Bryce Mackasey Quotes

My first job out of college was six weeks of picking fruit alongside a dozen or so men from Mexico. The orchard was in Emmett, Idaho. The men spent almost nothing on themselves. Their paychecks went directly to their families back home.

The agricultural fields throughout the Southwest, those jobs needed to be filled, and who were the ones to do it? It was the Mexicans.

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.

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

Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers, not lawyers.

Letting guest workers in America doesn’t create an underclass. It moves an underclass and makes the underclass better off.

Immigration has made free white laborers more easy to be procured.

The population feels the physical pressure of the foreigners coming and working here, some [of whom] are prepared to work longer hours or accept less.

Sure, immigrants will do work that no-one else will do. There was even a movie about it - 'A Day Without Mexicans.'

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

I think Americans are probably getting sick of us Australians trying to take their jobs.

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.

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.

I don’t buy the argument that there are certain jobs that American just will not do.

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

We must, by every reasonable means, import our people, not in one branch of industry, not merely as farmers, as tillers of the soil, but we must bring out of every kind of industry, must develop the minds of the people and their energies.

The way the market works it is always cheaper to hire an illegal immigrant then to hire a legal immigrant.

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

… 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.

Foreign workers typically migrate to Malaysia willingly, looking for greater opportunities, but often fall into forced labor or debt bondage.

If we have no foreign workers, our economy suffers; our own lives suffer.

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.

I agree that we need to have real temporary foreign workers, who are working in the fields, picking fruits.

New York is celebrated as a leader in our nation's quest for progress because ours is a city built by the labor of a thousand different shades and accents.

We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?