Immigrant Workers Quotes & Sayings

Women are the majority of immigrants yet the minority of immigrant employment visas; immigrant and native born women who work in the service arena - such as domestic workers - are not valued for their work, making pennies on the dollar compared to male counterparts; and, women are disproportionately affected by family reunification policies. — Christine Pelosi

Samaras is making the crudest of anti-immigrant pitches, and we didn't have to wait to see the consequence. On Friday - almost wholly ignored in the wake of the grim news from Paris - a gunman entered a hostel housing primarily migrant workers in Salonika, brandished a pistol and threatened to open fire because he "was sick of paying taxes for you people." A social outcast, perhaps? A thug belonging associated with the fascists of Golden Dawn? No. Stelios Ioannides is a local functionary of Samaras's New Democracy. — Anonymous

Obviously, after the match your fans come up to you and really look but to you but you don't get too much recognition around town for playing for FC Dallas. — Steve Purdy

Desire and hope will push us on toward the future. — Michel De Montaigne

Quality control which cannot show results is not quality control. Let us engage in QC which makes so much money for the company that we do not know what to do with it. — Kaoru Ishikawa

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like. — Minoru Yamasaki

According to one study, "a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers." In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a subsubcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all, they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government. — Naomi Klein

Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes. — Brandon Sanderson

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping. — Steve Brouwer

Friends want to know everything about you, and I couldn't tell them about Maryanne or bring them back to the flat to hang out. It was just easier to be a loner than to deal with the questions. — Samantha Young

During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American. — Anne Fadiman

The basis of art is change in the universe. — Robert Hass

Visually I've always liked the 20s 30s for film. I do these because I like the music. I like the clothes. I like the way the women and the guys look. There are soldiers and sailors and gangsters with the machine guns in their violin cases. It's a very colorful era of New York, full of great theater and great nightclubs and great jazz. — Woody Allen

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. — Joyce Carol Oates

The new fashions sold in department
stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.
They'd been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance
in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry
that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn't enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as
well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda
the advertising industry. — Mary Doria Russell

There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.
Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses. — Sergio Troncoso

Immigrant families have integrated themselves into our communities, establishing deep roots. Whenever they have settled, they have made lasting contributions to the economic vitality and diversity of our communities and our nation. Our economy depends on these hard-working, taxpaying workers. They have assisted America in its economic boom. — Edward Kennedy

The recovery of ethics under neoliberalism requires a multiplicity of factors- not just governments- who can create overlapping spheres of justice to achieve a complex equality for the laboring power in America and elsewhere. The question remains whether the political sphere continues to be a vital force in the struggle for democratic rights beyond the human needs of hidden, exploited refugee and immigrant workers. — Aihwa Ong

Life is too short to waste on unproductive endeavors — Blake L. Higginbotham

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me. — James Lasdun

The immigration system is broken and it needs to be fixed. And it needs to be fixed comprehensively, because this country depends on immigrant workers, but we don't have a system that reflects that. Our system is absolutely antiquated. — Pramila Jayapal

Hard-working immigrant workers in this country deserve a real path to citizenship as a part of comprehensive immigration reform ... We will continue to work with the immigrant rights community and our allies in Congress to devise a truly comprehensive model that places immigrant and workers' rights at the head of the line. — John Sweeney

If cheap immigrant labor is made unavailable, employers can hire Americans at a higher wage, or replace low-wage immigrant workers with technology and automation, which will create a smaller number of skilled jobs for Americans. — Jan C. Ting

As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal - and one in which it succeeded - as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe and workers of color in unprecedented ways. — David Roediger

Where you see immigration competition play out most clearly is among high school dropouts. I'd say there's clearly immigrant competition among the least-skilled workers, but natives are a shrinking share while immigrants are a growing share. — Jared Bernstein

For two full days we picked green beans out in the field, under the molten rays of the summer sun, rows and rows of beans. And the more rows I picked alongside Serafino, the madder I grew inside, thinking about those charityless, virtueless, and benevolentless shitheads who have spread about this glorious land a melodyless song, a giftless song that accuses the immigrant of stealing their lunches - when in fact they are picking, packing, and purveying them.* Millions of immigrant workers - men, women, and children - ignorant, poor, yet so ripe with hope and determination and humility, even while bent over at the waist, picking America's crops, servicing America's insatiable appetite, shouldering the heaviest and most dangerous loads, not so much for themselves, but for America, daily, joyously, like Whitman's song: "A song for occupations! / In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find / the developments, — Richard Horan

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe. — Alisa Harris

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn't an INS officer.
I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn't see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it's so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger. — Sergio Troncoso

I'm a huge supporter of animal rights - and I've been an outspoken critic of the cruelties routinely inflicted on livestock at factory farms. But it really bothers me that the mistreatment of pigs and chickens and cows seems to attract a lot more attention and spark a lot more outrage than the abuse of immigrant workers. — Eric Schlosser