JD Vance blamed immigrants for everything during the VP debate

Tuesday’s vice presidential election The debate was a mild meeting between two men tasked with defending the policies and records of their running mates. What many viewers expected to be a momentous clash between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) and Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) – both billed as the attack dogs of their respective tickets – manifested as a polite ‘agent-to- disagreement-fest’. who managed to cover up a lot of nonsense.

Vance, a seasoned public speaker with an oily mastery of making nonsense sound clever, slipped through his answers with ease. He complained when his lies were fact-checked, dodged questions and defended himself against criticism for his past public criticism of his current running mate.

Trump’s VP pick is being heralded as the intellectual mouthpiece of Trumpism, a moderating force in Trump’s chaos. It was abundantly clear Tuesday night that there is virtually no distance between Vance and the former president on policy — especially on immigration.

Trump and the Republican Party have for years made a habit of linking every disease affecting American society – real or imagined – to immigration. Fear-mongering about immigrant populations has been a pillar of the Republican Party’s 2024 campaign strategy, and Tuesday’s debate was no different. Vance repeatedly blamed migrants and the Biden administration’s immigration policies for a variety of social ills, in some cases to the point of absurdity.

Here are all the things Vance blamed on immigration in the vice presidential debate, and why most of it is nonsense.

The fentanyl crisis

“Kamala Harris was allowing fentanyl into our communities at record levels. … (Harris has) enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know they use children as drug mules.”

There is undeniably an epidemic of fentanyl deaths in the United States, but the role of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in bringing the drug into the country is often vastly overestimated by the Republican Party. In 2021, 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers were U.S. citizens, compared to just 8.9 percent involving undocumented immigrants. According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “only 279 of the 1.8 million Border Patrol arrests of illegal crossers resulted in a fentanyl seizure—too small a percentage (0.02 percent) to graph. to appear.”

The idea that the Biden-Harris administration has allowed fentanyl to enter the US at the southern border with impunity is also incorrect. According to Customs and Border Patrol data, “fentanyl seizures have increased more than 860 percent from fiscal years 2019-2023, and fentanyl seizures have nearly doubled from fiscal years 2022-2023.” In 2023, fentanyl deaths in the United States fell for the first time since 2018.

His mother’s opioid addiction

“A lot of fentanyl is entering our country. I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and is now clean. I don’t want people struggling with addiction to be denied their second chance because Kamala Harris has allowed fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”

During the debate, Vance linked the addiction struggles of his mother, Beverly Aikins, to his claims about drug trafficking at the border. The suggestion is misleading. According to Vance’s own memoirs: Hillbilly eulogy — and statements from Aikins – her struggle with addiction began with the abuse of prescription opioids she accessed through her job as a nurse, and progressed into an addiction to heroin and other substances after her discharge.

Rising housing costs

“You have housing that is completely unaffordable because we have brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce housing. … Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce housing is one of the biggest drivers of housing prices in the country.”

The claim that undocumented immigrants drive up housing costs and price Americans out of the market is a gross exaggeration. While an increase in population will inevitably increase housing demand, economists agree that the main culprit behind rising costs is a lack of inventory and new construction. A review by The New York Times found that Vance’s claim that more than 20 million migrants would flood the housing market was a vast numerical exaggeration, and that the housing shortage would still exist if undocumented immigrants were removed from the equation.

Vance’s recent suggestions that mass deportations will lower housing costs are also questionable. In fact, the forced removal of millions of undocumented immigrants from the country would have devastating consequences for the housing market. One in five undocumented workers earns a living in construction. According to a recent report from Mother Jones, mass deportations would deplete the workforce, drive up construction costs and reduce builders’ ability to keep up with increased demand.

Lower wages

“I think you start with deportations of those people, and then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undermine the wages of American workers. Many people go home if they cannot work for less than the minimum wage in their own country. And that would be very good for our employees, who just want to earn a fair wage for a good day’s work.”

It’s a long-debunked myth in Republican politics that immigrant jobs steal jobs and depress wages for native Americans. Economists have repeatedly found that immigrants “do not cause significant declines in the wages and employment of U.S.-born citizens.”

According to the Brookings Institute, “economists have found that immigrants slightly increase the average wages of all U.S.-born workers,” because immigrant workers and citizens tend to compete for different types of jobs that are often complementary to higher productivity.

Rising healthcare costs

“Kamala Harris went on to brag that she would undo Donald Trump’s border policies. That’s exactly what she did… This problem is causing enormous problems in the United States of America. Parents unable to afford health care, schools overwhelmed. It has to stop.”

Undocumented immigrants have incredibly limited access to health care benefits and insurance and often rely on government-funded programs to meet their health care needs. However, the idea that undocumented migration increases costs for U.S. citizens is incorrect. The lack of access to many government programs causes many migrants to avoid seeking treatment at all. According to the American Journal of Public Health, immigrants report “fewer medical visits, inpatient admissions, outpatient hospital visits, and emergency medical visits.”

A Tufts Medical School study found that “per capita expenditures from private and public insurance sources were lower for immigrants, particularly expenditures for undocumented immigrants,” and that “immigrant individuals have larger out-of-pocket health care contributions paid compared to US-born individuals.” individuals.”

Violence with weapons

“The vast majority, almost 90%, and some of the statistics I’ve seen of gun violence in this country are committed with illegally acquired firearms. And while we’re on that topic, we know that thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a huge influx in the number of illegal weapons controlled by the Mexican drug cartel. So that number, the amount of illegal weapons in our country, is higher today than it was three and a half years ago.”

Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that the majority of firearms seized in connection with drug cartels were manufactured in and originated in the United States.

Research has repeatedly shown that immigrants engage in significantly less criminal activity than U.S.-born citizens. A 2020 Princeton University study found that “undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants when it comes to a range of crimes.”

“Contrary to public perception, we see significantly lower crime arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens, and we find no evidence that undocumented crime has increased in recent years,” the study said.