How H-1B Restrictions Popped Dallas’ Housing Bubble

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1:42Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. In the suburbs north of Dallas, a housing boom has started to go bust. Some key towns that we're talking about are Prosper, Frisco, and Salina, which is one of the fastest growing towns in America. Prashant Gopal covers the U.S. housing market for Bloomberg. He says the burst of new construction kicked off during the pandemic. Remote workers were looking for affordable housing outside city centers. Corporations were relocating to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, bringing white-collar jobs.

2:28And a new population of workers had started moving to the region. A lot of the builders I spoke with, they told me that, you know, 70 % of their buyers were, you know, South Asian. which was actually what got me onto the story to begin with. I was sort of stunned that it would be that high. For the past decade, Dallas has been experiencing one of the fastest demographic transformations in the country, as Indian families are drawn there for the jobs, the schools, the weather, and the growing South Asian community. Many of the newcomers are here to work in tech roles on H-1B visas, temporary visas for highly skilled workers.

3:10From 2021 to 2024, the federal government granted almost 32 ,000 H-1B visas to the Dallas area, more than Silicon Valley, Seattle, D.C., or San Francisco. And the largest group of recipients, by far, is from India. H-1Bs are kind of like a stepping stone toward the American dream, right? Once you get an H-1B, often one of the first things you do is buy a house. One housing analyst told Prashant that in Dallas, the South Asian community became the most important first-time buyer group for builders. But recently, the market has been changing. Mortgage rates have risen, AI is driving tech layoffs, and the Trump administration is making it harder to get H-1B visas.

3:59Now, all those new homes are getting harder to sell. Collin County, which is sort of the heart of this northern corridor, home prices are down 9 percent year over year. That's a pretty big drop. Prashant traveled to the greater Dallas area to get to know the residents who've been navigating this downturn. He says many of them are grappling with job insecurity and starting to worry that the American dream they were building could be slipping away. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is intensifying a housing downturn in Dallas and upending lives.

4:48Like many stories of downturns, the one in Dallas, Texas, started as a story of growth. Its regional population has increased by 63 % over the last 25 years. The economy has been booming in large part because of its great diversity of sectors. Bloomberg's Prashant Gopal. Finance, tech, health care. There's so many different types of jobs there. And they've all been doing really well. There's no state income tax, which makes it really attractive. I mean, you think about the transportation, it's a key hub for airlines. I think relative to some other places, it's affordable as well. So there are a lot of things going for Dallas.

5:31Dallas has become a national hotspot for corporate relocations. Since 2018, companies like Charles Schwab, Caterpillar, KFC, and Toyota North America have all moved their headquarters to the region. A lot of the companies that have moved in, they have a lot of IT workers. And so they need to fill those jobs. These are highly paid jobs. It's not like they're making minimum wage. I mean, many of these software developers are, you know, well over$100 ,000, sometimes significantly more. People have master's degrees, PhDs, you know. To find the right talent, Dallas-based companies have been fielding applications from around the world.

6:12And one tool they've used to recruit foreign workers is the H-1B visa. You can think of it as a foothold, you know, in America. It's a temporary, gives you the right to work as long as an employer sponsors you. So many of the people who get H-1B visas, you know, maybe they come in to the United States on a student visa. This is sort of the typical path. And from there, they get a job, say, at a software company or some other job that requires sort of a high-skilled worker. They'll then get sponsored for an H-1B visa. And then it may take some time, but eventually they'll apply for a green card.

6:51And at some point, maybe they'll get a citizenship. Nationally, the majority of H-1B visa holders are South Asian. In 2023, over 70 % of recipients were from India, many of them in the market to buy new homes. I mean, even nationally, some of the, like there's a big public builder called Taylor Morrison, they say that over 40 % of their buyers nationally are Asian and Indian. So it's a big group for home builders, especially in this area. They were building a lot of homes. And as Dallas welcomed more H-1B recipients in the post-pandemic years, the number of Indian families looking for housing in the Dallas suburbs started to grow.

7:35Many of them were looking to buy new construction because the areas north of Dallas, they're a little bit further away from the jobs, but many were working remotely anyway, so it didn't matter so much. And they could get more for their money. And builders were building for this group. Prashant says H-1B visas were far from the only driver of Dallas's growing South Asian community. As more people kind of moved in, a community began to kind of arrive in the area. You know, a lot of the things that makes it more comfortable for people, ethnic grocery stores and movie theaters playing, you know, Tamil and Telugu films.

8:19And you have a cricket league. And I have to say, like, you know, several people told me that the weather reminded them of Hyderabad. I'll tell you, when I landed here, when the person says for here or to go, I had no idea what they were talking about because that term is not used back home. So I had no idea. So people helped me there. That's Neeraj Gupta, a real estate broker in Dallas. He's been in the area for over 25 years. Before getting into real estate, he worked in the tech sector on an H-1B visa. Miraj says the sense of community is a big draw for Indian residents who are new to Dallas.

9:00They have neighbors who can help them with everything from takeout orders to driver's licenses. All those things together we learned. So we have a community who are knit together, you know, closely and we are helping each other. He said during the COVID boom, he'd just get one call after the other. Indian-born workers who wanted to not just buy one house, but often they would buy a primary home for their family, and then they'd buy one or two investment homes in addition. Because they had good salaries, you know, especially if you had two, you know, husband and wife both working, you know, they could be making$250 ,000 or more.

9:40So they could buy million-dollar houses. But Prashant says the evolution of the Dallas suburbs has made some residents anxious. This was traditionally kind of a rural area, a lot of farmland. And now it's sort of this multicultural place that has just changed in many ways, not just because of the demographics, but also just because of the growth. So I think there was a group of people, and who knows how big, but there is some group of people that didn't like this, right? They didn't like the change that they were seeing. Maybe they thought it was too much, too fast. And it sort of led to a little bit of a backlash.

10:24How anti-immigrant sentiment, the Trump administration's crackdown on H-1B visas, and an uncertain labor market are affecting not only home prices in Dallas, but lives. That's after the break.

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13:15Many of the new homes and growing Indian communities are in Frisco, Texas, a 30-minute drive due north from Dallas' city center. Bloomberg's Prashant Gopal recently went there for a city council meeting to listen to residents during a public comment period. You have people showing up at the meetings to voice frustration about H-1B visas, particularly. Everybody wants to say hate has no home in Frisco. That phrase needs to be changed to hate has no home in Frisco unless you're from India and you want to come to city. They steal American jobs. They steal homes. They're stealing our land. Frisco will be remembered as the city that stood up and turned the tide on the Muslim invasion.

13:58Or will you choose? Of course, you know, the city council has no power over H-1B visas, but there's a lot of people talking about how there's fraud with H-1B visas and, you know, without evidence and also arguing that their area is turning into Mumbai. and while I was there, there was a person who showed up and said, you know, pretty soon the whole city council is going to be entirely Indian. There's one Indian member right now, but his fear is that, you know, the whole council will be Indian. And he said pretty soon, he said, I'm going to need Google Translate just to ask where the bathroom is.

14:35I mean, and to be clear, what you're describing, Prashant, is racism. Yeah, I mean, some of it is so outrageous. Prashant says the racism and fear-mongering is only one part of the story. At those same city council meetings, other Frisco residents have pushed back on the rhetoric, shared words of support. Friends, we are not experiencing an Indian invasion. We are experiencing an invasion of ignorance. The Indian community itself is a beautifully diverse community. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis and more. We need something better than ridicule, bullying, and division. We need decency, we need accountability, and we need the courage to say clearly that Indians belong here too.

15:17The conversation happening in Frisco echoes one happening at the national level. Prashant says the H-1B backlash is an extension of the anti-immigration rhetoric and policymaking coming from the Trump administration. There was a lot of rhetoric against undocumented immigrants, and that's sort of been the main focus in many ways. You know, when you think about Trump's rhetoric about Mexicans and the ICE deportations. But this group, these are legal immigrants. And so it's a relatively educated, affluent group of people that's also here legally. As part of a national immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has placed new restrictions on H-1B visas.

16:01On September 19th, President Trump signed an executive order, a restriction on entry of certain non-immigrant workers. We need workers. We need great workers. And this pretty much ensures that that's what's going to happen. He's imposed like a$100 ,000 fee for new H-1B visas. And, you know, he's added some other restrictions. The$100 ,000 fee is only for new visas. Existing H-1B visas aren't impacted by the change. The country would rather not have to pay$100 ,000. But they'd rather, how do you do that? You hire Americans. So there's an incentive. But if someone switches jobs or loses their job, getting a new, more expensive H-1B from another sponsor could be more difficult.

16:48It's sort of the feeling that anything can change at any time that makes people worried. Texas has pursued its own H-1B restrictions, too. In January, Governor Greg Abbott froze H-1B petitions for the state's agencies and public university roles to investigate alleged fraud in the program. And there are other pressures on this group of workers, like the changing nature of work itself. AI is taking jobs right now, and you have a lot of people who are worried about their jobs. And if you're on an H-1B visa and you lose your job, the fear is that you have, you know, 60 days to find another company to sponsor you.

17:30Otherwise, you might have to leave the country. And that's really tough right now because it's hard to find a job. Companies are increasingly asking their workers to come back to the office. You know, that's been going on for a while, but tech companies are doing that more and more. And if you're on a visa, you're less likely to be willing to just say, no, thanks. You know, I'm going to find another job. You kind of have to move. And, you know, you have that, you have the layoffs directly hitting this group, maybe more than any other group because so many of them are in software. Neeraj Gupta, the property management owner who described the boom north of Dallas, says that by 2025, the dynamic had shifted.

18:13He says many of his clients are from India on green cards or H-1B visas, and they started telling him they were worried about their jobs and their visas. I have seen the influx of home buyers, especially the buyers who are on H-1B, has reduced drastically, phenomenally. Even if financially it makes sense, because of the uncertainty in the job market and in their own immigration status, many of the buyers are holding back. Some of them had to sell, and they couldn't. So they had to consider renting their property out. The problem is the rental market's also down. A lot of these homes are too expensive for people.

18:59They can't afford to buy them. So, you know, prices are coming down, but there's still no buyers for homes, you know, million-dollar homes, or this many million-dollar homes. Prashant says that the developer who told him that South Asians used to account for 70 percent of his business told him that in the past year, the number dropped below 30 percent, leaving him with a backlog of 125 properties. That's the kind of decline in demand that sent home prices sliding. In Collin County, which includes parts of Prosper, Frisco, and Salina, they were down more than twice as much as in the broader metro area, according to data from Redfin.

19:41It's down across the metro, like down 4%, but it's much more in this area. If you're trying to sell a house in Dallas, you're competing with a lot of these folks. It has economic consequences as well, so builders aren't able to sell these houses. They sit empty, and that means that there aren't as many buyers coming in, you know, people who need furniture and everything else you need when you buy a new house. So, you know, there are broader impacts. The consequences for folks who are experiencing these challenges right now go far beyond just the financial peril of not being able to sell their home.

20:20You spoke to people who might have to, you know, leave the communities that they've built, leave their neighbors who are losing jobs and livelihoods. Say more about some of the human stakes that you chronicled when writing this piece. I mean, there's one story that was just truly heartbreaking. I spent some time with a widow and her two children. She raised those kids as Americans with her husband. But then one day she came home and saw her husband weeping. He had been laid off from his software job, and he didn't think he could find another job in this kind of environment. And the fear was that they'd be sent back to India.

21:15And about a week later, he died from suicide. And in his note, he said that he was worried about AI and his ability to compete with AI. That's so heartbreaking. Yeah. And I was sitting in this living room. There were four suitcases packed because, you know, 10 days later, they flew back to India a one-way ticket. You know, her kids, you know, were crying. You know, they had no idea what their life would be like because they'd never lived anywhere else, right, besides the United States. The question I'm left with is who is going to kind of fill the hole left by these people who may feel like they no longer have a place in the United States, or at least may not have a future here.

22:10What is their place in the economy, in society, and in the housing market, where in these places they've been really important. They've been especially important to home builders. So I guess the question is, what happens from here? What would it take to kind of make people feel comfortable again?

22:34This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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