Don’t Build Housing, Just Deport People: The Nativist Right Recoils at Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Proposal

The Trump administration has announced a proposal for a 50-year home mortgage, supported by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. It’s a plan that would lower monthly payments but severely increase cost for borrowers through significantly higher interest payments. 

The proposal has been greeted with rage and disdain across the nativist right. Commentators like Glenn Beck and Matt Walsh, as well as elected officials like Thomas Massie, have all condemned it as financially ruinous and politically insulting to hard-working Americans. 

Among Trump’s most hardline nativist base, there is real anger. Trump entered politics promising to take the country back for his white, Christian base. He promised not fiscal discipline but social welfare for the right kind of American. For migrants and minorities, he offered deportation and incarceration. In short, he swore to end our “American carnage.” 

Large parts of his base see deportation as the central tool for achieving progress—from housing affordability to crime to cultural renewal. For the furthest fringes of Trump's support, the real problem is a financing system controlled by Jews. And yet here Trump is, proposing a new financial instrument that would weigh down ordinary American homeowners in crushing debt. 

So for many, the mortgage plan is a betrayal. And their arguments against it help to show the harsh, uncompromising ways they view American identity and citizenship. It’s a politics marked by virulent ethnonationalism and Christian utopianism. 

Below, I want to show how the politics of home ownership in the reactions to Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal help to illuminate the white nationalist views pushing the GOP even more to the right. 

DIMBY: Deport In My Backyard

Many of the nativists attacking the 50-year mortgage proposal contend that the surest way to solve America’s housing crisis is to create space through deportations. Importantly, this includes both undocumented and documented immigrants, even citizens. What matters is whether or not they fall into the category of white, Christian Americans whose fortunes are the real measure of American success. 

If this sounds preposterous, that’s because it is. Just consider the eye-watering number of deportations being put forward as necessary for getting America back on track. 

James Fishback, CEO of right-wing investment firm Azoria, lamented that the housing crisis will continue so long as Republicans “refuse to deport the millions of legal and illegal migrants who are taking up so many American homes.”

Steve Ferguson, a small business owner who now spends much of his time blasting out America First missives to his quarter-million followers on X, echoed this sentiment:

Want to instantly lower housing costs?  Deport every last one of the 65 million illegal aliens living here as well as revoke the visas of the 55 million foreign nationals squatting here

Earlier this week, in response to a comment bemoaning the cost of homes in Aspen, Colorado, Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Governor Ron DeSantis, quipped, “Easy fix: deport the foreigners to free up some housing, and pay Americans who work there enough to live nearby.”

It’s important to stress again that even those who have obtained citizenship or legal residency are still viewed as alien, as not really American. One term used for such individuals is “paperwork American,” as deployed here by Joel Webbon: 

“Paperwork Americans” are NOT Americans.

I will NOT honor their “holy” days.

I will NOT respect their false gods and idols.

I will NOT tolerate their lectures on who is a “true” Christian and a “real” American.

“Silence, American “citizen”. A Christian American is speaking.”

It’s a pejorative that makes plain the belief that certain people are incapable of becoming Americans, unable to be transformed by any amount of paperwork or legal processes. This is a sentiment that cuts against the notion of America as a creedal nation open to anyone willing to come here and make a place for themselves. It rests on the idea that Americanness flows from biological and heritable qualities without which a person cannot hope to ever truly belong. 

As Matt Walsh argued on his show back in June, 

We like to talk about immigration like it’s all the same, but it isn’t. You’re not allowed to point this stuff out, but there is a distinct difference between immigration from, say, Somalia and immigration from, say Italy or Ireland.

Or consider this post by white Christian nationalist and self-styled “Heritage American” C. Jay Engel, featuring a family sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner with the following caption:

Give me some deeply American fall traditions or food staples that no foreigners could possibly assimilate to. 

I’ll start: the Thanksgiving Turkey. 

Any attempt by a foreigner to assimilate to this is pure LARP.

It’s not obvious what would actually prevent anyone from enjoying turkey, stuffing, and fall attire in November. Of course, for extremists like Engel the answer is necessarily an ethnonational one. It isn’t just that America should only be for some and not for others. By nature, it can only ever be for a select few.  

The overall message is clear. “Heritage” Americans want the government to guarantee them housing. But they want this done in tandem with removing undesirables from their communities. These outsiders don’t just threaten neighborhoods with foreign religions and customs. Their modest successes in achieving the American dream are unnatural perversions of that dream. After all, that grand aspirational ideal can only be properly said to exist for Americans, a category that does not extend beyond white Christians. 

Deporting immigrants to make room for “real” Americans is therefore both about a belief that only certain types of people can be American in the first place and a demand that these authentic Americans be provided an array of nostalgic comforts through government largess. It is, as Jonathan V. Last has repeatedly insisted, national socialism. That’s what DIMBYism is about. 

Land of plenty

Another key theme here is the idea that America is full. It’s a tired and easily debunked argument. The U.S. is, after all, absolutely massive and has a population density of just 37 people per square kilometer. Sure, America’s most populous states and cities are significantly denser, and many localities have failed to build enough housing to meet market demands, but we are not out of space in any meaningful sense. 

In the same June episode quoted earlier, Matt Walsh argued, 

Instead of simply targeting illegal aliens, the president should use his authority to immediately terminate all migration from the third world. We should start being extremely selective about the legal migration we allow, which means not allow an unchecked flood of third world migration into this country. The United States has, for far too long, functioned as essentially a giant soup kitchen or a homeless shelter for the entire world. And it’s not sustainable. We are out of space. We are out of money. We are out of resources. 

Again, none of this is true. But it is more legible when you understand nativist complaints about immigration as part of a zero-sum politics focused on securing special privileges for white, Christian Americans. 

Yet the DIMBY approach offered by nativists is not only about resource competition but also their vision of America as a pastoral idyll, a land of bounty meant to let every white American who wishes to live like a farmer-king. True Americans are entitled not only to their homes but to unimpeded enjoyment of the country’s natural riches. Any additional immigration by non-soluble populations is an affront to this national utopia. 

This is why you see calls across sites like X for government-backed homestead schemes for so-called Heritage Americans. This is also the logic behind efforts like Joshua Abbotoy and his venture fund, New Founding, which has developed projects through an affiliate company, RidgeRunner, to create “aligned communities” in places like Appalachian Kentucky. RidgeRunner’s logo is a deer head, and its motto are the words “land,” “liberty,” and “legacy.” Abbotoy hopes to create places that are alluring to red and blue state migrants alike by offering “culturally Christian” oases in America’s pristine rural heartlands. 

C. Jay Engel was one of the early customers for RidgeRunner’s Jackson County, Tennessee, development. As David Peisner has reported for Rolling Stone, Engel has frequently called for mass deportations and expressed a desire to return America “to how it was before the Civil Rights movement.” Andrew Isker, Engel’s podcast co-host and fellow RidgeRunner transplant, has argued that Jews should be given reduced rights because America is a country that “belongs to Jesus.”

What emerges from all this is a sense that America is “full” if a minority exists within eyeshot of any of its hard-working, God-fearing white citizens. America’s resources are stressed if a single undeserving migrant receives aid while humble Christian fathers go hat-in-hand to the loan officer. 

Real Americans are better off retreating to places where they can build the sort of communities that have been eradicated by liberals, migrants, and other enemies of traditional culture. This sort of utopian escapism is not new. The United States has a long tradition of gated communities, separatist groups, and so-called model societies. But we are seeing a lot of renewed energy on the American right for asserting an idealized version of the United States as white, Christian, and native-born. 

Mortgaging the future 

It’s worth noting in closing that the antisemitism of Engel and Isker is not incidental. There is a strong strain of antisemitic thinking that runs through right-wing efforts to create parallel investment and real estate structures. The online vitriol over the 50-year mortgage proposal has seen repeated references to “Jewish” finance as the real beneficiary of the scheme. 

Far-right Christian nationalist Joel Webbon summarized this view with a post reading, “The United States of Usury. 50 years a slave.” Posts across X about the program are rife with references to Jews and winking images of the goblin bankers

from Harry Potter. 

It’s one more element of a right-wing story of American life in which meaning, non-white forces steal the American dream out from under its Rockwell-esque protagonists. Of course, a 50-year mortgage is not a good policy. But it has nothing to do with a country that is overrun by undeserving immigrants or in the grips of Jewish finance. 

And the malice behind the reaction to the proposal will not fade so long as right-wing activists continue to successfully peddle their vision of a victimized white Christian nation.

Featured image is Loading Corn, by Thomas Hart Benton