J.D. Vance Says Immigrants Will ‘Bankrupt’ the Federal Government. The Opposite Is True.
Hours before he cast the tie-breaking vote on a major tax and spending bill in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to reframe the debate over the legislation.
Instead of thinking about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) as a matter of fiscal policy that’s primarily aimed at extending the 2017 personal income tax cuts, Vance said lawmakers should see it as a crucial piece of the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement efforts.
The fiscal policy debate—including big details like how much the bill adds to the deficit and how Republicans are trying to hide those consequences—is “immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vance wrote on X. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass.”
Vance’s claim is factually wrong—more on that in just a moment—but it is also telling.
The debate over the OBBBA has revealed (once again) that the uniting principle in Republican politics is not fiscal responsibility. The bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday afternoon, with Vance as the tie-breaking vote, will add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. It is not, under any circumstances, a fiscally responsible piece of legislation.
Instead, the fulcrum for conservative politics is—and for quite some time has been, even before Vance and President Donald Trump rose to prominence—immigration. If you want to keep the GOP coalition together for a tough vote, it makes more sense to pitch the bill as an immigration measure.
Vance understands this. He also understands that the facts don’t really matter when conservatives are talking about immigration within their own
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