On Monday, former President Donald Trump announced that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance would be the vice presidential nominee. Documented dove into what Vance has said publicly about immigration. Here’s what we found about the VP pick:
Two years ago during Vance’s campaign to become a senator in Ohio, he centered the topic of immigration by speaking about it in his ads, and has said he found doing so to be “very effective” in winning over voters. His work on the Trump campaign trail this year has shown he will be doing the same as he joins the ticket.
He told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in May 2024, that while campaigning in 2022, he understood that there was “a strong undercurrent” of people who are concerned about immigration, but “who didn’t like being called racist for it.” So he became determined to speak openly about the issue, adding that he would “absolutely” not allow himself “to be filtered by” liberals.
In 2022, he wrote an ad for his campaign — by himself, he said in the New York Times interview — that focused on the border. Vance, looking into the camera for the ad, said “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country. This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.”
That statement first asserts that drugs in the U.S. come from the border, suggesting immigrants are responsible for smuggling fentanyl. This is misleading, as the Department of Homeland Security reports that U.S. citizens, not migrants or asylum seekers, are the primary smugglers caught with fentanyl at the border. Almost 75% of individuals apprehended for attempting to smuggle fentanyl into the United States since October 2022 were U.S. citizens, and they were responsible for bringing in over half of all fentanyl confiscated by U.S. authorities, according to Homeland Security officials.
But Vance strongly believes undocumented immigrants at the border are the source of the problem. As he said to journalists and audiences at a Fox News town hall-style interview during his campaign trail for Ohio’s senate seat in 2022: “When the Fentanyl is brought into our country at such an extraordinary degree, brought in by the Mexican drug cartels, that’s actually one of the reasons why we have the labor shortage of course. We think about it most of all because it kills our citizens…it orphans our children. It also creates labor shortages because fentanyl takes people out of the workforce and makes them unable to work in good jobs,” he said. “If we can control the illegal immigration, that will actually help this problem.”
Secondly, Vance’s statement that “more Democrat voters” are “pouring into this country” suggests that as soon as immigrants arrive in the U.S., they can vote without U.S. citizenship, and as such, they dilute the votes of U.S. citizen voters.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s list of 1,513 voter fraud cases since 1982 shows that undocumented immigrants’ voting is so rare that there have only been 10 cases of confirmed undocumented immigrants voting in over 40 years. There is also no recorded case in American history where such illegal voting has changed the results of an election.
A central narrative in Vance’s opposition to immigration stems from his disapproval of employers who prefer hiring immigrants for cheaper labor instead of offering higher wages to U.S. citizens. Vance told the New York Times’ Douthat in May that there has been far less innovation in the U.S. and more substitution of labor with immigrants. Vance also argues that undocumented immigrants provide cheap labor and undermine job opportunities for American-born workers in states like Ohio. But according to the American Immigration Council, the state is facing a major labor shortage that immigrants are helping to fill across the manufacturing, healthcare, STEM, and education fields.
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“When you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects,” Vance said to Douthat. “What is not good is you replace the McDonald’s worker from Middletown, Ohio, who makes $17 an hour with an immigrant who makes $15 an hour. And that is, I think, the main thrust of elite liberalism, whether people acknowledge it or not.”
Under Trump’s first term, very few employers faced repercussions for hiring undocumented workers, despite profiting from their labor. Instead, the workers themselves were detained and often later deported.
Businesspeople connected to Trump also notably used immigrant labor. Major Republican donors Richard Ellis Uihlein and Elizabeth Uihlein — billionaire founders of Uline, a company that offers shipping, packing supplies, and other industrial supplies and bulk business goods — sought immigrant workers in their company, going so far as to sue the government to secure special visas at the same time federal officials implemented Trump’s more stringent immigration policies, ProPublica reported in 2019.
On issues concerning the border, Vance, like Trump, has said he wants to finish construction of the border wall, and has said he would “oppose every attempt to grant amnesty” to undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
During his run for Ohio’s senate seat in 2022, Vance said he is in favor of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) RAISE Act.
The RAISE Act, introduced in 2017 with Trump’s support, proposed ending green cards for parents of U.S. citizens. Instead, it would have introduced renewable 5-year visas that required sponsors to permanently cover their parents’ health insurance, while prohibiting the parents from working.
“What our immigration policy does now is it asks the question: who do you know? If you know somebody, that’s how you get into the United States legally,” Vance said. “I think the immigration policy in the United States should be about: What skills and what attributes do you bring to the table that are going to enrich the entire American nation? That’s what the RAISE act would do.”
In a campaign fundraising message/email distributed to supporters earlier this month, Vance is quoted as saying that “hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are entering our country and being sent to our neighborhoods, our cities, our schools, and our communities,” adding “we need to deport every single person who invaded our country illegally.”
In New York, statistics show that an increase in migration has not led to more crime and most people who arrive here say they are simply seeking more peaceful and healthy lives.
This summary was featured in Documented’s Early Arrival newsletter. You can subscribe to receive it in your inbox three times per week here.
