Vance Gets Creepy About Immigrants, Again
Last time he spun a yarn about Haitians eating people’s pets, this time he’s mocking Ukrainian Americans who oppose Putin’s war.
ON TUESDAY, JD VANCE rebuked Americans of Ukrainian ancestry who oppose his betrayal of Ukraine. The rebuke is instructive. It shows us how Vance, Donald Trump, and many of their followers think about immigration and foreign policy. They’re hostile not just to illegal immigration but also to legal immigration from certain countries. And they’re willing to target ethnic minorities in the United States by raising insinuations of dual loyalty.
Here’s what Vance tweeted on Tuesday:
Vance’s post is notable for a couple of reasons. First, the alleged conversation is more than two years old, and the words he quoted don’t show up in an internet search. Even if Vance described the exchange accurately, he was dredging it up out of nowhere to foster the impression that some Americans of a particular ancestry aren’t loyal to the United States.
To be fair, Vance didn’t malign all Ukrainian Americans. Note how he says, later in the tweet, that he “met many Ukrainian Americans” who “agreed with my views.” But he implied that those who don’t share his views on settling the war, or who identify with the country of their ancestors, can’t be trusted.
Second, Vance accused the man in Ohio of trying to enlist America in an “ethnic” rivalry. By framing the war this way, Vance erased its moral aspects—Russia is the authoritarian aggressor, Ukraine is the democratic victim—and reduced it to a clash of nationalities in which support for Ukraine could be dismissed as ethnic favoritism.
Did the man in Ohio literally refer to Ukraine as “my country”? We don’t know, since no video or independent account of the exchange seems to have been published. But even in Vance’s telling, the man objected that Vance was proposing to “abandon” Ukraine. That’s a moral term, which most of us would associate with Ukraine’s status as an ally, victim, or fellow democracy. But that part of the sentence didn’t serve Vance’s ethnic angle. So he ignored it.
YOU MIGHT INFER from Vance’s tweet that he has a particular beef with uppity Ukrainian Americans. But his problem with immigrants is much broader. It’s part of a long-term pattern of denigrating ethnicities and ancestries.
● In 2021, Vance claimed that waves of “Italian, Irish, and German immigration” around the turn of the twentieth century led to “ethnic enclaves” and “higher crime rates” in America. To fix that, he boasted, “One of the cool things that we did in the 1920s is we just sort of slowed down immigration a little bit.”
● In 2022, on his U.S. Senate campaign website, Vance argued that “our capacity to assimilate the next generation of immigrants is limited, and our legal immigration system should account for this fact by changing who we let in and reducing the total numbers.”
● In August 2024, Vance defended his 2021 remarks about Italian, Irish, and German immigrants. “When you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” he repeated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.”
● Most notoriously, last September Vance spread false stories that Haitian immigrants who were living in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status—i.e., legally—were eating other people’s pets. Vance rejected the legitimacy of TPS and insisted, on that basis, that the Haitians were here illegally. But he also alleged, irrespective of legal status, that there were too many of them, that they were too culturally foreign, and that they were bringing diseases.
“Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans,” Vance observed on Face the Nation as he hyped the pet-eating myth. He added, “This is what Kamala Harris wants to do to every town in this country: overwhelm them with migration, stress their municipal budgets, see communicable diseases on the rise.”
● At a rally later in September, Vance lamented that “some of our small towns in the state of North Carolina” were grappling with “a massive influx of children who don’t even speak English.”
● In October, at a rally in Arizona, Vance protested: “In Arizona schools right now, we have got thousands upon thousands of children who can’t even speak the native, the local language in Arizona.”
● Later in October, while discussing Muslims on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Vance warned about a “large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level.” He added: “If you think that won’t happen at a national level, you’re crazy.”
VANCE ISN’T A STRICT NATIVIST—his wife’s parents were born in India—but he’s a persistent ethnic demagogue. He associates immigrants with separatism, crime, and disease. He knows that many Americans don’t like the languages and customs these people bring, and he’s happy to exploit that friction.
He’s also selective and opportunistic in his choice of targets. While castigating Ukrainian Americans who identify with Ukraine, he defends American Christians who identify with Israel. In a speech last May, Vance proudly affirmed:
A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means that a majority of citizens of this country think that their savior—and I count myself a Christian—was born, died, and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory off the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous because of who Americans are.
That phrase, “who Americans are,” captures the way Vance thinks about immigration and foreign policy. It’s about identity, not values. A longstanding American majority identifies tribally or scripturally with Israel, but only a minority identifies with Ukraine. So while Ukraine might share the values enshrined in our Constitution—certainly more than Russia does—Ukrainian Americans aren’t “who Americans are.”
That’s what Vance meant when he declared, in his speech at last year’s Republican National Convention, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” We mustn’t let the wrong sort of people join our group—or push us around.