WATCH: Student grills Vance on how he can tell immigrants 'we don't belong here any more'

Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday the number of immigrants coming to the United States have been too high.

“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 lawful immigration pathways that have contributed to the country,” Vance said during an event organized by Turning Point USA, the political advocacy organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk. “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.”

Vance was responding to a question from an audience member during the Q&A portion of the event at the University of Mississippi.

Later in the exchange, Vance addressed a portion of the question that dealt with the number of immigrants the U.S. should accept.

“Right now the answer is far less than we've been accepting,” the vice president said. “We have got to 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.”

He also argued that for decades after the U.S. enacted strict immigration limits in the 1920s, the immigrants who were already in the United States “assimilated into American culture, and there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture.”

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