Vice President JD Vance taught college students an important lesson on the problems associated with mass immigration at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi on Wednesday.
After delivering his prepared remarks with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk — emphasizing the importance of avoiding pointless foreign entanglements, securing America’s borders, and altogether prioritizing citizens — Vance respectfully gave a few students much-needed reality checks.
One of the questioners prefaced by noting that his girlfriend was studying in the country on a student visa, then asked Vance about his views on legal immigration.
‘My job as vice president is not to look out for the interests of the whole world.’
“Thanks in part to the Biden border invasion but also thanks in part to a lot of bad immigration policy, right now, we have let in too many immigrants into the United States of America,” Vance responded.
The Pew Research Center recently indicated that as of January 2025, there were 53.3 million immigrants living in the U.S. — the largest number ever recorded. Over 15% of all U.S. residents and 19% of the U.S. labor force were immigrants.
The vice president suggested that “the evidence is pretty clear” that a great many of the over 1 million migrants who legally enter the U.S. every year “are actually undercutting the wages of American workers,” and suggested that such wage suppression is what prompted President Donald Trump and his administration to encourage H-1B reform.
Vance indicated further that while the intended function of the H-1B visa is to attract and retain top talent from around the world, “what it’s actually used to do is hire an accountant at a 50% discount to an American citizen. I don’t think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we’ve got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.”
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Photo by Brad Vest/Getty Images
“We have got to get our overall numbers way, way down,” the vice president said, adding that the nation needs time to “build a sense of common identity” before admitting more people.
Vance’s remarks evidently vexed a young female student of apparent Indian origin in the crowd who used her time at the microphone to complain both about the vice president’s stated desire for his Hindu wife to one day join him in following Christ as well as his desire to taper the number of immigrants legally admitted into the United States.
“When you talk about too many immigrant [sic] here, what is — when did you guys decide that number? Why did you sell us a dream? You made us spend our youth, our wealth in this country and gave us a dream,” the woman said.
“How can you as a vice president stand there and say that ‘we have too many of them now, and we are going to take them out’ to people who are here, rightfully so?” she asked.
After clarifying that he was proposing greatly reducing the number of foreigner admissions in the future while honoring past promises to previous entrants, Vance stressed between interruptions from the woman that immigration policy should be adapted to the circumstances of the day.
“We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years ago binds the country inevitably for the future,” the vice president said. “There’s too many people who want to come to the United States of America, and my job as vice president is not to look out for the interests of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.”
While the questioner did not appear all too pleased with Vance’s America-first answer, the crowd burst into applause.
Before the conclusion of the event, the vice president told the crowd, “Despair is a sin. Do not give in to the sin of despair. Let’s keep fighting to save the United States of America.”
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