Why JD Vance Couldn’t Stop Lying About Immigration
In the context of the truth, his running mate’s signature policy makes no sense.
JD VANCE’S PERFORMANCE at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate may have been kinder and gentler than his “childless cat ladies” and “they’re eating the cats and dogs” persona, but he’s still spewing pernicious falsehoods about immigration. Let’s start with his premise that “we’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country,” including “about a million of those people [who] have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally.” These figures are no mere exaggerations or outside estimates—they are meant to inflame listeners.
The best estimates of undocumented immigrants living in the United States is about 11 million as of 2022. That number doesn’t include about one million asylum seekers who have come since 2022 and are awaiting adjudication of their status. But it would be wrong to conclude based on those numbers alone that there are now 12 million or more undocumented immigrants—some of the 11 million have died (one million are over age 55) or left the country.
Nonetheless, the Trump campaign consistently inflates this number to more than 20 million by conflating undocumented immigrants with those in the country under some form of temporary status—i.e., legally. The Migration Policy Institute reports that many of these immigrants have “twilight status,” meaning they are legally present but have no pathway to become legal residents. Included in these numbers—about 2.5 million—are some 75,000 Afghans who fled in the downfall of Kabul; 196,000 Ukrainians admitted after Russia invaded their homeland; 357,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans fleeing communist dictators or anarchy in their home countries; as well as more than a half million DACA recipients and some 700,000 granted temporary protected status by previous administrations.
That still leaves between 5 and 10 million more people Trump seeks to deport if he’s elected. Perhaps he’s counting the 4.4 million U.S. citizen children living with undocumented parents to fill his deportation camps, or persons with legal status who have committed minor crimes.
And what happens when we round up these people? Vance didn’t say a word about the hit the economy would take if tens of millions of undocumented workers suddenly disappeared, exacerbating an already serious labor shortage. Or the effect their disappearance would have in hollowing out communities across the country. Instead, Vance implied that ridding the country of these people would be an unalloyed good for Americans, including solving the current housing crisis: “Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” he said. “It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien, alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”
So committed was Vance to blaming immigrants for the housing crisis that he even claimed that a Federal Reserve study backed him up. But the “study” he later shared on social media was no study at all, just a speech by Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, in which she said: “Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize.” Of course he ignored her remarks earlier in the speech when she said, “much of the progress on inflation last year was due to supply-side improvements, including easing of supply chain constraints; increases in the number of available workers, due in part to immigration; and lower energy prices.”
As for the supply side of the housing equation, if a Trump/Vance administration is successful in deporting undocumented workers, it will devastate the construction industry, and there will be no one to build new houses. About 30 percent of construction workers in the United States are immigrants, many of them undocumented, and in states like California and Texas the proportion is greater at 40 percent. As the National Immigration Forum notes in a recent paper, pathways to migrate legally to take construction jobs are limited. A Trump/Vance administration would likely severely limit or entirely close off the few avenues available, helping no one—the industry has already tried and failed to find domestic workers to fill these jobs.
Vance refused to answer a debate question about whether Trump’s deportation promise would result in undocumented parents being separated from their U.S.-born (thus U.S.-citizen) children, likely because even the MAGA crowd may find this idea unappealing. But Trump had no problem recently suggesting he’d do it anyway. “If you take a young woman with two beautiful children and you put her on a bus, and it ends up on the front page of every newspaper, it makes it a lot harder,” he told Sheryl Attkisson in a recent interview. “We are looking at it very closely,” he added.
But Vance, in full chameleon mode, deflected when asked the same thing during the debate: “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them hopefully are at homes with their families, some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.” Vance is referring to a study by DHS that says about 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up to their immigration hearings from FY 2019-2023, years which include Trump’s tenure in office, while another 291,000 have yet to be assigned hearings.
As for the assertion by Vance that a million undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes have been let go by the Biden administration, his figures are way off. The allegation comes from a recent letter sent by ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner to a Republican House member noting that about 435,000 convicted criminals are on what DHS calls its non-detained docket, but that number represents immigrants not in ICE custody—meaning, it includes people who are in prison or who have served sentences and been released over several decades.
Vance’s tone on immigration may have softened, but the policies he favors and the facts he distorts are no different from Donald Trump at his worst.
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