It may be an option today, but it won't be an option for very long. That's what I'm really trying to say.
Look at China and the way it's building infrastructure. They're building thermal power plants, major infrastructure power plants, at a rate of one every week, or something like that. They are coal-fired, oil-fired, and gas-fired plants. They need engineers to build the huge cities that they're presently building. They have built a large number of new universities.
They are churning out a huge number of engineers as we speak, but they have the capacity to absorb those engineers because they are doing nation-building. India is doing nation-building. You can't do nation-building without engineers, so the issue is....
There will be engineers who will want to leave, yes, but then we have to look at what's happening in the entire western world. The issue of the demographic of the baby boomers leaving the workforce and transitioning into retirement is creating a significant gap. It is maybe not as big a gap in some areas as it might be in others, but it is creating a significant gap.
In Europe, the U.S., and Canada, we are not well tooled to fill that gap. We've traditionally filled that gap through immigration, but if engineers elsewhere can have a high quality of life, a well-paid job—and not just a job, but a career—where they grew up and got their education, why would they leave? China is doing everything it can to keep its engineers. So is India.
That's all I'm saying. It's going to be a highly competitive market. We do have advantages. We may yet successfully attract some people, but we used to attract them by doing nothing. Today we're going to have to work hard to get something, but it will be nowhere near the kind of influx of immigrating engineers that we used to get.
That's all I'm saying. We just have to be realistic. We will have to create our own next generation of engineers. We will have to face the fact that we have to retool our universities to supply the engineers we need if we're really serious about maintaining the quality of life and the wealth-generating capacity that we have today.