Someone recently pointed out to me that rent and housing are actually down in Dallas due to crackdown on H1B’s: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-dallas-h1b-housing-m...

I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.

Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.

Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.

> I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.

Would you say that supply and demand share some kind of economic relationship?

It's just a never ending balance problem. Also the "just build more housing" is such a numbers only view. Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to hate budget cookie cutter apartment complexes; they're ugly, neighbor problems, noise, pets, etc. What people really mean is they want a single family house sitting on land, but you just can't have both.

people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.

Yes but it also has a pretty long lead time so continued mass immigration always drives up the price. It's true of most hard infrastructure.

Housing (in a given area) is a finite resource and not building more housing (in a given area) is a choice.

That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.

Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.

Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.

At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.

They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.

H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.