Vice President JD Vance said Monday that politicians at the local, state, and federal levels must “be honest” about the role mass immigration plays in driving up housing costs for Americans.
Aside from inflation, zoning laws, and energy costs, Vance said importing millions of migrants from around the world every year has played a significant role in making homes even more unaffordable for working- and middle-class Americans.
“One of the drivers of increased housing demand, we know, is that we’ve got a lot of people over the last four years who have come into the country illegally, and that’s something we have to work on if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing too,” Vance told the audience of local officials at the National League of Cities’ Congressional City Conference.
Vance said:
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. [Emphasis added]
Now, I’ll say this, it’s actually not just an American problem either. If you go to Canada, where, because of their laws and regulations, they’ve seen a massive increase in the number of people who have come into their country; you go to the United Kingdom; you go across the world, and 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.
[Emphasis added]
Indeed, housing costs became so out of control for Canadians last year as a result of mass immigration that Canada’s Justin Trudeau announced he would cut immigration levels to alleviate such burdens on his people.
At one point, a woman in the audience shouted at Vance as he was speaking, to which he responded, “I see one of our nice representatives out here wants to actually, I guess, continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, making your communities and — and citizens unaffordable.”
Vance said it is often those who earn the lowest of incomes who are devastated by unchecked levels of immigration to the United States.
“We know from economists that blue-collar folks are often those who face the biggest cuts in wages and in services when you have communities overwhelmed by illegal immigration,” Vance said.
Research from the Center for Immigration Studies has shown that a 5-percentage point increase in the immigrant share of a metro area’s population is linked to a 12-percent increase in the average American’s rent.
“I think that one thing that unites us in this room is that we want to give our blue-collar people in the United States of America a shot at the American dream again,” Vance said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.