JD Vance revived his anti-immigrant rhetoric during Thursday night’s NewsNation town hall with Chris Cuomo in Michigan, suggesting that “25 million illegal aliens” are taking homes that “should go to American citizens.” He also made sure to blame vice president Kamala Harris for everything wrong with the housing market and the economy.
The former CNN host kicked off the discussion, which was also streamed live on X, by asking Vance what he and running mate Donald Trump would do to lower housing prices. Vance said that there are simply not enough homes being built, a statement he believed Democrats would agree with.
“What I’m going to say about the demand problem is a little bit more controversial, but I think it’s just as important, which is that when you let 25 million illegal aliens — I think that’s the number that we have in our country right now — well, you’ve got to put them somewhere, right?” he posed. “And that means that those homes aren’t going to American citizens.”
The “Hillbilly Elegy” author then blamed “the highest levels of immigration, basically in our history,” due to “Kamala Harris’ open border,” although he didn’t specifically mention Haitian immigrants as the source of the problem as he did during his VP debate with Tim Walz.
“We’ve got to build more houses and we got to make sure those houses go to American citizens, people who have the legal right to be here,” he noted.
Cuomo did, however, point out, “Many analysts will say that’s not what’s driving the demand problem. The demand problem is interest rates pricing people out and wages not coming up enough.”
Vance then slammed “electric vehicles manufactured in China” for impacting “the types of auto jobs that have actually powered the Michigan economy for the last nearly 100 years.”
Vance, who turned 40 in August, also may have been trying to appeal to his age group when he said, “I’m the first millennial on a major party ticket. It’s actually funny, because I used to complain about the fact that I turned 40 after Donald Trump made me his vice presidential nominee. And then people would come up to me and say, ‘I just turned 60, or I just turned 70, stop complaining about turning 40.’ So I stopped doing that.”
He then pivoted to the issue of people in his generation “delaying having families” because of the prohibitive cost of housing and modern life in general.
Vance also took a question from an audience member about reducing the cost of childcare. The candidate admitted there should be more paid leave for mothers and fathers, before stating, “The childcare regime that we have in this country basically tries to force a one-size-fits-all model on the entire country.”
He suggested that more grandparents, aunts, uncles or members of the local church community could be sitting children instead, implying that they would be doing so for free. Except, as he noted, “Under Kamala Harris’ inflation they just can’t afford to make ends meet unless they go and take a job.”
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