Vice President JD Vance skirmished with a heckler during a speech Monday in which he claimed that expelling undocumented immigrants would bring down housing prices.
Vance was addressing the National League of Cities in Washington, D.C. when a woman in the audience began shouting her objections.
“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 citizens unaffordable,” Vance snapped back, to a mixture of boos and claps.
“But ma’am, with all respect, one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing is because we want to make it more affordable for Americans to live.”
The clash erupted as the Trump administration is stepping up its plans to deport “millions” of people, roughly doubling daily immigration arrests from their level under Joe Biden.
The round-ups have caught not only undocumented immigrants with no criminal charges but also U.S. citizens, native Americans, and a Palestinian student who protested against Israel, with detainees warehoused in foreign hotels and even, briefly, Guantanamo Bay.
Reports suggest that the administration may also revoke the immigration status of so-called DREAMers — people brought to the country by their parents as babies or children who essentially grew up in America — and roughly 875,000 people from troubled countries such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Haiti who are here on humanitarian status.
Though Vance claimed that deportation efforts were partly motivated by a desire to bring down housing prices for American citizens, the link between immigration and housing costs is disputed by experts.
“Local zoning regulations, the cost of energy. These things are about the supply of housing: how do we get more supply of houses out there to be built?” said Vance, according to footage from the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network (the heckler’s remarks were inaudible).
“But when we talk about housing and why costs are so high, we don’t talk enough about demand. And 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 …”
He added: “Just think about this: If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the costs 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.”
Most estimates put the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. at around 11 million to 14 million, although one report has claimed it could be as high as 17 million.
