JD Vance Sees Foreign People

During a campaign stop in Michigan, the vice president tells a tall tale about the state’s flagship university.

Photo by Brad Switzer on Unsplash

Anyone familiar with the basics of college football knows that Michiganders are not huge fans of Ohio. But Ohio State University graduate and current Vice President JD Vance appeared in Michigan on Friday to campaign for former Congressman Mike Rogers, who is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate this year.

While there, he took a shot at the University of Michigan, claiming that “less than a half of the people who go to the University of Michigan are actually from the state of Michigan.” He called it a “scandal,” and then went on to blame foreign students for that statistic.

“If you’re the mother of a child who’s applied to the University of Michigan and you know that his SAT score or her SAT score was 200 points higher than the foreign national who got in above them, Mike Rogers is going to fight for you,” he intoned.

There are a number of curious assumptions here. For one, I’ve never heard anyone claim that America’s foreign students are having university admissions standards lowered for them; they are disproportionately Asian — and it was Asian students themselves who brought the case that led the Supreme Court to outlaw racial preferences in admissions. If anything, they believe and quite a bit of evidence suggests that Asian students have had a harder time getting into schools that used race as one factor for admissions.

But the other assumption here is that Michiganders are being kept out of their own state’s top tier university by the presence of foreigners. Recall that Vance claims that fewer than half of the students at the University of Michigan are from Michigan itself.

I looked up the statistics on the matter, and there is some truth to matter that the school has tons of out-of-state students. From a recent report from the university, 18,800 undergraduates at the Ann Arbor campus came from Michigan while 16,558 came from out of state.

But are all of these Michiganders being Great Replaced by foreigners? Not quite.

In 2025, just around 15% of students at the school were from abroad.

At the Ann Arbor campus, out-of-state residents pay more than three times in tuition, on average, than in-state students. If anything, they are helping subsidize the operations of the school.

Vance’s remarks, however, are in a long line of statements from the Trump administration that aim to place foreigners at the center of all our problems. If housing is too expensive, it’s the immigrants’ fault. If your guy doesn’t win the New York City mayoral election, it’s the foreigners to blame. There is no problem too big or too small to put at the feet of people from other countries.

That isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate debates to be had about things like immigration and university policies. But Vance’s sloppy appeals to nativism and white fright aren’t rooted in reality.