Donald Trump’s pick for vice president — Sen. J.D. Vance — is championing reform of the federal government’s unpopular economic strategy of growth by migration.
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.
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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.
