JD Vance’s Sickening Nostalgia for One of America’s Most Hateful Eras

What Vance doesn’t seem to realize—or conveniently ignores—is that the 1920s acts that led to these curtailments were advocated by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which hated not only Blacks and Jews but Vance’s own group, Catholics, with almost as much vitriol. The second KKK took root in 1915 after it was glamorized in the film Birth of a Nation, and continued to grow during and after World War I, when the first Red Scare led U.S. citizens to fear they were being undermined by Bolsheviks and saboteurs. During Prohibition, the Klan capitalized on anti-Catholic sentiment among temperance groups, positioning itself as an extra-governmental enforcer of the law. “Prohibition provided the Klan essentially a kind of new mandate for its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, white Protestant nationalist mission,” Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard, told History.com.

This sentiment helped to fuel the 1920s laws that Vance is now praising. The KKK, which grew to perhaps as many as five million members strong at its peak in the 1920s—in a nation with just about 120 million people—was enormously influential in getting the anti-immigration laws passed. In fact, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans wrote in a 1926 paper that “the restriction of immigration” was one of the KKK’s proudest achievements over the previous decade. To Evans, this was as much an anti-Catholic crusade as anything: “Most immigration of recent years, so unassimilable and fundamentally un-American, has been Catholic.”

Ironically, Vance is applying the same logic to keeping out immigrants today, particularly those from Latin American or predominantly Muslim countries. As The Bulwark reported, he stated in 2022 that “our capacity to assimilate the next generation of immigrants is limited, and our legal immigration system should account for this fact by changing who we let in and reducing the total numbers.” He reiterated this sentiment in 2024 when he said, “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.” Speaking about Muslim immigrants on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he offered this bigoted assessment, after Rogan suggested we may fall under sharia law: “Real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you’ve had a large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level. And if you think that won’t happen at the national level, you’re crazy.”