The U.S. government is importing too many legal immigrants and too many H-1B visa workers, Vice President JD Vance told a cheering crowd of roughly 10,000 Turning Point supporters and students Thursday at the University of Mississippi.
“What is the exact number of immigrants America should accept in the future?” he said in response to a question, adding:
Right now, the answer is far less than we’ve been accepting. We have got to become a common [high trust] community again, and you can’t do that when you have such high numbers of [legal] immigration, which is one of the reasons why we have the immigration policy we do [have].
“We have got to get our overall numbers way, way down,” he said.
The H-1B visa worker program is touted as a means to import a few genius graduates, but is actually used to import cheap white-collar labor for employers, Vance said:
You want that super genius to stay in the United States of America and not go somewhere else. [But] what [the program] is actually used to do is hire an [foreign] accountant at a 50 percent discount to an American citizen. I don’t think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we’ve got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.
The comments on H-1B outsourcing got a huge applause from the university students, many of whom recognize that their nascent careers and middle-class ambitions are being diverted to foreign H-1B and OPT workers and are being consumed by fast-developing Artificial Intelligence technology. Breitbart News has published more than 1,000 articles on H-1B migration and OPT hiring since 2015.
Vance’s comments echo the administration’s zig-zag shift to a policy of economic growth via greater productivity and innovation. That is a huge change from President Joe Biden’s “Bidenomics” policy of importing more foreign workers, consumers, and renters to expand stock market wealth on Wall Street.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” President Donald Trump told Breitbart News in August.
The promise of cheap labor is ” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vance told an audience of Silicon Valley investors in May. He added:
And whether we’re offshoring factories to cheap labor economies, or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies. And I’d say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the U.K., that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate. That’s not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.
Vance outlined his immigration views in a question-and-answer session with attendees at the rally after his speech.
The Vice President politely rejected an emotional plea from an Indian student at the university, who suggested she and other foreigners are entitled to citizenship because they enrolled in U.S. universities:
I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future while also respecting that there are people who have come here through immigration path, lawful immigration pathways, that have contributed to the country. But just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean that we’re thereby committed to let in a million or 10 million or 100 million people a year in the future?
No, that’s not right … We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years ago, binds the country inevitably for the future. There’s too many people who want to come to the United States of America, and my job as vice president is not to look out for the interests of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.
The crowd roared its approval.
Vance argued high levels of immigration slash family wages:
Legal immigration is complicated because we let in about a million legal immigrants into the United States of America every single year, and I think the evidence is pretty clear that a lot of those immigrants are actually undermining the wages of American workers. It’s one of the reasons why the President United States … and a lot of us in the administration have encouraged H-B reform … What [the program] is actually used to do is hire an [foreign] accountant at a 50 percent discount to an American citizen. I don’t think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we’ve got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.
Vance celebrated the hugely important 1925 immigration reform act as a huge gain for ordinary Americans because it helped build the shared civic culture that helps ordinary people manage their lives and communities amid pressure from self-serving governments and business interests:
If you go back to the 1920s, the United States passed an immigration reform act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country. And what happened over those 40 years? The many, many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture, and there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture …
Back in my establishment GOP days, when I was still very early getting involved in Republican politics, I remember a conservative think-tank person who told me that one of the reasons why immigration was really good is that if you had enough diversity in a country, people would mistrust each other and they wouldn’t join labor unions. Okay? So I see a lot of left-wing people who theoretically support organized labor saying, “We need to flood the country with a limitless number of immigrants.” They’re unwilling to set any limitations on it. My response to that is, you were destroying the very social trust on which American freedom and prosperity was built, and that is really important …
We have got to become a common [high trust] community again, and you can’t do that when you have such high numbers of [legal] immigration, which is one of the reasons why we have the immigration policy we do [have].
Pro-migration advocates are worrying the populist GOP may pass a 1925-style reform, which Bloomberg.com recently described as “The 1920s Immigration Mistake America May Repeat.”
Vance called for a pause in immigration to help rebuild the shared culture that has been shattered by decades of progressive-style, government-imposed civic diversity:
I do believe that some immigrants, many immigrants, do in fact enrich the United States of America. But here’s the problem we have got: We don’t even know how many illegal aliens we have. We don’t even know! The best guess is probably 25, 30 million people. I’ve heard estimates as high as 50 million. When something like that happens, you’ve got to allow your own society to cohere a little bit, to build a sense of common identity for all the newcomers to assimilate.
“Until you do that, you’ve got to be careful about any additional immigration,” he said.
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