Vice President Vance calls for lower overall immigration

At a Turning Point USA event last week on October 29th, Vice President J.D. Vance stated his firm belief that lower immigration levels would benefit the country.

“We let in about a million legal immigrants into the U.S. every single year and I think the evidence is pretty clear that a lot of those immigrants are undercutting the wages of American workers… We have got to get our overall numbers way, way down.”

Vance’s comments were the strongest and most explicit endorsement for lower immigration we’ve heard from a sitting Vice President or President in at least a century. A questioner pressed Vance during the Q&A on his conclusion that the U.S. admits too many immigrants every year. Vance explained:

“I can believe that the United States should should lower its levels of immigration in the future while also respecting that there are people who have come here through immigration path lawful immigration pathways that have contributed to the country. But just because one person or 10 people or a 100 people came in legally and contributed to the to the United States of America, does that mean that we’re thereby committed to let in a million or 10 million or a hundred million people a year in the future? No. that that’s not right. . .

“. . . We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years ago binds the country inevitably for the future. There’s too many people who want to come to the United States of America. And my job as vice president is not to look out for the interest of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.”

Vance’s historical argument

Part of Vance’s argument for lower immigration was rooted in history. He referred to the immigration reductions passed by Congress in the 1920s and the 40 years of progress that followed. That history is documented in NumbersUSA’s Emancipation Reclamation, a free publication. As Vance explained, the slow down in immigration produced many positive outcomes for recent waves of immigrants as they assimilated into the economic mainstream of America. Immigrants were far from the only Americans who benefited from lower numbers. Over the four decades between Congress reducing immigration in 1924 and resuming mass immigration in 1965, economists and historians agree:

• the United States became a middle-class country;
• the sustained tighter labor markets were instrumental in the fastest income growth for workers in U.S. history;
• inequality among classes and races shrank as workers shared in the fruits of their labor as never before; and
• the increased incomes nurtured the rise of a new class of Black professionals who opened the political gates for the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

By several measures, the lower immigration era in the mid-20th century was a period of great progress for the nation. After Congress restarted mass immigration (by mistake!) in the 1960s, federal commission after blue ribbon federal commission recommended scaling the numbers back down. Vance’s support for lower immigration has been a mainstream idea for his entire life. What’s new is the platform he’s using to fight for lower immigration.