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WIKI——Vance on Immigration and border security

Vance has argued that failing to secure the United States’ southern border has fueled the US opioid epidemic by enabling illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the country, “orphaning an entire generation of kids”.

He is a critic of mass immigration, claiming that it drives down working-class Americans’ wages, increases house prices, and increases strain on social security. He opposes granting legal amnesty to illegal immigrants in the United States and argued that corporations use illegal immigration as a source of cheap labor to undercut the domestic American labor market.

Vance once admonished Trump for demonizing immigrants but has repeatedly called the effects of illegal immigration “dirty”. He has supported Trump’s proposal for a wall along the southern border and rejected the idea that advocates for the wall are racist. Vance has proposed spending $3 billion to finish Trump’s wall.

In 2022, Vance told Tucker Carlson that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” This led to Representative Tim Ryan’s allegations that Vance was endorsing the far-right, white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, according to which there is an effort to replace white Americans with immigrants. Ryan later lost to Vance in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Ohio.

During his 2022 campaign, Vance said that President Joe Biden was flooding Ohio with illegal drugs by not enforcing security at the southern border. The New York Times called the claim “blatantly false”, though other sources disagree.

In 2023, Vance introduced a bill that would make English the United States’ official language.