JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who rose to fame detailing his Appalachian roots in a best-selling memoir, has made appeals to working-class and middle-class voters a core tenet of his campaign messaging.
In rallies and interviews, Mr. Vance has sought to portray the Republican ticket as a champion of everyday people, first-time home buyers and autoworkers by misleadingly describing Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions on housing, trade and manufacturing.
Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.
What Was Said
“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”
— in a local news interview in August
This is exaggerated. Economists and real estate experts say that while migration, including illegal immigration, has contributed to population growth and thus demand for housing, it is not a main driver of the country’s housing affordability crisis. A lack of supply is the primary culprit, they said.
Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Mr. Vance’s claim “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.”
After the Great Recession, the number of new homes built annually plummeted and never really recovered in the two decades that followed. As a result, researchers and real estate firms now estimate a nationwide shortage of 1.5 million to seven million housing units.
It is also worth noting that a housing shortage would still exist even without the unauthorized immigrants who arrived under the Biden-Harris administration and settled in the United States to “compete with Americans for scarce homes.” And that number is nowhere close to 20 million, as Mr. Vance claimed.
According to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about 800,000 more unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States in 2022 than in 2019. Two groups that advocate lower levels of migration and stricter border security pinned the number at 2.3 million to 2.5 million more unauthorized immigrants in 2023 than in 2020.
It is difficult to estimate the exact impact of these migrants on housing demand, because they are more likely to rent than purchase housing, and may live with relatives or in larger households. Moreover, more than two-thirds of households with an unauthorized migrant also include others who are American-born or lawful immigrants.
But by a crude estimate, a population of 800,000 to 2.5 million equates to roughly 270,000 to 830,000 households given that the average foreign-born household has three people. In other words, even without these immigrants, there would still be a housing shortage of hundreds of thousands to more than six million units.
Population growth — which includes immigration, but also mortality and fertility rates — does increase demand for housing, said Albert Saiz, a professor of urban economics and real estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he said supply-side issues like a decade-long trend of decreased building activity have been more consequential for prices.
“There are many reasons why we have an affordability crisis, and immigration is probably not even close to the most important one,” he added.
Those include relatively smaller gains in construction productivity, NIMBYism (short for “Not in my backyard,” the reluctance by some residents to accept development), barriers to construction in cities like zoning laws and shrinking household sizes.
To Mr. Vance’s point, researchers have found that an increase in net migration does increase the cost of housing. Mr. Saiz, in a 2006 paper, estimated that an immigration inflow equal to 1 percent of a city’s population is associated with a 1 percent increase in rents and housing values. A recent working paper found a greater impact.
But Mr. Saiz cautioned that the effects were largely localized. For example, Venezuelans — who make up a significant portion of recent migrants at the southern border — settling in New York or San Francisco may contribute to increased rent prices in those cities, especially since it is more difficult to build new housing there. But they would have little impact on house prices nationally, Mr. Saiz said.
Jacob Vigdor, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington, estimated in 2013 that every immigrant moving to a county raises housing prices in that county by 11.5 cents. Adjusted for inflation, that is equivalent to about 17 cents today.
“There is an impact of the current immigration wave on housing prices, but it’s on the order of a few hundred dollars. If you want to tell the story of why the median house price in King County, Wash., is nearing $1 million, immigration is a very minor part of the story,” he said.
Mr. Vigdor estimated that the 500,000 Venezuelan migrants who have settled in Houston, for example, have added about $8,500 to the median value of a home in Harris County, Texas. That accounts for less than 10 percent of the escalation in the county’s median home value over the past five years, he said.
What Was Said
“This is the woman who voted to preserve NAFTA, to extend NAFTA.”
— at a campaign rally in Michigan in August
This is misleading. The Senate passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. At the time, Ms. Harris was a local prosecutor in California and would not be elected to the U.S. Senate until 2016, more than two decades later.
Mr. Vance was most likely referring to her 2020 vote against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal that updated NAFTA. Ms. Harris argued in January 2020 that the deal did not do enough to tackle climate change and said the senators should “learn from the mistakes of past trade deals.”
“We can do better,” she wrote on social media, announcing her opposition to the deal.
Mr. Vance cast her vote against the new trade deal as supporting NAFTA, but it is also possible to oppose both.
Ms. Harris said in 2019 that she would not have voted for NAFTA, and during her 2016 campaign for the Senate she also opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a large regional trade deal that Donald J. Trump also resisted.
Of the nine other senators who voted against the revised trade agreement in 2020, four were serving in Congress in 1993 and three — Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Chuck Schumer of New York and Jack Reed of Rhode Island — voted against NAFTA.
In his statement opposing the revised agreement, Mr. Sanders said that it “must be rewritten” and asked the Trump administration to go “back to the drawing board.”
What Was Said
“Kamala Harris wants to further entrench the E.V. mandate that sends your tax dollars to China instead of buying American-made cars from American workers.”
— at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday
This is misleading. Mr. Vance was most likely referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate change law signed by President Biden in 2022. The law does not impose a nationwide electric vehicle mandate, but it does provide tax credits for E.V.s and subsidies to domestic manufacturers. While Mr. Vance has a point that China dominates the electric vehicle industry, the law seeks to reduce reliance on Chinese imports and encourage consumers to purchase “American-made cars from American workers.”
The Inflation Reduction Act offers tax credits for electric vehicles that meet certain requirements on where the cars are assembled and where parts and materials are sourced. To qualify last year, at least 50 percent of a car’s battery and 40 percent of critical minerals — like lithium, nickel and cobalt — used in that battery had to come from the United States or from countries that have free-trade agreements with the United States. Those percentages will increase to 80 percent by 2027 and 100 percent by 2029.
Regulations completed in May also stipulate that cars containing battery components sourced from China or any other “foreign entity of concern” would not be eligible for tax credits in 2024, nor would cars containing critical minerals from those countries in 2025.
The Biden-Harris administration additionally imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in May.
Whether this mix of incentives and restrictions will work remains to be seen, but the intention is clear: discouraging consumers from buying Chinese-made electric vehicles and opting for American-made cars instead.
John Bozzella, the president and chief executive of the trade group Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote in a 2023 blog post that it supported the two auto-related goals of the law: supporting a transition to electric vehicles through tax incentives and localizing automotive supply chains, including battery production, “from China to the U.S. and our allies.”
Executives in the car industry have warned that repealing the electric vehicle provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, as Mr. Trump has suggested, would make the United States less competitive with China, the industry publication Automotive News reported.
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