JD Vance continues to walk into the lion’s den, doing one confrontational interview after another with various mainstream press outlets. The latest occurred in a sitdown with The New York Times, where Vance was peppered with questions about his views on illegal immigration.
During a discussion on the topic, Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro brought out an old mainstay among those who support illegal immigration, telling the vice presidential nominee that deportations can’t happen because illegal immigrants are needed to build houses. Vance quickly turned the tables on her, though.
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REPORTER: The reason that there is a housing crisis is that not enough houses have been build.
VANCE: And that we have 25 million people who shouldn’t be here.
REPORTER: Well, this is the thing.
VANCE: I think it’s both.
REPORTER: I know you do, but I don’t think many people who look into this agree with you, but about a third of the construction workforce is Hispanic. Of those, a large portion are undocumented so how do you propose to build all the housing necessary by removing all the people who are working in construction?
Let me stop Garcia-Navarro right there. How did she get from “about a third of construction workers are Hispanic” to framing the question as if no houses could be built without the portion of those workers who are illegal immigrants? That’s quite the leap by here without providing any hard numbers at all to prove her assertion.
But this is what the press does. They cite unnamed “experts,” in this case described as “people who look into this,” and skip over all the relevant details. As Vance notes, though, we would not have a “housing crisis” if there weren’t 25 million illegal immigrants competing for housing. When you bring such a huge number of people into the country over such a relatively short period, demand will naturally skyrocket and lead to shortages.
Vance continued by lighting into the reporter’s false premise.
VANCE: Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know back in the 1960s when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t buy houses, didn’t build houses. And I’m being sarcastic, of course, in service of a point Lulu because the assumption that because a large number of homebuilders are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again…
REPORTER: The country is much bigger, the need is much bigger. I mean, I’m not arguing in favor of illegal immigration. I’m asking how you deal with the knock-on effect of your proposal, to remove millions of people who work in a critical part of the economy.
I’m gonna have to stop Garcia-Navarro again here because she is absolutely arguing in favor of illegal immigration. I realize reporters like to throw that line in during interviews to appear like unattached bystanders, but she is pushing a pro-illegal immigration agenda, and she knows it. Her entire premise is that without continuing to allow people to break the law, there would be no one to build homes for Americans.
As Vance has already noted, a big part of that is the fact that so many illegal immigrants have been allowed into the country, driving up demand for housing and causing the current shortage.
VANCE: Well, I think that what you would do is you would take the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women but still millions of women, prime-age, who have dropped out of the labor force. You absolutely can reengage folks into the American labor market…
REPORTER: To work in construction?
VANCE: Of course, you could.
There she goes again. Does she believe that only Hispanic illegal immigrants are capable of doing construction work? That’s quite the assumption to make when arguing in favor of continuing to break American laws. Garcia-Navarro then tried to cite the unemployment rate, suggesting there aren’t enough Americans out there needing jobs. Vance was quick to point out how she had no idea what she was talking about because the unemployment rate does not include people who have left the labor force.
REPORTER: I mean the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. Most people who…
VANCE: But the unemployment rate, Lulu, this is important, doesn’t include…
REPORTER: But most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy, they’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old, they might not want to work in construction.
VANCE: The unemployment is not, does not count labor force participation drop-outs, and again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to society is it gets us in a mindset of saying, “We can only build houses with illegal immigrants” when we have seven million, just men, not even women, just men, who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
People say, “Well, Americans won’t do those jobs.” Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages, but people will do those jobs. They will just do those jobs at certain wages. Think about this from the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them reengaged in American society.
We can not have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and is importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’ border policies. I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who is just going to work under the table for poverty wages? It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American middle class.
It’s incredible to me how open mainstream journalists are about their desire to facilitate human trafficking for them to live their upper-crust lifestyles. Bringing in illegal immigrants to work for quasi-slave wages is not a solution to the housing crisis. It exacerbates the problem, distorting the market, both regarding demand for housing and wages to build homes.
Vance knows this topic better than anyone, and I’m dumbstruck how any reporter still thinks they can corner him on it. Garcia-Navarro, continually attempting to interrupt to inject her talking points, ends up looking ill-informed and supportive of abusive immigration and labor policies. That’s probably because she is.
