers are grim. Native-born workers saw wages rise by 0.9% on net, and metropolitan GDP climbed by 1.5%. But those aggregate figures offer little comfort to renters in Houston or Phoenix, or to school districts that had to absorb hundreds of thousands of new students without budget increases. The costs were borne by specific households, communities, and children, not by the economists' spreadsheets.
Cartels reaped record profits
While American renters struggled, Mexican cartels were having a historic run. Congressional materials attributed to Homeland Security Investigations put cartel-linked human smuggling revenues at roughly $13 billion in 2021 alone. Extrapolated across the four Biden years, that suggests something in the neighborhood of $50 billion, though no official audited total exists. The business model was simple: control the territory, charge fees of $8,000 to $20,000 per crossing depending on the route, and exploit anyone who couldn't pay.
The DEA's 2025 Project Portero specifically targets the cartel gatekeepers who controlled those corridors. As Associated Press reporting from 2024 documented, migrants had become "the most lucrative commodity" for criminal groups competing for control of migration and drug-smuggling routes in southern Mexico. That tells you everything you need to know about what four years of open borders actually financed.
Trafficking and lost children
And there was plenty to study. In fiscal year 2024, the Justice Department filed 146 federal trafficking cases against 223 suspected traffickers, including 136 principally associated with sex-trafficking. Those are just the prosecuted cases, a fraction of the underlying activity. Homeland Security reported more than 2,700 alleged Tren de Aragua arrests in its 2025 enforcement figures. The same criminal networks that charged migrants for border access moved fentanyl through the same corridors, generating a separate catastrophe that did not require a Brookings study to document.
Then there are the children. The House Oversight Committee reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra's department lost track of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children, who were placed with questionable sponsors during the Biden years. Children entered federal government custody and then disappeared from federal government awareness. The agency tasked with their welfare treated them as a logistics problem that it couldn't be bothered to solve.
Public health concerns ignored
Nobody wanted to touch the public health angle, either. During the same years Americans were required to show vaccine credentials to enter a restaurant or return from international travel, millions of unvetted and likely unvaccinated people crossed the southern border with no health screening at all. COVID spread, as did other diseases, and those eager to blame Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy cannot explain the timing behind recent outbreaks. A more detailed study is needed of the effect of millions of unvetted individuals, most likely unvaccinated, rapidly pouring over the border.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend post-arrival evaluations covering communicable disease screening, immunization assessment, and connection to primary care. But that implementation would have required personnel, planning, and a basic admission that there was a problem — none of which the Biden administration was willing to provide.
Enforcement was the missing piece
Here is what none of these studies will tell you: We didn't need new laws. Congress wrote the relevant immigration statutes decades ago. We needed a president willing to enforce them and a leadership team committed to treating cartel smuggling networks as the organized criminal enterprises they actually are, not as a political inconvenience. The Brookings data confirms the economic costs, but the human and security toll goes far beyond what any study can capture.
