For all his talk of being a family man, JD Vance went out of his way Tuesday to put a target on the backs of children during a speech in Detroit. But they’re the children of immigrants, so why would he care?
Vance was speaking about undocumented immigrants when he turned his attention specifically to school-age children.
“The other thing that is crazy about the border is that in the state of Michigan—I didn’t know this statistic until today—there are 85,000 students in Michigan public schools who are the children of illegal aliens,” Vance claimed.
“Eighty-five thousand. Now think about that. Think about what it does to a poor schoolteacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”
Here, Vance seems to have widened his net beyond targeting undocumented immigrant children, a plainly heinous rhetorical step in itself, to children who may very well be U.S. citizens by nature of being born here. It’s also worth noting that Vance has a penchant for falsely describing immigrants with protected legal status as “illegal,” so it’s unclear whom exactly he would include in this statistic.
It’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” from, but when contextualizing this number, whatever its validity, things don’t quite seem to add up.
In 2022, 1,433,914 students were enrolled in Michigan public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means that Vance is claiming that roughly 5 percent of all students in the state are such a gross drain on resources that it has somehow diminished the quality of education for the other 95 percent. Perhaps Vance is right to be concerned about the waning quality of American education.
Vance’s blatant scapegoating makes no sense because it is not built on real concerns about the quality of education, or the “poor” teachers who might struggle to meet the needs of the classroom because of a lack of education funding. Rather, his claim is built on making racist distinctions between who “deserves” to have access to education and who should be kicked out as a cheap shot for votes in a battleground state.
“Look, I think we’re a great country, we can be compassionate, and we ought to be compassionate, but our compassion has to start with our fellow citizens, the people that deserve to be in the United States to begin with,” Vance said.
The Ohio senator touted Donald Trump’s plan for the largest mass deportations in the history of the United States as “the best way to be compassionate.”
Vance has previously invoked compassion as a quasi-religious justification for the blatantly bigoted immigration policies. Neither of Vance’s rhetorical lines are particularly new for the Trump campaign, which has repeatedly stressed the strain influxes of immigration can have on schools. But this goes to show how the Republican ticket has normalized rhetoric that targets the most vulnerable in our society.
Last month, Trump made a similar comment about non-English-speaking students in schools in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which was promptly debunked by the Charleroi school district superintendent. In fact, reimbursement from the Department of Education had actually increased as student enrollment increased—the very same Department of Education Trump hopes to dismantle.
Vance’s reckless targeting of school-age children and teenagers also happens to be in a state with the largest populations of Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants.
