JD Vance: 'We Have Got to Get Our Overall [Migrant] Numbers Way, Way Down' 

Copyright breitbart

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]. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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]. 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.