JD Vance says mass deportation plan will encourage businesses to hire millions of US workers who have dropped out of labor force

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance argued for mass deportation of those in the country illegally during a sit-down interview with the New York Times that was released on Saturday, saying that the deportation of illegal immigrants will pressure US businesses to hire Americans who are outside the labor force. 

Vance had been arguing in favor of the deportation of those in the country illegally, when New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed him, asking him how the deportation of illegal immigrants would impact the construction industry.

“About a third of the construction work force in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?” the reporter asked.

Vance responded sarcastically, “I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses. But, of course they did.” Vance continued when she pushed back again, suggesting that American workers would not take construction jobs if immigrants were deported. 

The Ohio senator commented, “I think that what you would do is you would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women, but still millions of women, prime age, who have dropped out of the labor force. You absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market.”

Navarro-Garcia then cited the unemployment rate, which is at around four percent, suggesting that the jobs left vacant by those deported would not get filled. However, the unemployment rate does not include discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force, which has an impact on what is known as the labor force participation rate. The rate was 63.3 percent in February 2020, right before COVID, but it has not fully recovered under the Biden-Harris administration. 

Vance focused on this point: “The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts. And again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force.”

“People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages,” he added.

The GOP vice-presidential candidate balked at the idea that Americans were not willing to work in construction, then added, “We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’s border policies. I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.”