As President Barack Obama addressed the nation in his second inaugural speech Monday, calling for cooperative civic action and bipartisanship, he addressed students across the country and the world, encouraging them to pursue higher education in the United States.

“Our [national] journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity — until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country,” Obama said. “Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”

The president’s call for immigration reform to keep immigrant students in the U.S. workforce has been a grievance of research universities recently. In July, 140 university presidents and chancellors, including the chancellors of the Triangle’s Big Three, teamed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy to write a memorandum that called on the president to reform immigration for foreign students studying at American universities. 

“They are taking all their American ingenuity and know-how we generate here at the universities and going to other countries that are recruiting them,” Chancellor Randy Woodson said in a Technician article in July. To the University and the state, foreign students who don’t give back to the U.S. economy are not viewed as “good investments.”

The president echoed the message he said during visits to the Triangle in his first term, declaring that ingenuity and a high-tech economy will restore the American workforce, and he called for a higher education system to train workers ready to make economic impacts.

“No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores,” Obama said. “Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.”

As he enters his second term, Obama has called for an emphasis on education to help remedy the country’s problems, and he views public higher education as an essential piece of the country’s infrastructure.

“Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers,” Obama said.