Vance’s Debate Performance: Nativist Lies for Authoritarian Ends

A look at the wall-to-wall nativist disinformation that made up Vance’s pitch to the nation

On Tuesday night, Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance tried to sell the nation a twisted nativist fantasy where all the problems facing working people in America could be solved with a massive purge of their immigrant neighbors and sealing off the country from future immigration. The reality of Vance’s fiction is an agenda that would be devastating for American families. When asked about the details and consequences of his signature policy proposal – mass deportation – he dodged the question. 

Vance’s delusional and dystopian vision may have been a more polished veneer compared to a rambling demagogue with a penchant for Nazi-style rhetoric, but his ability to articulate lies in a style slightly less reminiscent of a carnival barker doesn’t make them any more true or any less dangerous than when his boss tells those same lies. Vance made clear these nativist lies weren’t just about a cynical politics of fear and division but ones attached to an active hostility to American democracy.  

While the debate may be remembered by Vance’s laughable claim that Donald Trump peacefully turned over power in 2021, one of the biggest reveals of the debate was when Vance refused to answer the direct question from the moderator about his mass deportation agenda:

“Senator Vance, your campaign is pledging to carry out the largest mass deportation plan in American history and to use the U.S. military to do so. Could you be more specific about exactly how this will work? For example, would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?” 

Vance refused to answer the question. Instead, he offered the position of the Democrats, which is to prioritize deportation resources for those immigrants who have committed crimes. Three presidential ticket debates, three direct questions to the Republican candidates about their signature policy proposal, and three dodges. Quite a tell for how politically toxic their own agenda will be with the American people when the details come to light.

CBS anchor and debate moderator Margaret Brennan did reference a CBS/YouGov poll from June suggesting that there was majority support for mass deportation, but as we have repeatedly detailed, there is a lot more data to support Vance’s fear that he is campaigning on an agenda whose details are politically toxic.. America’s Voice internal polling found a similar result to a Marquette University poll that saw a 16-point flip (from 64% support to 48% support) when basic details of who their plan would target were added. 

The Trump-Vance mass deportation agenda would create a massive show-me-your-papers-force of the military and local police to conduct door-to-door neighborhood raids rounding up Dreamers and the parents of US citizen children, separating American families into detention camps for round-the-clock rapid deportations with little oversight that would most likely ensnare US citizens in the process. Vance may not want to talk about the details, but there is a plan, and a network of Trump allies is eager to carry it out if given the chance.   

A new report from the American Immigration Council also puts the Trump-Vance mass deportation plan into perspective, writing, “the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people.” Trump aide Stephen Miller wasn’t exaggerating when he bragged that their mass deportation agenda would be “greater than any national infrastructure project we've done to date.” The scale is hard to imagine, but Trump-Vance's mass deportation agenda seeks to create detention camps for separated American families in magnitudes greater than the mass incarceration system already in place. No wonder Vance is scared to get into the details of his signature agenda.    

Instead of owning the details of his mass American family separation agenda, Vance tried to muddy the waters with some nativist disinformation and a debunked claim about “lost” migrant children, absurdly accusing the Biden-Harris administration of implementing family separation. Another tell as Vance clearly understands just how toxic his family separation agenda is that he attempted to brand his opponent with his plan.  

When it came to addressing real challenges facing American families, Vance had no solutions, just nativist disinformation. True to the ticket, he employed strategic bigotry to masquerade as a serious policy proposal around affordable housing, wages, child care, the opioid overdose crisis, and gun deaths. Vance and Trump’s arguments crumble the moment they are introduced to reality. Vance's torrent of nativist lies have been widely debunked before he spewed them again last night, but it is worth highlighting that the mass deportation and immigrant scapegoating on offer would likely exacerbate the challenges they claim to address for working families.        

Unable to tout his ticket’s economic proposals benefitting fatcat donors and billion-dollar corporations as beneficial to working American families, Vance employed the tired tactic pitting immigrant workers against U.S.-born workers. 

Mass deportations will lower wages and cost jobs of U.S.-born workers. But Vance falsely asserted, “will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.” But the research has been clear: mass deportation is a kitchen table issue that would hurt U.S. workers in the pocketbook. Past mass deportations, such as those that took place under the Eisenhower administration, similarly promised U.S.-born workers improved opportunities but ended up having the opposite effect. “The employment of native-born Americans dropped — and their unemployment went up,” economist Michael Ettlinger wrote at The Boston Globe and Medium. “American workers ended up with worse jobs and, if anything, their wages were lower”:

As in the past, US-born workers would take a hit. Removing 7.5 million undocumented workers would slash the national hours worked by 3.6 percent. Removing half of Mexican workers would increase the unemployment rate for unskilled US workers by more than 1 percent and bump up the unemployment rate for skilled US workers by more than 0.5 percent. Inflation would rise — by as much as 3 percentage points — and tax collections would go down by $100 billion a year.

As critical industries, including construction and agriculture, would take a blow due to the mass deportation of millions of essential workers, businesses would be forced to shut down following mass raids while “hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs,” the American Immigration Council also said. “The idea that deportation helps US citizens has always been an illusion,” Ettlinger added. “It’s never worked before, and it wouldn’t work this time.”

When asked about plans to address the real challenges facing Americans, notably affordable housing, Vance again blamed immigrants for the problem. “You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we have brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance falsely claimed, alluding to the GOP’s bigoted conspiracy theory that immigrants are intentionally being brought into the U.S. by Democrats. No actual solutions here, just strategic bigotry. 

The research has been clear: the mass deportation plan that the Trump-Vance ticket seeks to implement would, in reality, exacerbate housing challenges facing Americans by increasing housing costs “given the outsized role of immigrants in construction labor,” said housing expert Dr. Carlos Martín. Rising housing costs is the logical consequence of deporting millions of essential construction workers. Roughly 2.2 million construction workers are immigrants, a historic high according to Census figures. In some portions of the American Southwest, “all work crews are immigrants,” Dr. Martín has noted. “This trend is even more pronounced in some hazardous occupations, like construction laborers, roofers, and drywallers.” 

As portions of the nation are also getting pummeled by natural disasters at great human and fiscal costs, it’s also immigrants who have historically helped with recovery efforts. In Florida, where Trump now resides, Resilience Force workers were instrumental in helping the state recover from Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Michael in 2018. Immigrant workers have been so essential to disaster recovery that a statue in New Orleans honors the Latino workers who helped rebuild the city following Hurricane Katrina. 

But following the passage of Florida’s anti-immigrant S.B. 1718, Resilience Force Executive Director Saket Soni revealed that more than half of the organization’s workers said they would not travel to Florida to aid in Hurricane Ian recovery. “They felt very fearful,” Soni told CNN. “No amount of money would be worth it if it meant they would be incarcerated or deported.”

Child care is another example of the far-reaching costs of Vance’s nativism. On the debate stage, Vance claimed that supposed revenues from his ticket’s proposed tariffs would allow a potential second Trump administration “to provide paid family leave, childcare options that are viable and workable for a lot of American families.” 

But not only do experts say that proposed tariffs would in reality hurt working families in the wallet, mass deportation would make it harder for them to access affordable and quality child care. “Child care services would cease to happen without immigrant child care workers,” New America said last year. Chris Herbst, professor of public policy at Arizona State University studying child care costs:

“Immigrants are absolutely essential to the functioning of the child care market. Immigrants comprise one out of every five child care workers nationally, so they make up 20 percent of the workforce. This is up from about 5 percent in 1980. And immigrants are much more important to the child care workforce than they are to the labor market generally. They're about 17 percent of the total workforce. And it's not going to surprise you that the immigrant composition of the childcare workforce is much higher in urban areas. So they make up about 44 percent of all New York City's childcare workers, 47 percent of all childcare workers in Los Angeles, and 25 percent of all childcare workers in Chicago.

Immigrant childcare workers are hidden in the sense that we don't have that many conversations about them, but they're so clearly important. The delivery of child care services would cease if it weren't for immigrant child care workers.”

Both on and off the debate stage, Vance has also suggested that another way to tackle the childcare crisis is to just have relatives babysit for free. But under a mass deportation and denaturalization agenda that promises to separate millions of American families and likely ensnare U.S. citizens if recent history is a guide, the risks will be high that a relative, such as an immigrant grandparent, may not be there anymore to help with sitting duties. “For all his talk, Vance didn’t vote for an expansion of the child tax credit last month,” Heather Chapman noted at Rural Organizing earlier this month.

Momentarily putting his racist fiction about Springfield aside, Vance dusted off the GOP’s pernicious lies about fentanyl, swapping out President Biden for Vice President Harris in a rehashing of his conspiracy theory that the Biden-Harris has intentionally allowed the drug into the country. Vice President Harris “let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels,” Vance falsely claimed on the debate stage, even alleging that unaccompanied minor children “have been used as drug trafficking mules.” 

Vance’s solution to the opioid crisis devastating communities in Ohio and across the nation? Falsely blame immigrants, calling for mass deportation and a useless and expensive border wall. Worse is his running mate’s violent and childish understanding of the complex issue calling for invading Mexico to combat the crisis, an idea that would dramatically exacerbate the problem and create an incalculable number of other problems for Americans, as Radley Balko noted in a recent piece.   

The facts are that the prevalence of synthetic fentanyl is a serious and urgent issue driving what had been up until this year the grim record-breaking number of overdose deaths in America – and harsh anti-immigrant crackdowns will do nothing to solve it because fentanyl is not an immigration issue. Law enforcement agencies and the facts on the ground agree that most or all the illicit drugs smuggled into the country enter alongside commercial traffic at legal points of entry. On a more fundamental level, interdiction of the supply of fentanyl will only go so far if we are unable to address the demand for this and other drugs.

Unfortunately, many politicians – like Vance – have cynically and relentlessly conflated immigration and fentanyl to exploit the real pain suffered throughout communities across America and infuse it with strategic racism in a cynical attempt to gain power. While Vance notably positioned himself as a “savior of the Rust Belt,” he turned the opioid epidemic “wrenchingly” described in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir into a political issue. Vance set up a non-profit, which he claimed would address the opioid issue, but instead hired one of his top political advisers and a physician who was a flak for Purdue Pharma, the entity most directly related to creating this crisis. As AP noted, Vance’s non-profit “was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.”

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration and the Justice Department have taken decisive action on this issue, including seizing massive amounts of fentanyl and disrupting the supply chain through a slew of criminal and economic actions “involved in the international proliferation of illicit drugs.”

An encouraging sign on the horizon: “U.S. overdose deaths plummet, saving thousands of lives,” NPR reports. “While most experts agreed that the data doesn't yet provide clear answers,” experts said the drug “may be harder to find and less pure in some areas because of law enforcement efforts targeting Mexican drug cartels.” 

On the deadly gun violence crisis that has taken lives of Americans in communities like Newton, Aurora, and El Paso – and even threatened the life of his running mate – Vance again pivoted to the southern border, falsely claiming that “thanks to Kamala Harris's open border, we've seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel.” But the data has been clear that the flow of guns has been from the United States into Mexico, which has fairly strict gun laws. Mexico even filed a lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers and gun dealers to stop the flow of their firearms into the country, part of which was dismissed in August. But, Mexico is still considering its legal options. As Reuters reported, “Mexico accused the gun manufacturers of undermining its strict gun laws by designing, marketing and distributing military-style assault weapons in ways they knew would arm drug cartels and fuel murders, extortions and kidnappings. The country said more than 500,000 guns are trafficked annually to Mexico from the United States, more than 68% of which are made by companies it sued.”

“The ATF says the Mexican trafficking organizations use straw purchasers in the United States to illegally purchase guns and ammo and pass them off to people to smuggle the weapons across state and international borders,” AZ Family reported in May. Peter Forcelli, a retired Deputy Assistant Director of the ATF said, “The reality is that firearms trafficking to Mexico is no longer just a border state thing.” 

Vance’s nativist lies are, unfortunately, nothing new. As Democratic candidate Tim Walz reminded viewers, highlighting Vance’s known racist lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.  “Now, Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he's very worried about the things that I've said in Springfield,” said Vance. He means the racist lies he knowingly told that predictably led to threats of violence in the small Ohio town and the Proud Boys and other neo-Nazis marching in the streets. Walz is right to be worried. But true to character, Vance continued to fan the flames of the violent, bigoted conspiracies he helped unleash.

The anti-immigrant fearmongering that is the cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy that Vacne again put on full display has failed to deliver in cycle after cycle. We have the receipts. More money (over half a billion dollars in TV ads alone) and more extreme rhetoric (fully embracing deadly white nationalist conspiracy theories) that has characterized their 2024 isn’t likely to produce a different result. While it may work with the radicalized MAGA base, the lying and far-fetched claims of the nativists may be working to undermine support with those on the right who are a bit Trump-skeptical.  

Maybe that is why Vance and the Republican Party are so committed to the Big Lie 2.0. While Vance avoided spreading the lie on the debate stage (when his boss Donald Trump did), it remains a core part of Vance’s stump speech. Vance also directly refused to refute the Big Lie 1.0 that Trump lost the election in 2020. “A damning non-answer,” as Walz noted. Vance also defended Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, making the absurd argument that Trump left office peacefully on the 20th after his deadly violent coup failed two weeks prior. However, his very presence on the stage, and not that of former Vice President Mike Pence, illustrates this point further – a replacement eagerly willing to undermine American democracy to fulfill the authoritarian designs of his boss.

Likely the debate itself will have very little effect on the election. However, it was a window into the type of administration Vance would lead. One built on bigoted lies and conspiracies that are designed to find scapegoats in the pursuit of power that is actively hostile to American democracy. With a torrent of bigoted lies, Vance told us exactly the sort of man that he is, and we should believe him.