What Vance doesn't seem to realize (or conveniently ignores) is that the actions of the 1920s that led to these cuts were supported by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which hated not only blacks and Jews, but Vance's own group, the Catholics, with almost the same vitriol. The second KKK took root in 1915 after being made famous in a film. Birth of a Nationand continued to grow during and after the First World War, when first red scare made US citizens fear that they were being undermined by the Bolsheviks and saboteurs. During Prohibition, the Klan took advantage of anti-Catholic sentiment among abstinence groupspositioning itself as a non-governmental guardian of the law. “Prohibition essentially gave the Klan a kind of new mandate for its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, white Protestant nationalist mission,” Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard, told History.com.
This sentiment contributed to the laws of the 1920s that Vance now praises. The KKK, whose numbers may have grown to five million members strong at its peak in the 1920s—in a country of only about 120 million people—was extremely influential in passing anti-immigration laws. In fact, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans wrote in paper 1926 that “immigration restriction” was one of the KKK's most remarkable achievements of the previous decade. For Evans, it was as much an anti-Catholic crusade as anything else: “Much of the immigration of recent years, so unassimilable and fundamentally un-American, has been Catholic.”
Ironically, Vance today applies the same logic to keep immigrants out, especially from Latin American or predominantly Muslim countries. Like a stronghold reportedIn 2022, he stated that “our ability to assimilate the next generation of immigrants is limited, and our legal immigration system must address this fact by changing who we let in and reducing the overall numbers.” He reiterated this sentiment in 2024 when he said, “We want American immigration policy to promote assimilation.” Talking about Muslim immigrants on Joe Rogan PodcastHe offered this bigoted assessment after Rogan suggested that we might be subject to Sharia law: “Real religious tyranny is increasingly being seen in Western societies where there is a large influx of immigrants who are not necessarily assimilating to Western values, but are trying to create, I think, religious tyranny at the local level. And if you think that won't happen at the national level, you're crazy.”
