Vernon Ehlers: “Mr. Speaker, we have a major national problem. We have a booming economy which arose out of developments in science and…”

“Mr. Speaker, we have a major national problem. We have a booming economy which arose out of developments in science and technology, and we are all enjoying the fruits of that economic boom. At the same time, we do not have the workforce to manage the boom and to keep it going. There are several evidences of that. Number one, compared to other developed countries, we are at the bottom or near to the bottom in terms of the mathematics and science education student achievements of our high school graduates. The second point: if my colleagues would visit the graduate schools of science and engineering in this Nation, they will find that over half of the graduate students are from other countries, because our students cannot compete with those students from other countries. Another factor is that every year the science and technology industry comes to us and says, will you please allow more immigrants into our Nation with the scientific and technological capability to fill the need that we have. And just 2 weeks ago we approved a bill to allow another 200,000 immigrants into this Nation to fill that need. We have 365,000 open scientific and technical jobs in the United States, and we do not have people qualified to fill those jobs. We must either allow those from other countries in, or employers will move the jobs offshore to take advantage of the people there. We have to address this problem.”