Everyone knows the Republican Party has strong feelings about illegal immigration. For years, GOP leaders have said that stopping people from crossing the border illegally is crucial for the country. But what many people miss is that some Republican leaders also have problems with legal immigration too.
According to MSNBC, Vice President JD Vance has been talking more about this lately. Back in May, he sat down with a New York Times writer named Ross Douthat. During their chat, Vance talked about how he thinks immigrants hurt what he called “social solidarity.” He said he worries about “social cohesion” and that new people coming to America somehow make things worse by being different. But he never really explained what he meant by that.
Just recently, Vance spoke at an event at the University of Mississippi put together by Turning Point USA. A student asked him about legal immigration, and his answer was pretty clear. He said, “We have to get the overall numbers way, way down.” When someone pushed him to give an actual number, he wouldn’t say exactly how many immigrants should be allowed in. He just said it should be “far less than what we’ve been accepting.”
This reasoning has been used before
At that same event, Vance said America hasn’t done a good job creating “a sense of common identity” with people who have recently arrived. Because of that, he thinks the country needs to be really careful about letting in more immigrants at all.
Around the same time, a podcast interview came out where Vance talked with Miranda Devine from the New York Post. In that conversation, he basically said he doesn’t believe in the old idea of America as a melting pot. He thinks Americans should be able to pick who lives near them based on what they have in common.
“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers,'” Vance said in the interview. He then said the immigration system that let this happen was “a real, real disgrace.”
A history professor at Princeton University named Kevin Kruse saw these comments and pointed something out on social media. He said Vance was using the exact same kind of thinking that segregationists used back in the day. Vance has faced criticism before for his controversial statements, including when he mocked a NYC mayoral candidate’s emotional 9/11 story. Those segregationists argued that white people had a right to not live near people who were different from them.
A lot of people who follow politics like to say that Republicans only have a problem with illegal immigration. They say the party supports people who come here the right way and follow all the rules. But what Vance is saying now shows that’s not really the whole picture. His comments make it clear that some Republicans have issues with all immigration, not just the illegal kind. The vice president has drawn backlash in the past for mocking critics, and these latest remarks continue that pattern.
Published: Oct 30, 2025 04:00 pm