Charlottesville homes cost far more than the Virginia median. John McGuire has decided whose fault that is.
"If Charlottesville has 100 houses for sale and 1,000 people want those 100 houses, what happens to the price?" McGuire told supporters at a get-out-the-vote rally in Albemarle County on Saturday night, the Daily Progress reported. "You bring 15 to 20 million people to this country. Where are you going to sleep? They've overwhelmed our resources, and you guys are paying for it."
Then he went further.
The hotel rooms
"There are people in this district who cannot afford a $600-a-night hotel," McGuire said. "These people coming across our border get all these benefits from your taxpayer dollars."
How hotel prices are connected to immigration, the Daily Progress noted, McGuire did not say.
The conspiracy
He also explained why he thinks it's happening.
"The communists in Russia used mass migration to destabilize Europe. It's a communist tactic," McGuire said. "The Open Society Foundation and the Democrat Party has used mass migration across our southern border to destabilize the United States and overwhelm our resources."
The Open Society Foundations were created by billionaire George Soros, a major Democratic donor and a favorite target on the right. The Daily Progress reported that while the foundation supports refugee rights and immigration reform, it has never advocated or funded "mass migration."
That isn't a housing plan. It's a sitting congressman telling a campaign rally that a billionaire-funded plot is bringing in foreigners to ruin the country.
What actually drives Charlottesville's prices
Charlottesville has called itself in a "housing crisis" for nearly two decades. The median single-family home sells for about $500,000, compared with $420,000 statewide, according to Realtor figures cited by the Daily Progress.
The city's own 2021 housing study blamed "a growing population and constrained housing supply, increasing income and wealth disparities, and racial inequality." City officials have never said illegal immigrants are behind the city's high housing costs.
Nationally, Trump claimed on Truth Social in July that the "Biden illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices 30%." The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas paper he attached to his post didn't say that. It estimated that illegal immigration from early 2021 to early 2024, combined with very little new home building, raised housing costs in the average metro area by 6.6% — a fraction of Trump's number.
Blaming anyone but Trump
This is McGuire's pattern. In September, with Virginia diesel at record highs, he said fuel prices "would have gone up whether we'd had conflict with Iran or not" and blamed Biden — even though Congress's own budget office ties the price spike to the war, and McGuire has voted against every House resolution to end it.
Now the high cost of a home in his district is the fault of immigrants and a Soros foundation. McGuire is in a tougher-than-expected race against Democrat Tom Perriello, the last Democrat to represent Virginia's 5th District.
In summary
At a rally near Charlottesville on Saturday, Rep. John McGuire blamed immigrants for the city's housing prices and $600 hotel rooms, and claimed Democrats and George Soros's Open Society Foundations use "mass migration" as a "communist tactic" to "destabilize the United States." Charlottesville's own housing study blames limited supply, inequality and population growth, and the Dallas Fed research Trump cited put immigration's national effect at 6.6%, not 30%.
