Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have a story to sell you: Amid a scramble for housing in the United States, the real problem is the presence of immigrants.

Americans “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” Trump argued at the Economic Club of New York’s luncheon in September. Vance has made this argument even more fervently—on X, in recent interviews, and in other venues. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance declared that “25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” adding, “It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal-alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”

Key elements of this story are false. For one thing, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is. Furthermore, when the economist Ernie Tedeschi compared places that experienced a surge in foreign-born populations with places that saw large increases in housing prices for native-born Americans, he couldn’t even find a simple . But Trump and Vance correctly understand one thing: Making the American public believe that immigrants are drawing down limited resources is an effective way of bringing out illiberal sentiments that could fuel the GOP ticket’s victory.