The Houses Will Rot in the Fields…

Senator JD Vance’s conversation with the New York Times’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro is getting much-deserved attention, particularly for their exchange on illegal immigrants and construction jobs. Garcia-Navarro asks:

…about a third of the construction work force in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?

One can imagine the field day that Times fact-checkers would have if Vance had jumped from the fact that a third of the construction workforce is Hispanic to a conclusion that deporting illegal immigrant means “removing all the people who are working in construction,” but I digress. Vance responds:

Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses. But, of course they did. And I’m being sarcastic in service of a point, Lulu: the assumption that because a large number of homebuilders now are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again betrays a fundamental…

The reporter cuts Vance off here with a non-sequitur, an inaccuracy, and an evasion:

The country is much bigger. The need is much bigger. I’m not arguing in favor of illegal immigration.

The size of the country is, of course, entirely irrelevant. Does a bigger country have greater need? Not relative to the size of its potential construction workforce. But more importantly, the need is not greater. Declining rates of fertility and family formation mean that we have fewer young people emerging into adulthood and needing housing than we used to, arguably in absolute terms, certainly relative to the size of the workforce. That is, until you count… immigration. So no, there’s nothing about the nation’s pre-mass-immigration economic model that could not work in today’s “bigger” country.

But don’t worry, she’s not arguing in favor of illegal immigration. She’s just not not rejecting arguments against it… I think? At least that’s how it seems, as she continues:

I’m asking how you would deal with the knock-on effect of your proposal to remove millions of people who work in a critical part of the economy.

Vance suggests in response that we could reengage the millions of prime-age workers who have dropped out of the labor force, leading to an incoherent and innumerate word salad from Garcia-Navarro:

I mean, the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent.

[The unemployment rate does not count labor-force dropouts, as Vance explains to her.]

Most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy. They’re in the military…

[Labor-force participation and employment data is specifically for civilians.]

…they’re parents…

[Families are much more likely to have both parents working than in the past.]

…they’re sick, they’re old…

[Vance specified “prime-age” workers, which means those age 25 to 54.]

They might not want to work in construction.

Ah, now we’ve gotten to the nub of the matter. Apparently, the logic of “jobs Americans won’t do” has moved from picking lettuce to building houses. Vance’s response is worth reading in full:

This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages.

Think about the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them re-engaged in American society. 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’s border policies.

I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why try to re-engage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who’s going to work under the table for poverty wages? It is a disgrace, and it has led to the evisceration of the American middle class.

You will be unsurprised to learn that our intrepid Times reporter moves on at this point to a new topic. But not me! I’d like to stay on this one a bit longer. Indeed, you may have noticed we spend a lot of time here at Understanding America on the way Senator Vance answers questions—on tariffs, on immigration, on worker power, on family policy. That’s because he provides the best evidence to date of how it will look when political leaders make a full-throated case for conservative economics. What we keep seeing is, it looks quite good.