One of the best moments from now-Vice President-elect JD Vance came back before the November 5, 2024 election, when he sat down for an interview with New York Times (NYT) journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro and brilliantly shot down her claims. An underreported and still very relevant moment from the interview, however, came when then-Sen. Vance noted the ridiculousness of America’s unemployment rate statistics.
Namely, when Garcia-Navarro argued that deportation can’t happen because America already has such a low unemployment rate, meaning there would be too few people to make the economy work, Vance noted that the unemployment rate statistic doesn’t cover the issue of people dropping out of the labor force entirely.
X personality Collin Rugg, describing how that came up and what happened, introduced the moment by saying, “NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro sits in silence as JD Vance educates her on the labor force participation rate relating to illegal immigration. Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can’t be deported because America needs them for jobs. She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.”
Vance, commenting on the labor force participation rate, which has been quite low in America since the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, isn’t included in the unemployment rate, even when healthy people who could work have just dropped out entirely from the workforce. He said, “The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.”
Continuing, he noted that it is absurd to think that certain jobs can only be done by illegal immigrants, indicating that part of the problem comes from thinking that those who have dropped out of the labor force wouldn’t come back into it if wages rose. He said, “This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, ‘we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'”
Noting the scope of that participation in the labor force issue, Vance then argued that some people need to get back into it. He said, “We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force. Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.”
He further argued that the idea business has to just replace those people with imported workers is a major problem, saying, “We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’ border policies. I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality.”
Connecting that to the causes of the labor force participation issue, he said, “It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who’s gonna work under the table for poverty wages?” He added, “It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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