JD Vance: America Is a Nation of Citizens, Not Just an Idea

America is a nation of citizens, not just an idea, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) declared as he accepted the party’s nomination to serve as President Donald Trump’s vice president.

“One of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that “America is an idea,” Vance said from the podium, adding:

And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty, things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Vance’s emphasis on a shared American nationality in a hybrid society was cheered by the audience and echoed prior comments from 99-year-old World War II veteran William Peckrul.

“People say America is an idea, but I believe America is much more than that: America is our home,” declared Peckrul.  “You know when I was fighting in Europe, and I came back home, I kissed the ground, thanking God that I’m back home in our country,” the father of 11 added.

WATCH — Bernie Moreno Discusses the Importance of Trump Picking JD Vance as His VP at RNC 2024:

Progressives denounced Vance’s emphasis on citizens and nation. “Vance’s oration is an important phase in the ongoing evolution of right-wing Trumpism,” complained a left-wing author at the Nation:

With his nomination, the slapdash and xenophobic excesses of Trump’s prior two campaigns are becoming refined and sharpened into a potent, albeit bastardized, brand of pseudo-populist nationalism. But Donald Trump’s nation will never be a place of unity and worker sovereignty. And J.D. Vance’s homeland is a place that no honest populist would fight for.

The “nation, not idea” theme is important because it asserts the shared rights of ordinary citizens and political leaders within a competitive, raucous, and supportive society.

“If this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” said Vance.

“Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete — with people who shouldn’t even be here — for precious housing,” he said.

“We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages,” Vance said.

Americans “know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it — that is the source of America’s greatness,” he said.

“We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American companies and American industry,” Vance said.

WATCH — Jim Jordan on Trump Picking JD Vance, Investigating Secret Service After Assassination Attempt:

“Together, we will protect the wages of American workers — union and non-union alike — and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of our hard-working citizens,” Vance declared.

“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and every corner of our nation: I promise you this — I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” said Vance.

The nation accepts people and ideas from outsiders, said Vance, who is married to the child of Indian migrants. “It is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers, but when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”

Vance’s emphasis on a nation also accepts vast disparities — in wealth, luck, attributes, diligence, and ambition — while ensuring respect, autonomy, and civic support for the least fortunate Americans.

In contrast, many Democrats and business leaders insist that the United States is an idea but not a nation, and is a “Nation of Immigrants” but not of citizens.

That rival claim by elites opens the door to more wealth-shifting migration, more citizenship-melting diversity, and further demotion of the priorities held by ordinary Americans.

“Now, more than ever, we’re short of workers,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said at a 2022 press conference where he dismissed pr0-family, pro-birth policies in favor of more migration:

We have a [American] population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them — because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers [illegals who were brought in by their parents] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million — or however many undocumented there are here [emphasis added].

In 2018, immigration cheerleader Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) declared:

The American ideal is embraced by people all over the globe. It was best said a long time ago, E Pluribus Unum – Out of Many, One. Diversity has always been our strength, not our weakness. In reforming immigration we cannot lose these American Ideals.

“America is an idea … That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history,” Irish musician Bono insisted in 2012.

“America an idea,” Biden insisted in 2020 as he rejected any distinctions between Americans, migrants, and foreigners. For “everyone,” he said, that idea “allows us to stand as a beacon to the world, being part of something bigger than ourselves.”

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Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has quietly adopted a policy of Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. Under President Biden, the United States has pulled in at least 10 million legal, quasi-legal, and illegal migrants. The inflow is roughly one migrant for every American birth. 

The additional workers, white-collar graduates, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices. 

The little-recognized economic policy has loosened the self-regulation and feedback signals that enable a stable economy, democracy, and shared prosperity. It has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.

Donald Trump’s campaign team recognizes the economic impact of migration. Biden’s unpopular policy is “flooding America’s labor pool with millions of low-wage illegal migrants who are directly attacking the wages and opportunities of hard-working Americans,” said a May statement from Trump’s campaign.

The secretive economic policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The colonialism-like policy has also damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.