Paychecks in the United Kingdom and Canada flatlined when their governments tried to grow their economies by importing millions of diverse migrants, Vice President JD Vance pointed out Friday.
“While I’m sure the causes are complicated, no nation has leaned more into ‘diversity is our strength, we don’t need a melting pot we have a salad bowl’ immigration insanity than Canada,” Vance said on X.
“It has the highest foreign-born share of the population in the entire G7 [group of major economies] and its living standards have stagnated,” Vance said. “The fault lies with your leadership, elected by you.”
His comment displayed a chart showing the relative decline in economic output per person in Canada and the UK since 2016, compared to U.S. growth.
In Canada, family spending — “Household final consumption expenditure per capita” — has flatlined since early 2022, say records provided by a Canadian government agency.
“Households in the United Kingdom have experienced a significant fall in living standards since late 2021,” according to Statista.com: “Real household disposable income in the UK fell by 2.2 percent in the 2022/23 financial year, representing the biggest fall in living standards since at least 1956.”
In Biden’s term, wages stalled even as average wealth in the United States continued to climb because of lower regulations, rising stock values, and inflating housing costs. Also, Biden’s migrant inflow was roughly one-third the per-citizen scale that Canada’s government inflicted on Canada’s roughly 40 million citizens.
Over the last year, Vance has repeatedly argued that ordinary Americans gain more from high-tech investment than from additional low-wage immigration.
“If you go back to the three years of the [high migration] Biden administration, the average American worker actually lost about $3,000 in take-home pay. In the first 10 months of the Trump economy,” Vance told Breitbart News on November 20. Under Trump’s low-migration policies, “We’ve increased take-home pay by about $1,200, adjusting for inflation. So that’s a huge, huge thing,” he added.
Similarly, Americans were pushed out of housing because Biden “flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who are taking houses, which ought by right go to American citizens,” Vance told Fox News.
Instead of relying on the Biden, U.K., and Canadian strategy of using migration to grow the economy, the federal government should promote high-tech automation, Vance says.
“The evidence that I see is that if we really lean into robotics and technology, it’s going to raise everybody’s wages and make everybody better off,” Vance told Fox News on November 12. He continued:
There really are rules of how you make people more productive, how you create economic growth, of how you make people better off. The Democrat model was “Import low-wage immigrants!” and I really do think that hurt the jobs of our construction workers and hurt the wages of a lot of our blue-collar workers.
Their idea was that the way that we get more prosperity is to import more and more low-wage servants. And that actually, I think, reduced prosperity because it meant that a lot of our blue-collar workers were struggling.
But if you use technology and you empower the blue-collar workers [with robots and automation] rather than replace them with foreign labor, I think they’re going to do way better. They’re going to make higher wages, and the whole country is going to be better off.
Trump is also backing greater use of automation and robots.
Vance’s criticism of Canada’s economic policy is also a dig at President Joe Biden’s pro-migration policies.
Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, repeatedly cited Canada as the example he wanted to follow. “We look to the north, with Canada,” Mayorkas said in September 20024, adding:
Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And, so, they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition. And they say, “We’re going to bring in a million people.” And it’s market sensitive.
We [in the United States] are dealing with numerical caps on labor-driven visas that were set in 1996. It’s 2024. The world has changed. It is remarkable how there can be [elite] agreement that [the visas system] is broken and not have an agreement on a solution. The [United States] is suffering as a result of it.
“With all due respect to my Canadian friends, whose politics focus obsessively on the United States: your stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump or whatever bogeyman [Canadian media] tells you to blame,” Vance said in his X account.
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