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Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump's VP pick, has made his hawkish views on immigration central to his transformed political persona.
He was once skeptical of Trump's stances on immigration and its impact on the economy. "I don't think if you build a great Mexican wall, all of a sudden, all of these steel mill jobs are going to come back to southern Ohio, but it at least gives people something to latch onto," Vance said in September 2016.
But shortly thereafter, Trump beat the odds and won the 2016 election. Since then, Vance has radically changed his tune. Now, he even cites Trump's campaign promise to deport between 15 and 20 million people as a way to address the nation's housing affordability crisis.
In a tweet responding to the allegation that conservatives have few plans to address rising housing costs, Vance argued that cracking down on immigration would go a long way.
"Not having 20 million illegal aliens who need to be housed (often at public expense) will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens," Vance wrote on X in June.
The Trump campaign agrees. A campaign press secretary recently told NPR the "unstainable invasion of illegal aliens " is "driving up housing costs."
In the past, Vance has also blamed the housing affordability crisis largely on high interest rates. "The thing about the affordable housing crisis is, it is fundamentally a function of higher rents, higher mortgage payments, which are dependent on interest rates," he told this reporter last year.
But many economists say inflation and interest rates would likely be higher under a future Trump administration than under Biden, as deporting millions of people and restricting new immigration would actually increase prices by reducing the labor force.
A major wave of deportations could even threaten efforts to increase the housing supply. The country is facing a damaging construction worker shortage, and immigrants make up a disproportionate portion of these workers.
On top of that, Trump's promised tariffs, particularly on Chinese imports, and major tax cuts that would deepen the federal deficit would likely force the Fed to keep interest rates high, economists say.
The sharp uptick in home prices and rents in recent years is in large part a result of a severe shortage of housing years in the making. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the housing market crash, the construction of new homes plummeted and hasn't kept pace with demand.
Further, restrictive land-use policies, including single-family zoning that dominates American communities, are a huge part of why more — and denser — housing isn't getting built.
Trump hasn't talked much about housing policy on the campaign trail, despite arguing that Biden hasn't done enough to control housing costs.
As president, Trump's proposed budgets included significant cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His proposed 2021 budget asked Congress to cut housing assistance and community development aid — including shrinking the housing voucher program and slashing funds for public housing — by about 15%, not factoring in inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Vance has also supported GOP efforts to drastically cut funding for HUD, which provides most federal housing assistance. "A large share of the HUD budget, I think, actually could be cut," he told BI last year.
In office, Trump rolled back certain fair housing protections, including imposing a higher bar for proving housing discrimination and eliminating an Obama-era rule designed to reduce racial segregation.
Trump doesn't support upzoning to legalize denser housing construction in low-density neighborhoods — a key part of the solution to the housing supply shortage, according to experts. He claimed Biden wanted to "abolish" the suburbs by encouraging more affordable housing construction.
