Politics & Power Quote by Gary Miller

A border argument disguised as a paycheck argument, Gary Miller’s line is engineered to feel like common sense. “An American worker” is a talismanic figure: not a specific person with a union contract or a job title, but a stand-in for a threatened middle. By starting there, Miller frames immigration less as a legal or humanitarian question than as a breach of an implied wage guarantee. The moral center shifts from the migrant’s risk and desperation to the citizen’s entitlement to stability.

The phrasing does two quiet moves at once. First, it converts wage cuts into an external invasion (“somebody comes…illegally”) rather than a managerial choice. Employers vanish from the sentence even though they set wages, hire off the books, and benefit most from a pliable labor pool. Second, “willing to work for less than he or she should be paid” casts the undocumented worker as both victim and culprit: exploited, yes, but also responsible for lowering standards. It’s a neat political trick: empathy is acknowledged only long enough to be rerouted into blame.

The specific intent is coalition-building: speak to labor anxiety without sounding overtly xenophobic, wrap restrictionist policy in the language of fairness, and signal toughness through “illegally.” Context matters too: post-NAFTA, post-deindustrialization America is full of communities primed to believe the problem is the new guy, not the old incentives. The subtext is a promise of restoration: enforce the border and the wage will come back. The line works because it offers a clear villain and a simple fix to an economy that rarely supplies either.