Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) joined comedian Ilana Glazer this week on her It’s Open podcast.

During the lengthy conversation, Ocasio-Cortez sounded off on what she sees as the cause for the demonization of illegal immigrants in the U.S. – the cost of living and other economic struggles.

“I also feel this way about Jim Crow and racism and all of this stuff, which is that when there is so much economic insecurity, I don’t want to say it’s a driver, right? I want to be very clear about that. But I want to say that in the mix of deep racism and all of this, in the mix of that, when you feel like you could be next, when you feel like you are one accident away from losing your house and losing everything, you kind of, there is the lesser impulse of us is to subjugate or to feel like there is another class of people that is below you,” Ocasio-Cortez argued, adding:

That I’m not bad, right? Our systems require us. Capitalism and our, you know, what have you, our society requires us to internalize the failures of our systems, to your point, right?

It’s not the school that failed the kids. It’s that you’re the dropout. It’s not, it’s not that my, you know, it’s not that Walmart pays less than a living wage.
It’s that I’m poor and I didn’t work hard enough so I didn’t earn a better station in my life.

“It’s, you know, clean out your yogurt containers to recycle them rather than tax fossil fuel companies,” Glazer replied.

“That’s right. And so what happens is like, when you have these systems, when you have corporations, when you have an economic elite, they have not, there’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right?” Ocasio-Cortez continued.

“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” insisted the New York Democrat.

“That’s right,” Glazer agreed.

“You just can’t earn that,” Ocasio-Cortez continued as Glazer agreed again, “That’s exactly correct.”

“You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws,” Ocasio-Cortez continued as Glazer said, “Yup.”

“You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right?” Ocasio-Cortez continued, adding:

And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.

And so if you’re making minimum wage at a Walmart and you’re making seven bucks an hour. And I mean, dang, with these gas prices, it takes you seven bucks to get to work.

And so as a result, we’ve kind of internalized this moralized system, right? The people at the top are smarter, better, you know, more sophisticated. And therefore the people at the bottom, are uneducated, lazy, etc.

Watch the full clip above.

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