Tim Kaine talks jobs in Daytona Beach, full speech transcript
Second, and this is apropos of being here in Daytona State, it’s about skills. It’s about the skills of our workforce from pre-K, the earliest time in life. I saw that Donald Trump kicked a crying baby out of an event earlier today, so as I’m thinking about pre-K, sometimes you wonder who the baby is. You wonder who the baby is.
But the training of skills and education – and do I have any educators here in the room? I mean, yeah, okay. You guys are the best. You guys are the best. It starts early. I once went to a church and somebody said it’s easier to build a person – I’m sorry, it is easier to build a child than repair a person. So why not start early?
Assistance and helping our schools in the K-12 area get stronger, and a really important piece that Hillary Clinton calls her New College Compact – families ought to be able to go to college and kids ought to be able to graduate debt-free. That is a big reach, but this – we can do it. This, we can do. And even in the early years, especially for families that can’t afford it, why not make the first two years of community college free? This skilling of the economy is one of the things that’s going to […].
And then finally, this is the one that I’m really into the most, is Hillary Clinton pointed out we want to have strong colleges like Daytona State, we want to have strong colleges like University of Missouri where I went or University of Virginia where I live, but not all of the great learning is learning that takes place at a college. There’s union apprenticeship programs. There’s – I know, right? There’s all kinds of ways to get that education. So we have an amazing apprenticeship program in Virginia at the Newport News shipyards. It’s been going for 100 years in 2019. These guys build the largest – these guys and ladies, these great shipbuilders build the largest, most complicated items on planet Earth, nuclear aircraft carriers and subs, because of a great technical program. We don’t even count those students when they graduate as having a college degree, and yet they have a great job making a great living for their whole life, doing something patriotic. We ought to respect […].
And investments in historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions […]. And finally, let’s not forget, if we’re focusing on skills, immigration reform is one way to take advantage of a tremendous amount of skills. And why not have an immigration reform system, like I have supported in the Senate, that takes advantage of skills and enables people to come out of the shadows and into the workforce, be paid fairly, not be paid subminimum wages, pay taxes, contribute to the society in all the ways they can, and do it openly. And Donald Trump, on the other hand, he not only doesn’t want to do immigration reform, he wants to kick a whole lot of skilled people out of the country. That’s going atrás, no adelante. We don’t need to go backward, we ought to go forward, and Hillary Clinton will do that. So that’s punto dos, skills.