Mass migration is threatening the foundations of American and European societies, Vice President JD Vance told a UK-based media outlet.
“The problem with American immigration… over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people too quickly,” he said in a December 19 interview with Unherd.com. He continued:
If the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’
In the United States, “I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of [civic] balkanisation and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly,” he said, as he explained how he tries to balance rival goals within the United States and President Donald Trump’s administration:
When you ask yourself, “What should America’s immigration policy be?” well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgement. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgements, but also moral judgements. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it.
In recent speeches, for example, Vance has argued that careless migration is a drag on American innovation and productivity.
He is now working with President Donald Trump to pressure U.S. investors to focus on high-tech productivity and innovation. That would be a big shift from businesses’ preference for exploiting millions of poor migrant renters, consumers, and workers, and the mixed-skill, de-professionalizing H-1B visa workers eagerly imported by President Joe Biden.
In Europe, he said, “Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population.”
“I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation,” he added.
Vance also politely hit the rival claims that the United States is either a nation for an unreplaceable population of “Heritage Americans” descended from early settlers, or a nation for a replaceable population of people from diverse cultures who swear allegiance to a progressive “creed.”
“Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago… or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally,” he said, adding:
I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories.
Vance showed he is reading the debate closely when he cited a recent speech by author Gordon Wood at an awards speech hosted by the pro-migration American Enterprise Institute.
“The 21st Century, dominated as it is by mass migration from the South to the North, enables the United States to be more capable of accepting and absorbing immigrants,” Wood told his pro-migration audience. “But immigration must be carefully handled, because assimilation is not easy — no nation should allow the percentage of foreign-born to exceed about 15 percent of the population,” he said.
The migrant share of the U.S. population is at least 15.4 percent, or roughly one-in-six.
Wood, like former President Barack Obama, is an advocate for the high-stakes claim that the American creed can unite the myriad rival populations and cultures imported by the federal government’s elite-driven economic policy of Extraction Migration.
Wood said:
[President Abraham] Lincoln found a solution to the great problem of American identity, how the great variety of individuals in America, with all their diverse ethnicities, races and religions, could be brought together into a single nation. As Lincoln grasped better than anyone ever has, the revolution and its declaration of independence offered a set of beliefs that through the generations, supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation that history has ever known.
Since now the whole world is in the United States, nothing but the ideals coming out of the revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious History can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the one people that the declaration says we are.
To be an American, is not to be somebody, but to believe in something. That is why we are, at heart, a creedal nation, and that is why the 250th anniversary of that declaration next year is so important to us.
Wood’s claim that the creed can offset the government-imposed diversity — up to perhaps 15 percent — was applauded by AEI’s audience of pro-migration business leaders.
“Our problems with immigration pale in comparison with the European nations and the [migration] problems they will continue to face over the rest of the 21st Century, especially as global warming drives people northward,” Wood said.
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