Is Trump Good For Real Estate? Travel Ban Could Hurt Housing Market, Study Finds

President Donald Trump has long held up the real estate business he inherited from his father as a banner of success, but his recent, revised executive order temporarily banning travel to the U.S. by refugees and citizens of six Muslim-majority countries could put a dent in the U.S. housing market, especially in the long term.

Just over half of U.S. immigrants from the six nations—Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, now excluding Iraq—are homeowners, according to a report released Wednesday by the San Francisco-based real estate site Trulia.

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That’s the same proportion of homeowners as immigrants as a whole and about 18 percentage points behind native-born residents. Still, the percent of U.S. residents originally from those six countries living in the U.S. for at least 10 years who owned homes edged out that of other foreign-born people who’d lived in the U.S. for 10 years or more, with 61.4 percent, compared to 59.1 percent, according to the Trulia study, which relied on Census data.

Of the six countries, Iran was the largest source of ex-patriots living in the U.S., with 394,000, or less than 1 percent of the population, as of 2015. The fastest growing source of immigrants, of the six countries listed in the executive order, was from war-torn Syria, with 83,000—a 38 percent increase in the five years leading up to 2015.

Ex-pats have been the housing market’s saving grace since around 2010, when the proportion of U.S.-born residents owning homes and heading households began to drop precipitously, while the percent of foreign-born homeowners and heads of households began to shoot upward. Aside from the travel ban. Trump’s harsh stance on undocumented immigration and the use of H-1B visas could similarly hurt the real estate sector.

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Fortunately for the home market, a federal judge in Hawaii blocked the second iteration of the travel ban—the first of which, an all-caps version, was struck down by an appeals court in February—on the grounds that it constituted religious discrimination.