Success Quote by Kit Bond

The line is a neat bit of political judo: a pro-business argument repackaged as worker protection. Kit Bond frames the shortage of "high-tech graduates" not as a problem for executives or shareholders, but as a direct hit to "U.S. workers" broadly. It’s an attempt to build a coalition by collapsing two audiences into one. If employers can’t hire the talent they want, the story goes, everyone down the line suffers. The victim isn’t the company; it’s the American paycheck.

The subtext is doing heavy lifting. "Cannot get" makes the obstacle sound like circumstance rather than strategy, skirting awkward questions about wages, training budgets, offshoring, or why the labor market isn’t producing enough graduates. "They need" quietly treats employer demand as neutral and self-evident, not negotiable. Even the phrase "compete with foreign companies" recruits a familiar pressure point: national rivalry. It turns immigration policy, education spending, and corporate hiring into a patriotic choice. If you’re skeptical, you’re not just disagreeing with business; you’re risking America’s position in "the 21st century economy."

Context matters: this is the language of the early-2000s "skills gap" debate, when Washington sold H-1B expansion and STEM pipelines as competitiveness policy. Bond’s intent is to make that agenda feel like a labor issue rather than a boardroom preference. The rhetorical trick is plausible because it’s partly true: innovation clusters do create jobs. It’s also incomplete, because it doesn’t ask who captures the gains when "competitiveness" is achieved.