A week after President Barack Obama won reelection in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale,
wrote a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party’s stance on migrants and minorities, criticizing it for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and for alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Four years later, as Vance considered a career in GOP politics, he asked a former college professor to delete the article. That professor, Brad Nelson, taught Vance at Ohio State University while Vance was an undergraduate student. After Vance graduated, Nelson asked him to contribute to a blog he ran for the non-partisan Center for World Conflict and Peace.
Nelson told CNN that during the 2016 Republican primary he agreed to delete the article at Vance’s request, so that Vance might have an easier time getting a job in Republican politics. However, the article, titled “A Blueprint for the GOP,” remains viewable on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them),” Vance wrote. “Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
Twelve years later, as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance espouses many of the same anti-immigrant postures that he criticized back in 2012 as a 28-year-old law school student. In recent days, Vance has
amplified baseless claims against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
