Immigration can push down house prices Cambridge study suggests In a paper presented to the Royal Economic Society's annual conference, Filipa Sá, an economist from Trinity College Cambridge, compares local employment figures from the Office for National Statistics with property records from the Land Registry. Miss Sá said: "This finding can be explained by two factors. First, there is some evidence that immigration has a negative effect on native wages at the lower end of the wage distribution. Second, natives who leave the city are at the top of the wage distribution. This generates a negative income effect on housing demand and pushes down house prices in local areas where immigrants cluster. The pattern only applied in areas where the arriving immigrants were poorer. In areas where those arriving from abroad came from the top of the income scale - such as in the City of London - the pattern was often the opposite.