Asylum Seekers and the Rise in Homelessness

Between 2022 and 2024, the United States also experienced major shifts in immigration policies, leading to a sharp increase in new immigrant arrivals seeking asylum. The timing and geographic patterns of these arrivals suggest a link between the rise in sheltered homelessness and legal immigration into the United States. Yet media reports, policy discussions, and advocacy campaigns have tended to attribute the rise in homelessness to domestic housing conditions, such as worsening affordability and the expiration of pandemic-era eviction protections, with many accounts omitting asylum seeking or treating it as a secondary factor. Even analyses that acknowledge the role of recent migration patterns have lacked reliable national estimates, preventing a nuanced understanding of the unprecedented rise in homelessness.

Our research addresses this gap by examining asylum seekers’ contribution to the rise in sheltered homelessness between 2022 and 2024. Our analysis employs two complementary approaches. First, we obtained direct estimates of the sheltered homeless population from official reports, local asylum-seeker tracking systems, and correspondence with agencies in the four localities that experienced the largest increases in sheltered homelessness. Second, we obtained indirect estimates by assuming, consistent with historical trends, that the Hispanic share of the sheltered homeless population would have remained stable at its 2022 level without the increase in asylum seekers. The difference between the actual and expected Hispanic counts in 2024 indirectly estimates asylum seekers’ contribution to the recent rise in homelessness.

Our analyses suggest that the growing presence of asylum seekers residing in homeless shelters explains about 60 percent of the rise in sheltered homelessness between 2022 and 2024. This rise was concentrated in only four localities—New York City, Chicago, metropolitan Denver, and Massachusetts (primarily suburban Boston)—which together accounted for 75 percent of the national increase. While the direct and indirect approaches yield estimates that are largely consistent with one another and strengthen confidence in our conclusions, some caveats may lead us to understate the effect of migration: The direct method is limited to the top four localities, while the indirect method likely underestimates non-Hispanic asylum seekers, particularly in New York City.

Our findings offer several implications for future research and policy. While our analyses attribute most of the rise in sheltered homelessness to asylum seekers, approximately 40 percent remains unexplained, underscoring the need for research to identify other contributing factors. Notably, our findings do not suggest that asylum seekers played a major role in the rise in unsheltered homelessness, a trend that predates the recent shift in immigration patterns. From a policy perspective, our findings highlight the substantial fiscal burden of providing emergency shelter for new immigrant arrivals, a burden that has fallen disproportionately on a small number of localities despite some state and federal support. Additionally, newly arrived homeless migrants likely have distinct service needs and vulnerabilities compared with long-established residents who lose housing. Finally, our analysis suggests that policy shifts since 2024, including restrictions on asylum pathways and new local limits on shelter stays, will likely decrease sheltered homelessness in the coming years.

Note
This research brief is based on Bruce D. Meyer et al., “Asylum Seekers and the Rise in Homelessness,” Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper no. 2025–49, April 2025.