JD Vance: Britain is stagnating because of immigration
Britain is stagnating because of its high levels of immigration, JD Vance has said.
In a speech on Tuesday, the US vice-president said the West 'got lazy' by using 'cheap labour' as a substitute for productivity.
'I'd say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the UK, that imported large amounts of cheap labour, you've seen productivity stagnate,' Mr Vance told a gathering of tech bosses in Washington DC.
'That's not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.'
The vice-president told attendees at a summit hosted by Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, that the US had also been 'addicted to cheap labour' during its '40 years of failed economic policy'.
Tariffs
Donald Trump sees tariffs as a 'necessary tool to protect our jobs and our industries from other countries', he added.
Mr Trump recently imposed 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, with some delayed until April 2, and floated the idea of imposing 200 per cent on European wine and spirits.
Britain has been sucked into the US president's trade war after he imposed 25 per cent tariffs on iron and steel imports.
Mr Vance argued on Tuesday that Washington's use of tariffs combined with technological advances would allow the US to rebuild its manufacturing base.
'When you erect a tariff wall around a critical industry like auto manufacturing and you combine that with advanced robotics and lower energy costs and other tools that increase the productivity of US labour, you give American workers a multiplying effect,' he said.
'Now that, in turn, allows firms to make things here at a price-competitive basis.'
JD Vance criticises Britain
The vice-president has emerged as a repeated critic of Britain since entering office in January despite his apparently close relationship with David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, he lambasted allies for clamping down on free speech, and invoked the example of a British man, Adam Smith-Connor, who was arrested and convicted in 2022 after praying silently outside an abortion clinic.
Mr Smith-Connor told The Telegraph at the time that he was 'delighted' that Mr Vance was 'exposing the reality' of censorship in Britain.
Earlier this month, Mr Vance was accused of denigrating Britain's war record after suggesting that the UK and France had not fought a war in 40 years.
Between 2001 and 2014, more than 600 British troops were killed fighting alongside the US in Iraq – where Mr Vance served as a military journalist with the US Marine Corps in 2005 – and Afghanistan.
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JD Vance, the vice-president, on Friday accused California governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass of encouraging violent immigration protests as he used his appearance in Los Angeles to rebut criticism from state and local officials that the Trump administration fueled the unrest by sending in federal officers. Vance also referred to US senator Alex Padilla, the state's first Latino senator, as 'Jose Padilla', a week after the Democrat was forcibly taken to the ground by officers and handcuffed after speaking out during a Los Angeles news conference by homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on immigration raids. 'I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,' Vance said, in an apparent reference to the altercation at Noem's event. 'I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn't a theater. And that's all it is.' He added: 'They want to be able to go back to their far-left groups and to say, 'Look, me, I stood up against border enforcement. I stood up against Donald Trump.'' A spokesperson for Padilla, Tess Oswald, noted in a social media post that Padilla and Vance were formerly colleagues in the Senate and said that Vance should know better. 'He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,' Oswald said. Vance's visit to Los Angeles to tour a multi-agency federal joint operations center and a mobile command center came as demonstrations calmed down in the city and a curfew was lifted this week. That followed over a week of clashes between protesters and police and outbreaks of vandalism and looting that followed immigration raids across southern California. Trump's dispatching of his top emissary to Los Angeles at a time of turmoil surrounding the Israel-Iran war and the US's future role in it signals the political importance Trump places on his hard-line immigration policies. Vance echoed the president's harsh rhetoric toward California Democrats as he sought to blame them for the protests in the city. 'Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, by treating the city as a sanctuary city, have basically said that this is open season on federal law enforcement,' Vance said after he toured federal immigration enforcement offices. 'What happened here was a tragedy,' Vance added. 'You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law and they had rioters egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job. That is disgraceful. And it is why the president has responded so forcefully.' Newsom's spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement: 'The vice-president's claim is categorically false. The governor has consistently condemned violence and has made his stance clear.' In a statement on X, Newsom responded to Vance's reference to 'Jose Padilla', saying the comment was no accident. Jose Padilla also is the name of a convicted al-Qaida terrorism plotter during George W Bush's administration, who was sentenced to two decades in prison. Padilla was arrested in 2002 at Chicago O'Hare airport during the tense months after the 9/11 attacks and accused of a 'dirty bomb' mission. It later emerged through US interrogation of other al-Qaida suspects that the 'mission' was only a sketchy idea, and those claims never surfaced in the terrorism case. Responding to the outrage, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said of the vice-president: 'He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.' Federal immigration authorities have been ramping up arrests across the country to fulfill Trump's promise of mass deportations. Todd Lyons, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended his tactics against criticism that authorities are being too heavy-handed. The friction in Los Angeles began on 6 June, when federal agents conducted a series of immigration sweeps in the region that have continued since. Amid the protests and over the objections of state and local officials, Trump ordered the deployment of roughly 4,000 national guard troops and 700 marines to the second-largest US city, home to 3.8 million people. Trump has said that without the military's involvement, Los Angeles 'would be a crime scene like we haven't seen in years'. Newsom has depicted the military intervention as the onset of a much broader effort by Trump to overturn political and cultural norms at the heart of the nation's democracy. Earlier Friday, Newsom urged Vance to visit victims of the deadly January wildfires while in southern California and talk with Trump, who earlier this week suggested his feud with the governor might influence his consideration of $40bn in federal wildfire aid for California. 'I hope we get that back on track,' Newsom wrote on X. 'We are counting on you, Mr Vice President.' Vance did not mention either request during his appearance on Friday.
