Tucker Carlson’s Latest Racist Whopper, ‘Invading’ Refugees Are Behind the Housing Crisis

It is scarcely new information that Fox News swirls lies into reality like a spinning wheel spins fiber into yarn. They just pull disparate facts from the air and cobble together something that sounds plausible. Then the fish stick trust fund baby gets on the air and in impassioned tones of outrage explains yet one more time how dirty brown people are swarming across the border, making America poorer and posing a physical threat to his viewership. And they eat it up with a spoon.

Today’s fable du jour is that the United States has a “housing crisis” because “we are now living through the biggest influx of refugees in American history.” Wrong wrong and wrong. But it sounds good, doesn’t it? You can almost hear the blood boiling as the Foxies scrunch towards the teevee screen and squint, just as their caveman ancestors hunched towards the fire and listened to the tribal shaman tell tall tales of the monsters that lived in the dark, just outside the encampment, waiting to get them. Media Matters:

Carlson’s premise is wrong. We are actually living through the lowest ebb of refugees admitted to the United States since the establishment of the refugee resettlement program in 1980, according to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

That fiscal year, the U.S. admitted 207,116 refugees; while resettlement ceilings were lowered in later years, between 50,000 and 75,000 refugees regularly arrived during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, with a recent peak of more than 85,000 in fiscal year 2016. But President Donald Trump drastically slashed both the cap on refugees and the program’s capacity, resulting in plummeting resettlements.

When President Joe Biden lifted the fiscal 2021 cap to 62,500 refugees in May, he said that it was unlikely that figure could be reached due to the Trump administration’s sabotage, and indeed, fewer than 5,000 refugees have been admitted thus far.

So what is Carlson talking about? He appears to be deceptively conflating refugee resettlement numbers with the projected figure for U.S. encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We are on pace for at least 2 million illegal immigrants arriving in America this year alone,” he said, fearmongering that this is “far more than the number of asylum applicants who arrived in Europe in 2015.”

But that’s apples and oranges. It’s true that internal government documents estimated the U.S. was on track to encounter more than 2 million migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a March CNN report. But more than six in 10 of those encounters this year through July have resulted in the migrants’ immediate expulsion, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

The remainder don’t instantly become permanent U.S. residents — they are apprehended and processed under normal immigration law, which in many cases results in their eventual deportation. A sizable percentage is unaccompanied children who are held in government facilities and placed with sponsors elsewhere in the country, thus having minimal impact on housing demand.

Now there is a housing shortage nationwide. That’s true. The U.S. built on average 276,000 fewer homes per year between 2001 and 2020 compared to the period between 1968 and 2000, according to the report which was covered earlier by the Wall Street Journal. Building needs to accelerate to make up for the shortfall and whether that will happen or not is debatable, because new housing permits were actually down 3% in the spring, rather than being up. Both rental costs and home buying costs have spiked this year in Arizona and Nevada and those are two states where people have traditionally come for the good housing values available. That has changed in just this past year.

What Carlson is doing is ginning up fear of the relocation of brown people generally, but the Afghans in particular, in wake of recent events. He’s not alone in that. Steve Cortes, a former Trump advisor and now a talking head at Newsmax, posted this cheery image.

The Republican Party of Green County literally says, "not in my backyard!" to Afghan refugees coming to Wisconsin. pic.twitter.com/oliTbezSoq

— James Wigderson (@jwigderson) August 17, 2021

This is the wave of fear that Carlson and the others in right-wing media are riding.

“We will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions,” he said on Monday. “So, first we invade, and then we’re invaded. It is always the same.”

In Carlson’s telling, Afghans will move to your neighborhood and drive up your rent. But for Carlson, the solution to housing costs must be decreasing demand rather than increasing supply. That’s the only way for him to secure the existence of his people and a future for white children.

Housing supply will be solved by building more units and that may depend upon revising land use regulation. But in no way, shape or form is the housing shortage being caused by “millions” of refugees appearing out of nowhere.

As to where the Afghans might actually alight after leaving Afghanistan, that is an issue which is being debated as we speak, but they definitely have not been buying up tract homes in suburbia the past week. That is pure fiction.