Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance discussed illegal immigrants in the workforce with the New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast Saturday.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance criticized what he called the “deranged” idea that the country needs illegal immigrants to solve the housing crisis.
Vance appeared on the New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast on Saturday where he was asked about former President Trump’s plan to begin deporting the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country. Host Lulu Garcia-Navarro pointed out a third of construction workers are Hispanic and “a large proportion are undocumented.”
“So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?” Garcia-Navarro asked.
“Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses. But, of course they did. And I’m being sarcastic in service of a point,” Vance responded.
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He continued, “The assumption that because a large number of homebuilders now are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again betrays a fundamental—”
“The country is much bigger. The need is much bigger,” she interrupted.
Vance later criticized the idea that millions of illegal immigrants are needed for construction jobs while there are millions of male American workers currently out of the workforce.
“This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set 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,” Vance said.
“Think about 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 re-engaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers,” he continued. “That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’s 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 re-engage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who’s 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.”
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While explaining the Trump administration’s deportation plan, Vance said one way to do so is to ensure businesses can’t hire illegal immigrants.
“I don’t think that you have to deport everybody, because if you re-establish some semblance of a reasonable border policy, a lot of those people are going to go home willingly. If you make it harder for American companies to undercut the wages of American workers by hiring illegal labor, a lot of those folks are going to go home,” Vance said.
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