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Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that a surge in illegal immigration, combined with years of sluggish home construction, has pushed housing prices to levels that many Americans can no longer afford. Vance made the comments during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
âA lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive,â Vance said. âWhy is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants. Theyâre taking houses that ought to go to American citizens,â Vance said. And at the same time, we werenât building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had. What weâre doing is trying to make it easier to build houses, trying to make it easier to build factories and things like that so that people have good jobs.â
Vance said the influx strained the housing supply at the same time builders were already failing to keep pace with demand.
âWeâre also getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country, and youâre already seeing it start to pay dividends. Working peopleâs wages are going up, and thatâs how we ultimately chip away at the Biden affordability crisis. We make an economy where people can afford to buy the things that they need. The best way to do that is good jobs and good wages,â Vance added.
âAnd thatâs why the presidentâs focus is where it is. Under the Biden administration, the price of a new home literally doubled in four years. It went up 100 percent. Under the Trump administration, housing and rent prices are up about 1 to 2 percent â actually in line with what you would like to see,â Vance argued.
Vance said the administration believes the country needs to construct several million additional homes to stabilize the market.
âWe probably need to build about 5 million new homes,â he told Hannity.
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The vice president said Republican-led states are meeting housing needs more effectively than Democratic states.
âOne of the biggest challenges that we have in the housing market, aside from too many illegal aliens who are taking the houses of American citizens, is that in the blue states, youâre not building enough houses,â Vance said.
âNo robot can replace a great blue-collar construction worker,â Vance said.
âBut can a robot maybe make it easier for a construction worker to put more nails in more walls over a shorter period of time â some of the rote things? Youâre going to see robotics help the construction workers.â
Vance said improved technology, more construction, and stronger wage growth will help more Americans buy homes and start families.
âWe will do a lot over the next three years and three months to make sure more people can buy homes,â he said.
âYoung people can start families, and weâve got good jobs putting people on a career trajectory.â
He said economic stagnation under the previous administration trapped workers in low-paying jobs with no path upward.
âThe biggest problem in the Biden economy was that people couldnât build a career out of a job,â Vance said.
âYou had fourteen or fifteen dollars an hour with no promise to make more.â
âThatâs not how you build a middle-class American dream,â he said.
âThatâs how you build debt servants.â
