Illegal immigration raises demand for housing, which increases costs for American citizens, Vice President JD Vance said Monday.
And when Americans can own houses, they are stakeholders in the nation, which makes them better citizens, he said.
“We want our citizens to feel that investment in their own country, and it’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard to feel that investment if you feel like you can’t even own a slice of it, even if that’s what you want to do.”
Vance addressed a bipartisan audience of local leaders who traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the National League of Cities’ Congressional City Conference this week.
“But when we talk about housing and why costs are so high, we don’t talk enough about demand,” he said. “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, and that’s something we have to work on if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing, too.”
Housing is a top financial concern for Americans, according to a May 2024 Gallup poll. Some experts worried that because Trump didn’t mention the housing crisis in his joint address to Congress last Tuesday, it is no longer a priority for him, but Vance’s speech sought to put those concerns to rest.
“Now the Trump administration has taken important steps to make building cheaper and to boost the supply of housing,” Vance said. “Of course, it’s going to take time, but this is a Day One issue for our entire team, from the president on down.”
Vance discussed “slashing needless regulations” that stand in the way of building new homes. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner is working to cut Biden administration rules responsible for high costs, the vice president said.
Many of the local leaders in the audience are also responsible for high housing costs, due to allowing illegal immigrants to increase demand for homes, Vance said.
“The reason why we care about border security is because we want your communities to be safer,” he said. “We want them want them to be more affordable. We want there to be less drugs in our country, and we want your citizens to be able to live the American dream. It is the birthright of every single one of our citizens, and we’re going to fight for it every single day.”
He told local leaders that while they can disagree with the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration laws, local municipalities will be expected to help as long as those laws are on the books.
“It will be the policy of the Trump administration to enforce the nation’s laws, and it will be the policy of the Trump administration to say that it is not up to local cities to choose which federal laws that they’re going to enforce,” he said.
“We’ve got to have everybody respecting the law, and that is going to be one of the major policy focuses, of course, of the Trump administration, and it already has been,” he continued.
Vance attempted to unite his audience around helping blue-collar Americans, urban and rural, afford to buy a home and raise their children in a safe area.
“With all respect for policy disagreements, 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,” he said.
