Burgess Owens: “Our economic viability is directly threatened. Education is the basis for the kind of skills that we need in order to…”

“Our economic viability is directly threatened. Education is the basis for the kind of skills that we need in order to compete economically. Bangalore, India is now called the computer programming capital of the world, Bangalore, India which is in a country which is considered a developing nation. But they have as good a computer program in English as you have anywhere in the world, and many of the companies of this country are contracting their computer programming to Bangalore, India where they can get a year's worth of work for a month's salary, what they pay to computers in this country. Economically the competition is going to broaden, and the competition economically will be more dependent upon the educated population that a nation has and the way it utilizes that educated population. People are not going to have the jobs if they do not have the skills and the education. The corporations that are now uniting with the Republican majority to cut the budget for education are the same corporations that are asking for, in the immigration bill, that we allow them to keep bringing in technicians. And people at high levels, especially computer programmers, in order to fill the gap they have here for computer programmers. So it is all interwoven, interconnected, and we cannot maintain a military power if we do not maintain our economic might.”