Compassion and Immigrants
- A series of court orders from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston beginning with an April 18, 2025 ordergranting a preliminary injunction compelling the government to give at least 15 days-notice before an alien may be removed to a third country, i.e., any country not explicitly provided for on the alien’s order of removal, a May 7, 2025 order preventing a temporary restraining order to prevent non-citizen removals to third countries, including but not limited to Libya and Saudia Arabia, without prior written notice and a meaningful opportunity to raise fear-based claims, and a May 21, 2025 orderproviding relief for the government’s violation of the initial preliminary injunction. There is an excellent summary of this litigation at Joyce Vance’s May 21, 2025 Civil Discourse Substack posting entitled, Welcome to South Sudan.
- A May 21, 2025 Slate column by Dahlia Lithwick entitled, Americans Don’t Lack Empathy. We Are Being Drained of It. The concluding paragraph may require some self-reflection as well as thoughts about our fellow Americans:
- “The invisibling of the other is, at bottom, just another authoritarian party trick that allows us all to accept some tolerable level of mass renditions, or school defundings, or arrests of public officials, or presidential pardons. It is not so much that most Americans are without basic empathy, but rather that we are being forced to ration it, and to serve ourselves first. Whether that effort can be reversed in time for the midterms or the 2028 elections is not really the exigent question. The weirdly urgent task lies in asking ourselves whether we have become unwitting accomplices in the imperceptible attempts to make some people unseeable, and why we might be willing to accept that. That isn’t the work of political parties or messaging or even of leopards or faces. It’s something to which we are all susceptible, and against which we all must be on guard.” (emphasis added).
- A May 20, 2025 Bloomberg.com column by Jonathan Levin entitled, Florida’s Real Estate Strength Is Turning Into a Weakness, which argues that immigration reduction may significantly hurt the Florida real estate market.
Florida’s Real Estate Strength Is Turning Into a Weakness
The state’s market once thrived on immigration and foreign investment. Now, it must brace for a pullback.
By Jonathan Levin Bloomberg.com May 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
Jonathan Levin is a columnist focused on US markets and economics. Previously, he worked as a Bloomberg journalist in the US, Brazil and Mexico. He is a CFA charterholder.
The biggest risk to Florida’s housing market may be falling immigration rather than the widely discussed slowdown in domestic migration or even the condo regulatory crisis and mini supply shock that’s followed.
Consider recent developments. From about 2020 through 2022, American retirees and increasingly mobile knowledge workers drove Florida real estate prices higher, a trend that coincided with booms in places such as Phoenix, Arizona; Austin, Texas; and Boise, Idaho. In the following years, other pandemic superstar cities saw their gains begin to fade, but immigrants and other international buyers helped keep Florida’s transaction volumes and housing values buoyant. Immigrants took the baton from retirees, hedge fund workers and tech bros, and it’s still in their hands.
In cities like Miami, the international market includes a spectrum of buyers and renters. At one end, there are working-class immigrants, including a large group of Venezuelans granted Temporary Protected Status under former President Joe Biden — a status the Trump administration will be able to terminate after the Supreme Court lifted a federal court freeze on Monday. At the other extreme are ultra-wealthy international investors and business owners, who have habitually and for decades used Florida real estate to gain dollar exposure — a sort of hedge against their home-country assets and incomes.
According to a 2024 National Association of Realtors report, Florida was the top destination for foreign real estate investment, with a majority of purchasers hailing from Latin America and Canada. Notably, international buyers often pay cash, making them somewhat immune to the higher mortgage rates that shut out many others. So it’s no surprise that cash deals in Florida have increased as a percentage of overall transactions, with 62% of condos and 42% of single-family homes bought with cash in March, according to data from Attom.
President Donald Trump’s immigration policies may already be having a chilling effect on this market, as my colleagues Augusta Saraiva, Michael Smith and Anna J. Kaiser reported this month. Beyond just scaring off undocumented immigrants, the Bloomberg report said that the Trump administration is also cutting off Federal Housing Administration mortgages to buyers with temporary immigration status. Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that buyers from Canada — the biggest single source country for Florida international buyers — were starting to retreat amid a tense trade war with the US and Trump’s repeated threats to make the country the 51st state (which probably aren’t serious, but who knows with him). As strategist Aziz Sunderji has shown in his Home Economics newsletter citing NAR and Census Bureau data, most Canadian holdings in Florida are vacation homes, including significant clusters along the state’s Gulf Coast.
Adding to that, some investors have begun to question the dollar’s status as a haven currency. Since Trump took office, the dollar has weakened against major Latin American currencies, even though basic macroeconomics would have predicted that it would strengthen in the face of new tariffs. It’s hard to imagine that anyone will feel safer holding the Mexican peso or Brazilian real anytime soon, but the developments could dent the currency-hedge trade in Florida real estate, at least at the margin. If that happens to any meaningful degree, it endangers Florida’s last bastion of support for housing demand.
Clearly, the retreat of retirees and second-home buyers is a part of the story, but I suspect that’s already been priced in. The state saw net domestic migration drop to 64,017 in 2024, down from 185,067 a year earlier and 314,467 in 2022, according to Census Bureau population estimates. The flurry of pandemic-era transplants probably borrowed from 2023 and 2024 demand, though transactions are probably about as low as they will go for a while now. With around 4.1 million more Baby Boomers expected to turn 65 each year through 2027, the numbers are bound to pick up again eventually. It’s mostly a question of how quickly price declines make up for higher mortgage rates among retirees, or borrowing costs fall.
Recent developments in the condo market are also a factor. In laws passed in 2022 and 2023, Florida’s legislature mandated stringent building inspection and upkeep requirements, part of a movement for enhanced safety following the tragic collapse of a Surfside building in 2021, which killed 98 people.
While important and necessary, the laws led to a spurt of special assessments by condo associations — essentially surprise bills on top of normal association dues — as buildings hurried to comply with the law. As new requirements came into effect, there was a burst of new listings in 2024 and early 2025 — a mini supply shock that exacerbated the situation, especially in retirement communities to the west. But for all the talk of people rushing for the exits, Florida’s new listings in the first four months of the year are just a bit above “normal,” which I define as the 2017-2019 average (before the housing market went haywire during the pandemic). Listings in the condo market are about 6% above that level and single-family home listings are 5% above normal, according to Redfin data. In the same period, condo sales are running about 31% below normal and single-family home sales are down about 10%, the data show.
Listings and inventories interact in complex ways, but it sure feels like more of a demand issue than a supply glut. To the extent that inventories are mounting, it’s primarily because the product is sitting on the market for longer. New laws passed a few weeks ago in Florida’s legislature give condo associations an extra year to meet requirements for structural integrity studies and more financial flexibility concerning reserves, so that could prevent a big wave of fire sales for now.
In the absence of a drop in mortgage rates fueling demand, immigration is likely the biggest story to watch — an area where strength may be quickly turning into weakness for one of America’s most dynamic and volatile housing markets.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.