Smart businesses do not look at labor costs alone anymore. They do look at market access, transportation, telecommunications infrastructure and the education and skill level of the workforce, the development of capital and the regulatory market.
You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.
If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.
You can't imagine a world, quite frankly, without a safe and secure aviation system. And so our job is to really focus on that, and what we need to do to keep it safe and secure.
Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.
So not only do we need to deal with threats as they emerge, we have to be thinking in anticipation of future threats, and the things we do have to be things that enable the system to continue to work.
Each and every one of the security measures we implement serves an important goal: providing safe and efficient air travel for the millions of people who rely on our aviation system every day.
But my view is that you need a system at the border. You need some fencing but you need technology. You need boots on the ground. And then you need to have interior enforcement of our nation's immigration laws inside the country. And that means dealing with the employers who still consistently hire illegal labor.
Today in America, we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change, but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years.
Well, you know, I think in conversations with members of the Senate and others, they all recognize that the issue of immigration is important. It's important to our nation, it's important to our public safety, it's important to our security, it's important to our economic well-being moving forward. And it's not something that's going to go away.
Let me be very clear: We monitor the risks of violent extremism taking root here in the United States. We don't have the luxury of focusing our efforts on one group; we must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown, and regardless of the ideology that motivates its violence.
We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not nor will we ever monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.
And we ask the American people to play an important part of our layered defense. We ask for cooperation, patience and a commitment to vigilance in the face of a determined enemy.
I believe that Streamline should be part of our toolbox of things that we use at the border. And there needs to be a variety of things that we use at the border to get the most effective enforcement strategy. And so really it's a resource issue more than anything else.
Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).
I have long been a proponent of a guest-worker program between the United States and Mexico, and in particular I have proposed that Arizona would be an ideal location for a pilot project.
Such a system would be very, very expensive and laborious to have, given the kinds of border we have. Scientists and engineers aren't even sure they have the technology to make it work
It is fair to say there are individuals in the United States who ascribe to al-Qaeda-type beliefs.
It drove home, personally, the value of early detection and education and intervention.
It's all about who gets to work and making sure they're legally present in our country. And to do that nationally E-verify becomes a key component. It certainly needs to available, effective and as inexpensive as possible and that employer needs to use it as a tool. Some of the arguments that are made about how it works or does not work don't carry much water with me. I've already used it for several years. It works.
The last thing the Department of Homeland Security is about is infringing on anybody's constitutionally protected rights.
Well, you know, the violence is mostly in Mexico itself, at least the violence that people are worried about. And so we want to make sure that violence does not spill over into our communities that are along the border.
One of the most striking elements of today's threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.
What we're going to do with cyber-attacks - and we have already actually started - we started well before the executive order actually was issued - is working with the private sector, determine how best to share information, because, you know, we can't help until we know that there has actually been an attempted intrusion or attack. Information-sharing piece is very important.
I believe we have to move, eventually in our country, toward a system of public financing that really works for candidates running for federal office. I will support that as president.
