Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Let me state the obvious. Illegal immigration is illegal, duh.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Part of the problem is there are people in Washington, D.C. in positions of power to whom the border is just a nuisance, and I think some of them believe that illegal immigration is a moral good. It is not. It undermines legal immigration.

If we didn’t have the Chinese buying things, we’d be on the floor.

I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.

One way to stop illegal immigration is a border wall.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

We Conservatives hate unemployment.

A short squeeze could happen with the U.S. dollar if lenders suddenly forced debtors to pay in cash.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.

What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they’re learned to do more with less, and so they don’t hire.

Economy’s got to get moving, we’ve got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.