JD Vance Takes on the Elites Who Hollowed Out America’s Factory Towns

Vance returned to the steel plant where his grandfather worked with a message for America’s forgotten workers.

Vice President JD Vance returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, on Friday and delivered a blistering indictment of the political and corporate establishment he says spent decades sacrificing American workers in pursuit of open borders, cheap foreign labor, and globalization.

Speaking at Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works, Vance took direct aim at The Wall Street Journal, Democrats, and corporate leaders who supported policies that he argued hollowed out manufacturing towns across the Midwest.

Vance pointed to a 1984 Wall Street Journal editorial that proposed a five-word constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.”

“They weren’t joking, they weren’t being tongue-in-cheek,” Vance said. “If you look at what they tried to do over the next 40 years, they told you back then exactly what they were trying to do.”

Vance argued that what followed was not an unintended consequence of globalization but the predictable result of policies embraced by powerful interests in Washington and corporate America.

“Being replaced by foreign workers wasn’t an accident,” Vance said. “It was a desired outcome of a generation of American elites.”

The vice president made the argument personal, recalling his years at Middletown High School, when classmates routinely talked about fathers losing their jobs — sometimes after being forced to train the foreign workers replacing them.

Vance highlighted the story of Kevin Flanagan, a worker who was reportedly told he would receive his severance package only if he trained his replacement. According to Vance, Flanagan complied and then took his own life on his final day.

The vice president also spoke about his grandfather, who spent nearly four decades working as a welder at the Middletown steel plant.

“My papaw hated the politicians who ignored this place,” Vance said. “He hated the people who saw this as a place of the past. He hated the people who forgot about this town.”

Vance stressed that responsibility for the decline extended across party lines.

“The unfortunate reality is they came from both political parties,” he said. “They spent the last 40 years telling you it didn’t matter if we made things right here or in overseas countries.”

Vance then connected the destruction of manufacturing jobs with another crisis that devastated communities like Middletown: drugs pouring across the southern border.

“The blood of those people, in my view, it pools at the feet of those who sell out their country for a cheap bottom line,” Vance declared.

He accused politicians and corporate interests of enriching themselves while working-class communities were left with shuttered factories, lost jobs, addiction, and broken families.

“Politicians who came to Washington with a few thousand dollars in their bank account left with millions in stock portfolios,” Vance said.

“And what did all of you get? What did we get? If you were lucky, your neighbor’s job got shipped to a foreign country while your tax dollars got shipped to fraudsters. If you were unlucky, and I know many of you were, you were left raising a grandchild while you were mourning a child killed by the poison that came across that open border.”

Vance also hammered Democrats over the Biden-era border crisis, accusing the party of allowing millions of illegal aliens into the country to compete with Americans for jobs and housing.

“For four years the Democrats invited millions of illegal immigrants into this country to take over our communities and compete with us for jobs and housing,” Vance said.

He specifically called out former Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown and other politicians who, according to Vance, portrayed themselves as allies of American workers while insisting Washington needed new legislation before the border could be secured.

Vance said the Trump administration proved otherwise.

“As we’ve learned over the past 18 months, it didn’t require a new law to close down that border,” he said. “It just required a new U.S. president.”

Vance portrayed President Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a rejection of the economic and immigration consensus that dominated Washington for decades.

According to Vance, the administration is now pushing corporations to hire and train Americans while using tariffs to penalize companies that move production abroad or rely on foreign labor.

Companies that want American workers are being rewarded, Vance said, while those looking overseas will “pay a big fat tariff.”

The vice president also pointed to increased factory construction employment as evidence that the administration’s economic approach is beginning to reverse decades of industrial decline.

For Vance, however, the larger argument went beyond tariffs or immigration enforcement.

Globalization, he argued, was never an unavoidable economic force. It was a series of deliberate political choices made by Washington and corporate elites — and voters made a different choice when they returned Trump to the White House in 2024.

Standing inside the steel plant where his grandfather once worked, Vance made clear what he believes that choice means for communities like Middletown.

America’s future, he argued, will not be built by abandoning towns like his hometown.

It will be built by bringing American industry — and American jobs — back home.