Bill Clinton Quotes

Either Men or Women that have a Trade, or are Labourers, can, if industrious, get near three times the Wages they commonly earn in EngIand.

Today’s fear mongering about international crime frequently relies on dire warnings about “broken borders”. But those who claim that U. S. borders are out of control now forget that those borders were never effectively controlled in the first place. In fact, the United States has always had highly permeable borders. Border smuggling has defined the U. S. Mexican economic relationship from the start; the same is true of the U. S. Canadian relationship.

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

Many of the worst off, native-born Americans are hurt by immigration—especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U. S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-skilled Americans..

… immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.

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.

Workers come to America to fill jobs unwanted by Americans, but they are staying and they are not going home.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

All contracts, not in opposition to the laws of the State, that have been entered into in foreign countries, between emigrants who come to settle in this State, or between the inhabitants thereof, and the servants and day laborers or workingmen whom they introduce, are hereby guaranteed to be valid in said State

General well-being is incompatible with lowness of wages.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

[It is] a dangerous thing, it seems to me, when any one part of this country suggests that it may be a better place … merely because it has cheaper labor to offer. That never has been a thing, as far as I know, that we have been proud of.

… employers use newcomers [illegal immigrants] to drive down wages because they are … in the shadows.

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads like a funeral program for the middle class.

Mexican exports worldwide benefit the U.S. economy because of their high percentage of U. S. content.

There is, in my judgment, a great future before American manufacturing, commerce and trade, which will absorb millions of additional workers. When these workers are employed at good wages, as at present, they will buy farm products in a liberal way. The proportion of the American people engaged in industrial life doubtless will continue to increase, just as it has been doing.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward Tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were often explicitly racist—such as the national origins quotas of the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act—the restrictions were also motivated by bona fide national security concerns, as well as a desire to protect native wages and welfare states from immigrant competition and foreign dependents.

The fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear. … I think that you’d be hard pressed to find any set of assumptions under which Mexican immigrants are a net fiscal plus, but equally hard pressed to make the burden more than a fraction of a percent of G.D.P.

I am totally in favor of trade. But I want trade deals for our country that create more jobs and higher wages for American workers.