JD Vance isn’t just opposed to illegal immigration. The vice president wants to get the number of legal immigrants “way, way down” as well.
It’s hardly a secret that opposition to illegal immigration is one of the defining issues of the contemporary Republican Party. GOP leaders have spent years insisting that the nation’s survival is dependent in large part on strengthening border security and targeting undocumented immigrants in the United States.
What’s too often left out of the public conversation, however, is the number of party leaders who speak with equal vigor against legal immigration.
In May, for example, JD Vance sat down with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and fleshed out his perspective about the degree to which immigrants — not just undocumented immigrants, but anyone coming to American soil from somewhere else — adversely affect “social solidarity.” The vice president added that his principal concern was with “social cohesion” that new arrivals somehow undermine by being different in ways he didn’t identify.
