Alice Hamilton Quotes

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

Bread is high, employment scarce, and wages are low in Europe, and there will be a tide of men flowing into our country that will give value to those lands

It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowding tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.

The world is dealing with issues of immigration, deindustrialization, and poverty.

I was so glad to get out of the cotton patch and stop pickin' cotton, I wouldn't of cared who come by and said, 'I'll take you to Chicago.'

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

Without economic growth and job creation in Mexico, we won't be able to confront the migratory phenomenon.

If you live in a squalid environment, then of course you are going to want to get out of it, you are probably going to want to get into the country, because that's what it does.

I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.

At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

Europe is not America; one of the reasons for the fragmentation and individualism of American life is that it is a vast country. In Europe with its much higher population density and planning controls, the rules have to be different. We are condemned to share—the rich cannot ignore the poor, the indigenous cannot ignore the immigrant—but that does not mean people are always happy to share

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.

We find ourselves ordered by the Government to cast out those we have tried for so long to help. The effort of a parent to feed his or her children is criminalized.

Some of these races, notably those of Asia, are trained by a hundred generations to eat less, wear less, seek less shelter, and work longer hours than any Western race can endure. No Western standards can compete with them in their midst.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

There was more violent crime among poor Irish immigrants in New York City 100 years ago than there is among blacks and Puerto Ricans today.

The Latin American people have become fed up with the 500 year siesta and the lack of opportunity. So they come to the United States. But that is because the leaders of their countries do not do anything to improve the situation…. When Mexican President Fox took office he observed that over half the Mexican population was living in poverty and that he was unlikely to make significant changes during his remaining term in office. That was a sophisticated way of saying to the Mexicans, “Go to the United States!”

The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums …

When the famine took place, the Irish fled as from a plague to America, and when they landed there both men and women were the prey of every blackguard without a single person to advise or protect them. Had the Government taken the movement in hand and employed agents at New York to provide for them until they obtained employment, and to direct them where to apply for it, England would to-day probably have had a grateful nation on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, we have a hostile multitude which neglects no opportunity of voting for any politician hostile to Great Britain…

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

It is in another world. In the midst of so much wealth there seems to nothing but chimneys and flaring furnaces with wretched cottages around them. Add to this a thick and black atmosphere and you have but a first impression of the life a third of my subjects are forced to live.