WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance argued Monday that Americans forced to compete with illegal immigrants for housing in the United States are shouldering an unfair burden.
Vance spoke on Monday afternoon at the National League of Cities Congressional Conference in Washington, D.C., where he delivered brief remarks on the correlation between illegal immigration and the housing crisis. Vance argued that in America today, it takes almost twice the average family’s income simply to afford a new home.
“That’s just not acceptable or sustainable,” the vice president said.
“We want Americans to be able to afford the American Dream of home ownership,” he continued.
“One of the drivers of increased housing demand, we know, is that we have got a lot of people over the last four years, who have come into the country illegally,” Vance explained. “And that’s something we have to work on, if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing too.”
Vance continued: “Just think about this: If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large and frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing. And that is what we, of course, have seen, because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country, over the last four years, we’ve also unfortunately made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.”
Vance emphasized that the immigration policies of the past decade have made it “far too easy” for non-citizens to compete with Americans for housing, arguing: “There’s a clear link — more mass immigration, higher housing prices. It’s hurting working families across this country.”
“You see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices. And we have to be honest about that,” he argued.
This comment was greeted by heckling from a person in the crowd, who shouted something unintelligible.
“I see one of our nice representatives out here wants to actually continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, making your communities and cities unaffordable,” he joked with a smile, a comment which received applause from the crowd.
The vice president then told the protestor: “But ma’am, with all respect, one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing is because we want to make it more affordable for Americans to live.”
“That is one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing,” he added.
