VP Pick J.D. Vance: Migration Policy Should Help Ordinary Americans

Donald Trump’s pick for vice president — Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) — has made himself into a champion for reform of the federal government’s unpopular economic strategy of growth by migration.

“No one can avoid that [immigration] has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” Vance told a D.C. audience at the NatCon4 conference on July 10.

America is not a “nation of immigrants,” Vance argued:

America is not just an idea — though we were founded on great ideas. America is a nation. It is a group of people with a common history and a common future, and yes … one of the parts of that commonality as a people is that we do allow newcomers to this country. We allow them on our terms, on the terms of the American citizens. And that’s the way that we preserve the continuity of this project from 200 years past to hopefully 200 years in the future.

The elite’s ruthless support for migration is a threat to democracy, said Vance, who grew up in a poor home in Ohio:

The real threat to American democracy is not … some foreign dictator who doesn’t like America or our values. The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration, and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American democracy.

Vance’s ground-floor opposition to the federal migration policy is sharply different from the elite, business-first consensus broken by voters’ support for Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.

Many polls show overwhelming public support for less migration.

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But the GOP also includes many advocates who want to use migration to grow business. For example, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to the NatCon4 audience on July 9, saying:

If we’re being honest, we have sloppily used the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration to actually obfuscate a deeper divide on our views on the quantity and quality of illegal or legal immigration … between what I call the National Protectionist direction of the future and a National Libertarian direction for the future.

“The National Protectionist view … myopically promotes American wage growth, worker wage growth, even at the expense of these other important national objectives,” he said, adding;

The top objectives here of U.S. immigration policy [should be] to protect US national security, to preserve U.S. national identity, and to promote U.S. economic growth, in that order.

…

Immigration policy is summarized for me in three simple maxims: No migration without consent. Consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America and who share American national values, and migrants who enter unlawfully without consent must be removed.

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Ramaswamy was questioned by an audience member: “How many? … What would be your number of legal immigrants?”

Ramaswamy responded:

The question of “What number?” is the wrong question … The sole purpose of U.S. immigration policy should be to advance the interests of U.S. citizens. So if the number of immigrants who meet that criteria is zero, then the answer is going to be zero. If the number of immigrants who meet that criteria is in excess in whatever congressional bill is floating around on a given day, then it may be in excess of that.

Ramaswamy derided curbs on migration to protect Americans’ wages as “nanny state” policies, saying:

The National Protectionist view focuses on guaranteeing wages for American workers and to elevate the prices that American manufacturers are able to command in the marketplace, whereas the National Libertarian view is concerned foremost with getting in there and actually dismantling the regulatory state as its top concern … I don’t care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. Our goal is to dismantle the nanny state altogether.

In his subsequent speech, Vance argued that the elite support migration because it makes them rich and also sidelines ordinary Americans:

They really benefit from the cheap labor …. [and] they actually don’t really like the people who make up the domestic populations of their own countries. It’s one of the things that we consistently find from the U.K. elites to certainly the American elites, [that] they seem to really not like their own fellow citizens — even though the wars that they want are going to be, of course, fought by the people in the heartland.

Ramaswamy’s views were a minority at the event.

“We must ask whether a program or strategy strengthens national security and/or improves the living standards of the American people over the long term,” investor Scott Bessent told the conference. “America first, but most of all, Americans first,” said Bessent, who founded the Key Square Group investment firm.

“The massive importation of immigrants to this country — a majority of them illegal — is an experiment because it has never been done before and no one can be sure that it can work,” said Theo Wold, a former staffer for Trump’s White House. He continued:

So who’s running this experiment and why? … The elites in this country, upper class, ruling elites are the ones in the position to decide whether our border is open or closed and to what degree. And elites benefit from open borders, so that is what they choose.

At the NatCon4 speech, Vance skirted the policy questions raised by his view of immigration.

For example, he did not endorse reforms of the H-1B, J-1, L-1, and OPT visa worker programs that now flood the U.S. professional job market with desperate foreign graduates who must comply with C-suite demands or else be sent back to India.

Similarly, Vance did not describe how migration policy should be designed to help companies raise the productivity of U.S. workers.

Since 1990, following the 1990s departure of many manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China, and other countries, the economic policy of Extraction Migration has been used to inflate the nation’s consumer economy with tens of millions of imported consumers, renters, and workers

The result of Biden’s Extraction Migration policy has been lower wages, higher housing costs, higher interest rates, lower productivity, and greater civic chaos for 330 million Americans.

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.

But Biden’s migration-fueled economic policy also provides huge windfall gains for Democratic donors, including investors, federal and state government agencies, as well as urban retailers, landlords, and employers.

But a top Wall Street investor argued in April that immigration should be reduced to help spur domestic productivity and high-tech investment.

“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:

That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology.

“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink said.