Donald Trumps crackdown on H1B visa abuse sends Dallas home prices way down
Donald Trump’s H-1B clampdown is cooling the Texas suburbs, and other parts of the country — and that may be the point. Indian tech workers once turbocharged home prices north of Dallas.Now they’re gone — and a housing correction is already underway.For years, the suburbs north of Dallas were ground zero for one of the most extraordinary housing booms in America.
Subdivisions multiplied.Prices soared.
Builders couldn’t put up homes fast enough.The engine behind it all was a wave of Indian-born H-1B visa workers flooding into high-tech jobs along a corporate corridor that attracted more company headquarters relocations than anywhere else in the country between 2018 and today, according to real estate firm CBRE Group.Now that engine is sputtering — and the White House may be fine with that.President Trump’s escalating crackdown on the H-1B program, which grants temporary visas to high-skilled foreign workers, has helped trigger a price correction in one of the nation’s most overheated regional housing markets. In Collin County — the suburban epicenter of the boom — home prices fell nearly 9% year-over-year as of February, more than double the 4% drop recorded across the broader Dallas-Fort Worth metro, according to Redfin data. The retreat of Indian buyers from the market, once the dominant force behind new home sales in the area, is beginning to function like a release valve.The scale of what happened north of Dallas is hard to overstate. The federal government granted nearly 32,000 new H-1B approvals in the Dallas area alone during the Biden administration — topping Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, DC, according to a Bloomberg investigation published this week, which cited US Citizenship and Immigration Services data.Only the New York City metro area ranked higher.The workers who arrived on those visas poured into new subdivisions in Prosper, Frisco and Celina, where the population more than tripled in just five yea...