JD Vance tells TPUSA crowd at Ole Miss ‘we have got to become a common community again’

After doing just that, touching on Charlie Kirk's legacy, he took questions from the crowd, in the of tradition Kirk. Many of those questions were about immigration, both legal and illegal. Vance stuck by the Trump administration's efforts to quell and reverse illegal immigration.

Ahead of taking questions, Vance addressed the issue, saying "Why do I care so much about having a secure border in the United States of America? It's because I believe that when you let in a flood of illegal immigration, what it does is it drives down the wages of young people and makes housing unaffordable for the entire American population. That's why we closed down the border."

When he was asked about legal immigration, Vance said that the United States has "let in too many immigrants" and that in some respects those immigrants are undercutting American wages. He went on to say "We don't even know how many illegal aliens we have..." estimating between 25-50 million.

"When something like that happens, you've got to allow your own society to cohere a little bit, to build a sense of common identity for all the newcomers to assimilate—the ones who are going to stay—to assimilate into American culture. Until you do that, you've got to be careful about any additional immigration, in my view."

A woman who said she was an immigrant, who had come to the US to study, was clearly angry over questions of immigration. "When you talk about too many immigrants here," she asked, "when did you guys decide that number? Why did you sell us a dream?

"You made us, spend our youth, our wealth in this country, and gave us a dream. You don't owe us anything. We have worked hard for it. Then how can you as a vice president stand there and say that we have too many of them now, and we are going to take them out to people who are here rightfully so by paying the money that you guys asked us, you gave us the path. And now, how can you stop it and tell us we don't belong here anymore?"

In response, Vance said "I believe that we should have lower immigration levels, but if the United States passed a law and made a promise to somebody, the United States, of course, has to honor that promise. Nobody's talking about that. I'm talking about people who came in, in violation of the laws of the United States of America. And I'm talking about, in the future, reducing the number, reducing the number of people."

Vance said that there are too many people who want to come to the US and that this desire on the part of others does not create an obligation on behalf of the nation. "My job as Vice President is not to look out for the interest of the whole world, it's to look out for the people of the United States."

His final point about immigration in this question was a history lesson. "If you ask the question, what is the exact right number of immigrants for the United States to let in, it is just very specific on the context.

"If you go back to the 1920s, the United States passed an immigration reform act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country. And what happened over those 40 years? The many, many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture, and there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture."