VP Vance asks local leaders to comply with immigration laws, gets pushback

Vice President JD Vance spoke to thousands of local government leaders at the National League of Cities conference in Washington, D.C., Monday afternoon, where he called on them to follow new federal law aimed at curbing illegal immigration.

Vance began his speech by addressing the current American housing crisis, citing a study that showed house sale levels to be the lowest in 30 years.

“The average income it takes to buy a new house is nearly two times the average salary of your typical American family — not the average American worker, but the combined incomes of a husband and wife," Vance said.

This finding coincides with over three-quarters of Americans who believe housing affordability is a pressing and growing issue, per a survey by Data for Progress.

While Vance said some of this cost can be reduced by slashing unnecessary regulatory fees at the local level, since these fees account for over 20% of the cost of a new home, he believes the most effective way the U.S. could reduce housing costs would be to decrease demand.

Vance on how to decrease housing demand

“While we’ve made it a little hard to build homes in this country for the last four years, we’ve also unfortunately made it too easy for people to compete with American citizens for the precious homes that are in the country to begin with,” Vance said.

He continued, “If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you’re going to have a large and frankly completely preventable spike in the demand for housing.”

Vance then referenced a recent trip he’d taken to the southern border and described a conversation he’d had with local border patrol in Eagle Pass, Texas.

“They told me in just a matter of weeks their small border had gone from 1,500 daily encounters to less than 30,” Vance said.

The mayor of Eagle Pass told Vance that a high influx of illegal immigrants was “incredibly stressful” on the town’s local resources, hospitals and schools.

The U.S. housing crisis vs other countries with mass immigration

Vance then compared the U.S. housing crisis to other countries that allow mass immigration. “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,” he said.

This statement was met by yelling in the audience from a woman later identified as Mary Lupien, a city council member in Rochester. Vance addressed Lupien, saying, “I see one of our nice representatives out here wants to actually continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, making your communities unaffordable. But ma’am, with all respect, one of the reasons we’re doing what we’re doing is because we want to make it more affordable for Americans to live.”

Vance referenced a similar housing crisis in the U.K., which Matthew Goodwin, a British political commentator, described in an article for The Spectator.

In 2022, the British government set a goal to build 300,000 homes, and by the time 2023 rolled around, they’d built a little over 204,000. While they were close to the target, Goodwin wrote that Britain experienced a net in-migration rate of 745,000.

“We should be able to talk about how immigration is fueling the housing crisis, driving up house prices and making many homes unaffordable for British families and British workers,” Goodwin said.

Vance echoed Goodwin’s call to have open and honest conversations about all aspects of immigration.

“The reason why we care about border security is because we want your communities to be safer, we want them to be more affordable, we want there to be less drugs in our country, and we want your citizens to live the American dream,” Vance said. “It is the birthright of every single one of our citizens, and we’re going to fight for it every single day.”

Vance tells local leaders to respect and follow federal law

Vance acknowledged the wide range of opinions sitting in his audience and encouraged local leaders to voice their concerns over federal policy by reaching out to state and federal lawmakers.

Then he added, “While we have immigration laws in the books, we will enforce them, and expect our local municipalities to help us.”

“It is not up to local cities to choose which federal laws they’re going to enforce,” he continued. “We can’t do immigration enforcement with sanctuary cities. We’ve got to have everybody respecting the law, and that is going to be one of the major policy focuses of the Trump administration.”