Molly Ivins Quotes

There's no doubt that Mexican men and women full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.

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.

You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery.

Maybe Mexicans are lazy except when they’re taking everyone’s jobs.

Mexico is a Latin powerhouse. And Mexicans, they're known as hard workers. Here in the U.S., not everybody wants to do those kinds of jobs. I've lived. I know what it feels like and what they go through and how families suffer.

Michael Bennet can't possibly understand the impact of flooding our job market with workers that aren't citizens of this country, and when we fight, they call us racist. When did wanting to feed your family become racist?

When I go running, I see Mexicans working hard.

The white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Because the truth is, today's immigrants, as they have for generation after generation, work the longest hours at the hardest jobs for the lowest pay, jobs that are just about impossible to fill.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the eight hours when we stop killing each other and gratuitous overeating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!

There was never a war on poverty. Maybe there was a skirmish on poverty.

Rather than improving the wealth of their own nation, the Mexican government encourages its poor to come to the U.S. and send money home.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

It appears fashionable these days, and almost politically correct, to blame hard-working immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America, for the social and economic ills of our state and nation.

We cannot get control of our borders until we do something about… a man or woman who is making 50¢ an hour in Mexico and can make 10 bucks an hour and the United States for a job that Americans will not do.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

The day where America can be the welfare system for Mexico is gone.

The intelligence and prosperity of the American working man is endangered by the present immigration.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.