DOG WHISTLE

J.D. Vance Conflates Foreign-Born Workers with ‘Illegal Immigrants’ to Bash Job Numbers

The GOP senator from Ohio seemed not to realize that foreign-born workers can also include U.S. citizens.

The March jobs report may have exceeded economists’ expectations, but because some jobs went to migrants, it inevitably became Fox News fodder for Maria Bartiromo and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).

Vance appeared on Sunday Morning Futures on Sunday, where he railed at the idea that “foreign-born” workers are taking “a lot of that net job growth” from Americans. He then said, in the same breath, it was a “disgraceful commentary” that President Joe Biden could commend an economy that was benefiting “illegal immigrants more than American citizens.”

“That is just astounding, Senator,” Bartiromo told Vance. Bartiromo did not push back on Vance’s equation of foreign-born people—which could include U.S. citizens through naturalization, legal migrants, foreign students, and refugees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau— to undocumented immigrants.

Vance’s statement moves slightly away from his declaration in a Fox News interview last month that foreign-born workers accounted for “100% of net job creation under the Biden administration.” That statement was labeled “mostly false” by the fact-checking website Politifact because it lacked important context and relied on a data set that began before Biden took office.

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Corbin BoliesMedia Reporter

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