I guess housing prices wouldn't rise as quickly, but I doubt that's a big part of the motivation.
I'll give a relatively mundane example in Boston, not even about development. A couple years ago, a taco shop under Emerson College wanted to stay open until 2AM. An organized group of busybodies showed up to the meeting to stop it, claiming it would bother the college students (yes, their claim was that a taco shop open until 2AM would bother college students). The city listened and told the shop it has to close by midnight.[0]
Now, it's pretty obvious to me that the majority of people closest to the taco shop would be fine with it being open. I live a 5-10 minute walk from that location and would love it to be open later as well, but I didn't hear about this meeting until the results were already in. These meetings aren't listed anywhere in bulk online, the people in charge seem to be inclined to listen to whoever wants to stop stuff, and the people who want to stop stuff seem to have organized and made it a full-time hobby to attend these meetings.
So a lot of NIMBY sentiment is simply organization rather than a true majority sentiment.
0. https://www.universalhub.com/2020/city-always-sleeps-think-c...
It's not cool to be racist, so you have to pretend you're just "hard" on immigration, and that people who aren't racist are soft on it.
It makes it confusing to have a conversation about it, when one side can't admit what they actually want.
Though, since this is not my first rodeo, I'd suggest at least some portion of those claiming to be “xenophilic restrictionists" will reveal that they are xenophobic, and don't care about restricting the "right kind" of immigration.
As I said, it's not cool to be racist, which confuses matters.