Everything J.D. Vance Blamed on Immigrants During the VP Debate
Tuesday’s vice presidential debate was a mild meeting of the minds between two men tasked with defending the policies and records of their running mates. What many viewers expected to be a memorable clash between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — both billed as the attack dogs of their respective tickets — manifested as a polite agree-to-disagree fest that managed to disguise a lot of nonsense.
Vance, a seasoned public speaker with an oily mastery of making bullshit sound smart, slid through his answers with ease. He complained when his lies were fact-checked, dodged questions, and defended himself from scrutiny about his past public aspersions on his current running mate.
Trump’s VP pick has been billed as the intellectual mouthpiece of Trumpism, a moderating force to Trump’s chaos. It was abundantly clear on Tuesday night that there is virtually no distance between Vance and the former president in terms of policy — especially on the issue of immigration.
For years now, Trump and the Republican Party have made a habit of pegging any malady affecting American society — real or invented — to immigration. Fear mongering over immigrant populations has been a pillar of the GOP’s 2024 campaign strategy, and Tuesday’s debate was no different. Vance repeatedly blamed migrants and the Biden administration’s immigration policy for all manner of social ills, in some cases to the point of absurdity.
Here are all the things Vance blamed on immigration in the vice presidential debate, and why most of it is bullshit.
The fentanyl crisis
“Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels. … [Harris has] enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules.”
There is undeniably an epidemic of fentanyl deaths in the United States, but the role of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in bringing the drug into the country is often wildly overstated by the GOP. In 2021, 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers were U.S. citizens, compared to just 8.9 percent involving undocumented migrants. According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “just 279 of 1.8 million arrests by Border Patrol of illegal border crossers resulted in a fentanyl seizure — too small of a percentage (0.02 percent) to appear on a graph.”
The notion that the Biden-Harris administration has allowed fentanyl to enter the U.S. with impunity at the southern border is also false. According to Customs and Border Patrol data, “fentanyl seizures have increased more than 860 percent from fiscal years 2019-2023, and fentanyl seizures nearly doubled from fiscal years 2022-2023.” In 2023, fentanyl deaths in the United States decreased for the first time since 2018.
His mom’s opioid addiction
“A lot of fentanyl is coming into our country. I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean. I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”
During the debate, Vance connected the addiction struggles of his mother, Beverly Aikins, to his claims about drug trafficking at the border. The suggestion is misleading. According to Vance’s own memoir, Hillbilly Eulogy — and statements from Aikins — her struggle with addiction began with the abuse of prescription opioids she was accessing through her job as a nurse, and devolved into an addiction to heroin and other substances after being fired.
Rising housing costs
“You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes. … Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country.”
The claim that undocumented migrants are driving up housing costs and pricing out Americans from the market is a gross exaggeration. While an increase in population will inevitably increase demand for homes, economists agree that the primary culprit behind rising costs is a lack of stock and new constructions. A review by The New York Times found that Vance’s claim of more than 20 million migrants flooding the housing market was a huge numeric exaggeration, and that the housing shortage would still exist if undocumented migrants were removed from the equation.
Vance’s recent suggestions that mass deportations will lower housing costs are also dubious. In fact, the forceful removal of millions of undocumented people from the country would have devastating impacts on the housing market. One in five undocumented workers makes a living in construction. According to a recent report from Mother Jones, mass deportations would deplete the workforce, drive up construction costs, and shrink constructors ability to keep pace with increased demand.
Lower wages
“I think you start with deportations on those folks, and then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can’t work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that’ll be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”
It’s a long-debunked myth within Republican politics that immigrant workers steal jobs and depress wages for native-born Americans. Economists have repeatedly found that immigrants don’t “cause any sizeable decrease in wages and employment of U.S.-born citizens.”
According to the Brookings Institute, “economists have found that immigrants slightly raise the average wages of all U.S.-born workers,” as immigrant workers and citizens tend to compete for different types of jobs that are often complementary to increased productivity.
Rising health care costs
“Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump’s border policy. She did exactly that… This problem is leading to massive problems in the United States of America. Parents who can’t afford health care, schools that are overwhelmed. It’s got to stop.”
Undocumented immigrants have incredibly limited access to health care resources and insurance and are often dependent on government-funded programs to meet their health care needs. The notion that undocumented migration is raising costs for U.S. citizens is, however, false. Lack of access to many government programs leads many migrants to avoid seeking treatment altogether. According to the American Journal of Public Health, immigrants report “fewer medical visits, inpatient admissions, outpatient hospital visits and emergency medical visits.”
A study by Tufts Medical School found that “per capita expenditures from private and public insurance sources were lower for immigrants, particularly expenditures for undocumented immigrants,” and that “immigrant individuals made larger out-of-pocket health care payments compared to U.S.-born individuals.”
Gun violence
“The gross majority, close to 90%, and some of the statistics I’ve seen of the gun violence in this country is committed with illegally obtained firearms. And while we’re on that topic, we know that thanks to Kamala Harris’s open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel. So that number, the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago.”
Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that the majority of firearms seized in connection with drug cartels were manufactured in and originated from the United States.
Studies have repeatedly found that immigrants engage in significantly less criminal activity than U.S.-born citizens. A 2020 study by Princeton University found that “undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.”
“Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years,” the study added.
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