Very misleading.
Per Claude:
This tweet makes several distinct claims — worth separating the sourced one from the broader ones.
The Fed paper claim (bottom of the post)
This is real and mostly accurately characterized. A Dallas Fed working paper (not yet peer-reviewed, and the authors explicitly note it doesn't reflect official Fed views) found that between 2021-2024, unauthorized immigrant worker inflows explained about 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average metro area studied. But there's an important nuance the headline glosses over: this isn't "prices rose 30% because of immigration." The actual math is that total house prices rose about 22.4% over the period, and immigration explains roughly 30% of that increase —
implying immigration's contribution to average home prices was closer to 6-7 percentage points, not 30. Trump repeated the more dramatic framing in a Truth Social post; the Post's headline is a bit ambiguous but not outright false — it's just easy to misread as "immigration caused prices to rise 30%" rather than "explains 30% of the rise." The paper also found immigration boosted employment with no evidence of reduced average wages, which cuts against the "avoid working" framing in the tweet.
Cotton's broader claims
These don't hold up as well against the research base:
"Disproportionately commit crimes" — This runs opposite to the weight of evidence. Multiple studies (Texas arrest records by immigration status, NIJ, Cato, NBER) consistently find undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and a quarter the rate for property crimes. National studies overwhelmingly find immigrants of all legal statuses commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born.
"Disproportionately use welfare" — Also runs opposite to policy reality. Under PRWORA, unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for most federal public benefits, including non-emergency Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and TANF. They can't access federally funded healthcare or ACA marketplace coverage either. Exceptions are narrow: emergency Medicaid, community health centers, school lunch programs, and short-term emergency shelter. There's a separate think-tank estimate (EPIC for America) claiming high household-level usage, but that's counting U.S.-citizen children's eligibility within mixed-status households, not undocumented individuals' own eligibility — a meaningfully different claim.
"Avoid working" — Contradicted by the very Fed paper cited: it found immigrant workers raised local employment roughly one-for-one with no wage decline, which implies labor force participation, not avoidance.
So: the housing/rent statistic is real
but somewhat oversold in the framing, and the crime/welfare/work claims in the tweet's setup aren't well supported by the research base — if anything the data points the other way on those three.
The reality