Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), whom President Donald Trump nominated for vice president, has become a champion for reforming the federal government’s unpopular economic strategy of growth through immigration.
“No one can avoid it. [immigration] “Our communities have become poorer, less safe, less prosperous and less progressive,” Vance told an audience in Washington. NatCon4 Conference July 10.
America is not a “nation of immigrants,” Vance argued.
America is not just an idea. We were founded on great ideas, but America is a nation. It is a collection of people with a common history and a common future. And, yes… part of that commonality as a people is that we embrace newcomers to this country. We embrace them on our terms, the American terms. And that is how we maintain the continuity of this project from the past 200 years to hopefully the next 200 years.
Vance, who grew up poor in Ohio, said the elite’s relentless support for immigrants is a threat to democracy.
The real threat to American democracy is not foreign dictators who don’t like America or our values. The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep voting for less immigration and then politicians keep giving us more immigration. That’s a threat to American democracy.
Vance’s ground-level opposition to federal immigration policy is a stark departure from the elite, business-first consensus that was shattered by voter support for Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.
Many opinion polls show overwhelming public support for reducing immigration.
Watch the video:
But there are also many Republican supporters who want to use immigration to boost business, such as entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswami, who told an audience at NatCon4 on July 9:
To be honest, we have been using the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration to obscure a deeper divide in our views about the quantity and quality of illegal and legal immigration — the divide between what I call a “future state protectionist orientation” and a “future state liberal orientation.”
“The idea of national protectionism shortsightedly promotes higher wages, higher wages for American workers, at the expense of other important national goals,” he said, adding:
The main goal of U.S. immigration policy is [should be] The order is to protect U.S. national security, preserve U.S. national identity, and promote U.S. economic growth.
…
Immigration policy, to me, boils down to three simple principles: no immigration without consent should be allowed, consent should only be given to immigrants who benefit America and share our national values, and immigrants who enter illegally without consent must be deported.
Watch the video:
Mr. Ramaswami was asked by an audience member: “How many? … How many are legal immigrants?”
Ramaswami responded:
“How many?” is the wrong question… The sole purpose of U.S. immigration policy is to promote the interests of the American people. So if the number of immigrants who meet that criterion is zero, the answer is zero. It could be exceeded if the number of immigrants who meet that criterion is exceeded by a bill being considered in Congress on a given day.
Ramaswami derided policies that restrict immigration to protect American wages as “nanny state” policies, saying:
The state protectionist view is focused on guaranteeing wages for American workers and raising the prices that American manufacturers can demand in the marketplace, while the state liberal view is primarily concerned with getting in there and actually dismantling the regulatory state… I’m not interested in replacing a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. Our goal is to dismantle the nanny state altogether.
In a later speech, Vance argued that elites support immigration because it enriches them and alienates ordinary Americans.
They really do benefit from cheap labor… [and] They actually don’t like their own people very much, and this is a consistent pattern seen from British elites to American elites. [that] They seem to really hate their own people, and the war they want to see is of course going to be fought by people in the heartland.
He’s a great vice presidential candidate. translatorHis conservative economic policies and commitment to the American worker perfectly represent the transformation of the Republican Party over the past eight years.
— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) July 15, 2024
Ramaswamy’s views were in the minority at the event.
“You have to ask whether the programs and strategies will strengthen our national security and improve the standard of living for the American people over the long term,” investor Scott Besent said at the conference. “America first, but above all, Americans first,” said Besent, who founded the investment firm KeySquare Group.
“Importing a large number of immigrants into this country — most of them illegal — is an experiment that’s unprecedented and no one is sure will work,” said Theo Wald, a former Trump White House staffer.
So who is conducting this experiment and why? … The elites, the upper classes, the ruling elites in this country are in the position to decide whether to open the borders or close them, and to what extent. And because the elites benefit from having open borders, that is their choice.
“It’s time not only to end mass immigration but to reverse it. It’s time to rediscover American culture, not multiculturalism.”
To decolonize and re-Americanize this country.”
–translation: in Natcon Talk pic.twitter.com/6RptogGe5Q
— Nick Solheim (@NickSSolheim) July 8, 2024
In his speech at NationalCon 4, Vance sidestepped policy questions raised by his views on immigration.
For example, he did not support reforms to the H-1B, J-1, L-1 and OPT visa worker programs that were flooding the U.S. skilled job market with desperate foreign graduates who would be deported to India if they did not comply with the demands of their executives.
Similarly, Vance did not explain how immigration policy should be designed to help businesses increase the productivity of U.S. workers.
Following the loss of many manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and other countries in the 1990s, the economic policy of extractive immigration has been used since 1990 to inflate the country’s consumer economy with tens of millions of imported consumers, renters and workers.
Biden’s immigration extraction policies have resulted in lower wages, higher housing costs, higher interest rates, lower productivity, and greater social unrest for 330 million Americans.
Biden’s unpopular policies “flood the American workforce with millions of low-wage illegal immigrants and directly attack the wages and opportunity of hardworking Americans,” the Trump campaign said in a May statement.
But Biden’s pro-immigration economic policies also stand to generate huge benefits for Democratic donors, including investors, federal and state government agencies, urban retailers, landlords and employers.
But a top Wall Street investor argued in April that immigration should be reduced to boost domestic productivity and high-tech investment.
“In the developed world, the big winners are going to be countries with declining populations,” said BlackRock founder Larry Fink. Said He made the remarks at a pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.
That’s something most people never talk about. [a] Decreasing population is a negative factor [economic] Growth. But in my conversations with the leaders of these great developed countries, [such as China, and Japan] No one can enter a country with xenophobic, anti-immigration policies. [so they have] As these countries experience declining populations, technologies such as robotics and AI will develop rapidly.
“If all of this promises to transform productivity, Most of us would think so. [emphasis added] “You can have a declining population and still have a higher standard of living for countries, and for individuals,” Fink said.
