Vice President JD Vance told Joe Rogan the Democratic Party’s socialist wing hurts working Americans by flooding the labor market with low-wage migrants.
“The [Democratic Socialists of America] types are a little full of shit when they talk about helping normal people,” Vance said on Rogan’s July 15 show.
“If you want to help a normal person, don’t provide a corporation nine low-wage migrants to compete against them when they’re bargaining for wages, you actually give workers more power when you have a more restricted immigration policy.”
The comments came during a discussion about alienated younger voters watching their prospects for prosperity and marriage evaporate under wage-cutting migration, inflation, and concentrated corporate power.
That alienation is empowering the Democrats’ Red/Green coalition — now led by immigrant socialist Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York City.
“Unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome,” Vance warned.
He pressed fellow Republicans to recognize the stakes.
“One thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is, socialism is the alternative if we don’t have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable. That’s our job. That’s what we have to do.”
Vance said America ran an economic experiment — offshoring industrial jobs, building a services-and-finance economy, letting Wall Street buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an “investable” commodity.
The result? “It’s created a generation of kids who are attracted to socialism.”
Rogan agreed: “Kids feel like there are no options other than to burn it down, yes, and that’s the problem.”
He added that young people are “terrified about the future because of AI, because they feel like jobs are going to be taken away.”
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Vance is building a coalition within the GOP that blends business ambitions with the growing bloc of alienated, populist-minded voters deciding elections.
Amid the extremes of libertarianism or socialism, “there is a third way… that balances these things,” Vance said.
That third way requires concessions from business leaders who got almost everything they wanted under President Joe Biden — and now face a wave of anger from left-wing coalitions amid the chaos of artificial intelligence, mass migration, and civic diversity.
Vance’s “third way” vision is drawn from his new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.”
His Catholic-themed approach offers business leaders low taxes and light regulation — plus security from the Democrats’ Red/Green coalition of pro-tax socialists, Muslims, immigrants, and low-level violence.
But business leaders must make compromises, Vance argues.
The GOP should break up major economic powers via antitrust measures, curb migration, and build a political counterweight outside the free market, Vance said.
“If you go back again to what worked and what was broken about the Industrial Revolution, hyper-monopolistic-style companies had way too much power … If a single corporation has monopolized an entire space, then you don’t have a real democracy unless you rein in the power of that company.”
Americans should have a greater role in company policies, he said, pointing to strong religious institutions and worker participation as reasons the United States and Britain weathered the Industrial Revolution better than other Western countries.
“I think that you have to give workers some seat at the bargaining table,” he said.
Curbs on mass migration would give young Americans more power in the labor market.
“Man, one of the reasons why I’m such an immigration hawk is because it is really important not to flood the country with low-wage immigrants,” Vance said.
Vance argues that Christianity can take the rough edges off capitalism, citing a “fascinating encyclical” written by Pope Leo XIII in the late 19th century.
“The basic argument of it is that in the age of industrial churn, there has to be a middle way between six-year-olds working on the factory floor and socialism. Part of that solution to give workers a say in what’s going on — to give normal people some power in this system.”
So far, establishment business leaders have vehemently rejected any compromise on political regulation of business, anti-trust, and the mass migration since 1990 that annually imports millions of new consumers, renters, and workers for Wall Street’s investors.
The need for political compromise is even greater amid rising Artificial Intelligence, Vance said.
He recounted a conversation with a right-of-center tech CEO who compared AI’s impact to the Industrial Revolution — not mass unemployment, but dangerous inequality.
“He said the main issue, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, is that there was a lot of demand for workers, but the inequality in the country got completely out of whack. [For him], this is the era of the Robber Barons, and the Robber Barons in both Europe and the United States led to fascism. It led to communism.”
“If you don’t give them a good option, then it leads to fascism and communism,” Vance said.
Vance is making progress as he tries to steer between the two evils.
Some business leaders now openly promote the productivity-beats-migration themes Vance pushes.
President Donald Trump has also backed the policy. In August 2025, he promoted automation as an alternative to immigration.
“We don’t have enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … We’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.”
AI “is going to unleash a lot of wealth creation, but if that wealth creation all goes to some segment of people, you’re going to have communism,” Vance warned.
“We have run this experiment before, and it leads to communism.”
Jamie Dimon: "Immigration – What the hell are we doing? The bottom 20% of our population, their wages didn't go up for 20 years. They're dying 7 years younger… Their schools don't work… [Americans] should be getting sick of it."pic.twitter.com/FGInUTEyt5
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 4, 2026
