JD Vance: Student’s Immigrant Checkmate

Learn English with this high tension 2025 exchange between U.S. Vice President JD Vance and an Indian student who publicly confronts him over immigration cuts, American identity, and religious expectations. Recorded at the University of Mississippi, this moment captured national attention for its raw honesty and direct questioning. A powerful lesson for English learners who want real language, real emotion, and real debate.

Who This Speech Is For

• Learners interested in discussions about identity, immigration, and interfaith families.

• Those who want to understand how personal stories appear in political communication.

• Intermediate to advanced learners exploring debates, public Q&A sessions, and spontaneous speech.

How This Speech Helps Your English

• Develop comprehension of fast, unscripted dialogue between a speaker and audience member.

• Learn vocabulary related to culture, religion, immigration, and public policy.

• Observe how tone, clarification, and emotional control function in real political exchanges.

• See how speakers answer multi-part questions by structuring thoughts under pressure.

Why This Speech Matters

• Highlights a rare public conversation on interfaith parenting and cultural identity.

• Demonstrates how immigrants articulate concerns about belonging and fairness in policy.

• Shows how politicians frame personal and national responsibilities in response to difficult questions.

Student: I did not agree with many of the things that you said right ahead of this, but I don’t think that’s my point to discuss here. What I wanna ask is…

You are married to a woman who is not Christian. In her Wikipedia, I just looked that up, I wanted to know what her faith was, I didn’t know this before, but she still calls herself Hindu.

You are raising two kids, three kids, in interracial, cultural, racial, religious household. How are you maintaining or how are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion? Or how are you teaching them that your kind, their dad kind, who got here just few years or few decades ago, is different or is better than your mom’s kind who got here just a generation before? How are you balancing that?

And when you talk about too many immigrants here, what is… when did you guys decide that number? Why did you sell us a dream? You made us spend our youth, our wealth in this country and gave us a dream. You don’t owe us anything. We have worked hard for it. Then how can you, as a vice president, stand there and say that we have too many of them now and we are going to take them out, to people who are here rightfully so by paying the money that you guys asked us?

You gave us the path and now how can you stop it and tell us we don’t belong here anymore? And one more thing. I’m sorry. One more thing. Do you have to be…

JD Vance: There’s a lot there. I don’t know if I’m gonna remember all this, but I will try.

Student: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had to say all of this and please take it with due… I’m saying all of this… with due respect. I have no intention of causing a scene here or anything, but…

JD Vance: We’re not close to causing a scene, don’t worry.

Student: But we talked about Christianity, all of this. I’m not even Christian and I’m here standing to show support. Why are we making Christianity one of the major things that you have to have in common to be one of you guys? To show that I love America just as much as you do. Why is that still a question? Why do I have to be a Christian, or…

JD Vance: Okay. So I… There was a lot there and I’m gonna try to respond to as much of it as I can. So on the question of immigration. So first of all, I can believe that we should have lower immigration levels, but if the United States passed a law and made a promise to somebody, the United States, of course, has to honor that promise. Nobody’s talking about that. I’m talking about people who came in in violation of the laws of the United States of America, and I’m talking about in the future reducing the number of people… Sorry, what?

Student: May I continue on that? Because when you just said you are not stopping with the people who came here legally, right? But you are pushing out policies that hurt us, and these policies are not even solving the problems. These policies are just creating chaos…

JD Vance: No, no. Ma’am. Okay, so again, I’m gonna finish answering the question and then, if I’ve answered all nine of your questions in less than 15 minutes, then we can keep on going. I… We gotta have a little fun, right?

So here’s the thing. I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future while also respecting that there are people who have come here through immigration path… lawful immigration pathways that have contributed to the country. But just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean that we’re thereby committed to let in a million or 10 million or 100 million people a year in the future? No, that’s not right.

We cannot have… I’ll go and finish. We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years ago binds the country inevitably for the future. There’s too many people who wanna come to the United States of America, and my job as vice president is not to look out for the interest of the whole world, it’s to look out for the people of the United States.

Now… you asked a personal question about our interfaith household. And yes, my wife did not grow up Christian. I think it’s fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not in a particularly religious family in either direction. In fact, when I met my wife, we were both… I would consider myself an agnostic or an atheist, and that’s what I think she would’ve considered herself as well.

Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here. The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend, we talk to each other about this stuff. So we decided to raise our kids Christian. Our two oldest kids who go to school, they go to a Christian school. Our eight-year-old did his first communion about a year ago. That’s the way that we have come to our arrangement.

But… Thank you. My eight-year-old was also very proud of his first communion. Thank you, guys. I’ll tell him that Ole Miss wishes him the best. But I think everybody has to have this own conversation when you’re in a marriage. It’s true for friends of mine who are in Protestant and Catholic marriages, friends of mine who are in atheist and Christian marriages. You just gotta talk to your…

The only advice I can give is you’ve just gotta talk to the person that God has put you with and you’ve gotta make those decisions as a family unit. For us, it works out. Now most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I’ve told her and I’ve said publicly and I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved… by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah.

I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way. But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me. That’s something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love. Again, one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.

Usha’s closer to the priest who baptized me than maybe I am. They talk about this stuff. My attitude is you figure this stuff out as a family, and you trust in God to have a plan, and you try to follow it as best as you can. And that’s what I try to do.

I wanna make a final point. So, I don’t wanna cut you off. I wanna be respectful to all the people behind you in line. But I wanna make this point about immigration, okay? If you ask the question, what is the exact right number of immigrants for the United States to let in, it is just very specific on the context.

If you go back to the 1920s, the United States passed an immigration reform act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country. And what happened over those 40 years? The many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture, and there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture.

I think we have two problems in our immigration system today, and my guess is you’re probably a slightly more leftist political persuasion, liberal political persuasion, maybe not, but here’s the thing. I remember back in my establishment GOP days when I was still very early getting involved in Republican politics, I remember a conservative think-tank person who told me that one of the reasons why immigration was really good is that if you had enough diversity in a country, people would mistrust each other and they wouldn’t join labor unions. Okay?

So, when I see a lot of left-wing people who theoretically support organized labor saying, “We need to flood the country with a limitless number of immigrants,” they’re unwilling to set any limitations on it, my response to that is, “You are destroying the very social trust on which American freedom and prosperity was built.” And that is really important to me.

So, the honest answer to your question, what is the exact number of immigrants America should accept in the future, right now the answer is far less than we’ve been accepting. We have gotta become a common community again, and you can’t do that when you have such high numbers of immigration, which is one of the reasons why we have the immigration policy we do. Thank you.