Quotes & Sayings About Foreign Workers

The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

We talked a lot about Donald's [Trump] record on immigration. There is irony that he has made the center of his entire campaign immigration, given that he faced a $1 million court judgment for being part of a conspiracy to hire illegal aliens, given that news broke that he is hiring foreign workers at his fancy hotel in Florida. — Ted Cruz

The receding waves of foreign peon labor are leaving California agriculture to the mercies of our own people. The old methods of intimidation and starvation perfected against the foreign peons are being used against the new white migrant workers. But they will not be successful. — John Steinbeck

By 1940, Arado had 8,000 workers; by 1944 it had 9,500. Almost thirty-five percent were foreign-born. You may ask why the Nazis would allow so many foreigners to work in a high-security company. I tell you, I really believe it was because Hitler insisted that Aryan women must be protected breeding machines whose major task was to stay home and have babies. — Edith Hahn Beer

At the beginning of the 60's our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone.' But this isn't reality. — Angela Merkel

Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well-known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism. Whether in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the barrios of Caracas, the ghettos of Newark, the mining towns of West Virginia or the tarpaper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff and Shiprock, it's the same the world over - one big wretched family sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries. — Edward Abbey

Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them, whether it be the Mafia, stockholders, a foreign company, the state,
or even a workers' commune. Networks of multilane highways, long. range, wide-band-width transmitters, strip mines, or
compulsory school systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality, which is the primary treasure in many
so-called "underdeveloped" areas. — Ivan Illich

Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers. — Andrew Nikiforuk

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors. — James Buchan

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life ... when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings ... when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors ... when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats ... — Wilhelm Reich

You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again and your asset values will disappear, your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers. — Lee Kuan Yew

Donald Trump claims - he did interview after the debate where he said, well, gosh, you can't find Americans to do these jobs to be waiters or waitresses or bellhops.What ridiculous nonsense. "The New York Times" reported roughly 300 Americans applied for those jobs. He only hired 17. Instead, he brought in foreign workers, because they're captive workers, because you can pay them less because they can't leave. — Ted Cruz

It makes no sense economically that public money goes to help foreign workers and migrants in a region where unemployment is higher than national average. — Marion Marechal-Le Pen

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions. — Robert Reich

What's wrong with leading the way? We've played that role before, after all. We gave the world the secret ballot ... that did so much to raise living standards and improve conditions for workers worldwide. We were a leader in extending to women the right to vote. We were barely a nation when we set the bar for bravery and sacrifice by common soldiers in foreign wars. We grew up out of racism and misogyny and homophobia to become a mostly tolerant, successful multicultural society. We did these great things because we know we are in it together. It is our core value as Australians. — Geraldine Brooks

At the time, there were very few foreign names in the press and they were all factory workers. I thought I'd never get a job at a university with a foreign name. — Carl Rakosi

It is U.S. workers who lose out when employers cannot get the high-tech graduates they need to compete with foreign companies in the 21st century economy. — Kit Bond

Donald Trump is a world-class con artist. He conned all these people that signed up for Trump University. Now he's trying to do the same thing to Republican voters. He's trying to convince them that somehow he's the guy that is going to stand up to illegal immigration, but he hires illegal immigrants, that he's fighting for American workers, but he's hiring foreign workers for his hotels, that he's going to bring back jobs from China and from Mexico, but, in fact, he's creating jobs in China and Mexico, because that's where all of his suits and ties that he sells are made. — Marco Rubio

Apparently, union bosses are so distraught about declining enrollments they will stoop to exploiting illegal workers. There is no doubt that this would hurt American workers, who would suddenly face a flooded job market full of cheap foreign labor. It would depress the wages of the American workers and cost them jobs. — Lamar S. Smith

As these debts become due, rich creditors will be pitted against poor debtors; private-sector taxpayers against public-sector workers, young workers against the retired, domestic voters against foreign bondholders. It is impossible to forecast who will win each of these battles but one thing seems certain: not all these debts will be paid in full. — Philip Coggan

The provisions contained in this plan will ensure that the United States has the infrastructure necessary to meet energy needs through future decades, easing dependence on unpredictable foreign oil markets, and creating thousands of new jobs for American workers. — Ron Lewis

The time to fix our broken immigration system is now ... We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace ... But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America ... Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should. — Barack Obama

Within this very myopic perspective, immigrants fill the labor slots that need filling, and those foreign-born workers play no other role in our country's cultural, political, social, or economic life. Our children's schools are unaffected, the welfare state is untouched, the balance of political power is unchanged, and daily life in — George J. Borjas

In 1992, the federal Government actually issued more work authorizations to immigrants and temporary foreign workers than the net number of new jobs created by our economy. Something is fundamentally wrong when we have millions of American citizens and legal residents begging for jobs, and yet we are admitting thousands and thousands of immigrants a year with virtually no consideration to our employment needs or their employment skills. — Ronald Reagan

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants. — Lamar S. Smith

The "health, education, and welfare" section of government is another boondoggle. First we manufacture indigent and superfluous people by legal monopolies in land, money and idea patents, erecting tariff barriers to protect monopolies from foreign competition, and taxing laborers to subsidize rich farmers and privileged manufacturers. Then we create "social workers, " etc., to care for them and thereby establish a self-aggravating and permanent institutionalized phenomenon ... — Laurance Labadie

As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues. — Sean Penn

We have seen numerous instances in which American businesses have brought in foreign skilled workers after having laid off skilled American workers, simply because they can get the foreign workers more cheaply. It has become a major means of circumventing the costs of paying skilled American workers or the costs of training them. — Ronald Reagan

We should strengthen our immigration laws to prevent the importation of foreign wages and working conditions. We should make it illegal for employers to lay off Americans and then fill their jobs by bringing in workers from overseas. Any U.S. employer who wishes to hire from abroad - even for temporary jobs - should have to recruit U.S. workers first. And we should end the unskilled immigration that competes with young Americans just entering the job market. — Edward Kennedy

Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures? — Nancy Snow