Ranting about America’s housing crisis, which is real enough, Fox host Tucker Carlson told his gullible audience,
“So, why is it happening? Well, lots of reasons, but one reason it’s happening is America is becoming a lot more crowded than it ever was, and one of the reasons for that is that we are now living through the biggest influx of refugees in American history.”
(Quoted from Media Matters, here.)
That is a flat-out lie.
The graph (source here) below shows the number of refugees entering the U.S. by year.
Here’s another graph (source here), showing U.S. housing starts by year.
See that big plunge from 2006-2009? That’s why the U.S. has a housing shortage. The housing crash brought residential construction to a near-halt. As a result, the growth in housing supply fell behind population growth for several years, and now we have a shortage.
It would be a lot worse if U.S. population hadn’t slowed to a crawl (“lower than at any time since the Depression,” the Washington Post said here); see graph below (source here).
But a liar like Tucker Carlson, by definition, doesn’t care about facts or truth.
Tucker Carlson is a racist demagogue, and the game he’s playing is stoking racist hatred against the Afghan refugees who may eventually make their way to our country. The Fox network, and the Murdoch family who own it, are responsible for giving this vile man a soapbox. Shame on them.
Meanwhile, the rightwing hand-wringers blasting Biden for not getting these refugees out of Afghanistan quickly don’t want them resettled in their states and neighborhoods (read that story here).
Related story: For a list of states offering to take Afghan refugees, click here.
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