JD Vance Was Right: Cheap Foreign Labor Is an “Addiction”
April 10, 2025
Pawel Styrna
The recent panic over tariffs that President Trump imposed has laid bare our dependence on international supply chains and cheap foreign labor. While FAIR does not comment on trade policy, mass migration is connected with it in the context of globalist ideology and its elevation of the “free movement of goods, capital, and people” to the status of a religious-like dogma. As a result, for several decades now, American workers have been ground between the millstones of cheap foreign labor in the form of both outsourcing our industries and importing wage and job competition through mass migration, both legal and illegal. In a speech last month, Vice President JD Vance addressed this dependence, referring to it as a “drug.”
Speaking at the American Dynamism Summit on March 18, the vice president looked at the historical big picture and emphasized that “whether we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration (…) system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies,” and that it’s a “drug that too many American firms got addicted to.”
A major problem stemming from the “crutch” of cheap labor, Mr. Vance contends, is that it “inhibits innovation” because “if you can make a product more cheaply, it’s far too easy to do that rather than to innovate.” Citing the examples of Canada and the United Kingdom, he drew the connection between the large-scale importation of cheaper foreign workers and stagnant productivity. “[A]ll of this,” Mr. Vance explained, “is why the president is approaching the issue of illegal immigration as aggressively as he has, because he knows that cheap labor cannot be used as a substitute for the productivity gains that come with economic innovation.”
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2025/04/10/jd-vance-cheap-foreign-labor-addiction
