Former President Barack Obama took Vice President J.D. Vance to task for comments he’s made about immigration, in which he suggested immigrants threaten “social cohesion” in the United States because they don’t share the same values as those who were born here.
Just last year, while speaking to a conservative think tank, Vance remarked, “Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally.”
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Vance added, “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
The irony and hypocrisy of Vance’s comments couldn’t be more obvious, Obama told author Malcolm Gladwell, commenting that the United States has been having these same “arguments” about who is a “real” American ever since the Civil War.
Noting that Vance is married to a woman of Indian immigrants, Obama then fleshed out the larger point he was making.
“At least one of our major parties has been captured by politics that is not that subtle about suggesting that ‘We the people’ means a certain kind of people,” Obama continued.
“When you have the vice president — the current vice president — making a speech that is basically a blood-and-soil version of ‘We the people,’ that it matters who your parents were, how long they’ve been here, despite him being married to… a daughter of an immigrant himself, that echoes, then, ideas about who can be a citizen, who belongs, who gets to make decisions.”
“A hundred years ago, a vice president could not stand up and make a nativist argument if he was married to the daughter of an Indian immigrant — but today he can,” Gladwell said. “So, we’ve moved on from malice to hypocrisy — that’s progress!”
Obama laughed in response.
“Listen, hypocrisy is progress,” he concurred. “Because it means that… you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others. And that is better than not even thinking about the idea that maybe you’re doing something wrong.”
So who are the “real” Americans? The answer couldn’t be more obvious: We all are. We all live here, and working together, we can achieve anything, including treating each other with the respect and grace we all deserve.
