Hundreds of people battled the storm outside Thursday to make it to the Iowa Youth Leadership Town Hall Meeting in Hilton Coliseum. All speakers voiced concern when discussing the future of agricultural and manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Two presidential hopefuls, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., assured the crowd that keeping jobs in the United States was in their agenda.

“American goods are getting pushed off the shelf by Chinese goods,” Hunter said.

The keynote speaker, Daniel DiMicco, chairman, president and chief executive officer of steel company Nucor Corp, stressed the importance of keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States and not in China.

“I am concerned that elected officials aren’t acting strong enough for free trade,” DiMicco said.

He said Iowa had a 10 percent decline in manufacturing jobs in the last decade, which resulted in 27,000 lost jobs. He said all of those jobs were moved to China for cheaper labor.

“The WTO [World Trade Organization] process is broken and it needs to be fixed,” DiMicco said.

DiMicco works in the steel company and has seen a lot of negative changes. He said the steel that comes from China isn’t high quality and is dangerous to be using. He said 40 percent of the world’s production of steel comes from China, which is more than the next four producing countries combined.

“They have outdated factories with old technology,” DiMicco said.

DiMicco said he wants the U.S. government to get tougher on Chinese steel imports to level the playing field.

“Free trade can be good and we embrace competition, but we do it ethically and legally,” he said.

Many jobs in the engineering field are also being pushed overseas. Sarah Walter, representative of the Engineering Leadership Program, said she was worried about the number of engineering jobs that would be available to graduating students, because she said foreign countries will do the same work for 40 to 80 percent cheaper than in the United States.

“We’re ready to compete with engineers around the world, but only if we have a fighting chance,” Walter said.

She said 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will be moved overseas by 2014.

Tom Mullikin, lawyer and town hall event organizer, spoke to the crowd about how important this issue will be for the upcoming election and how both parties need to come together to solve this issue.

“You hear a lot about the war on terror, but you don’t hear a lot about the war on jobs,” Mullikin said.

“This is not a democratic issue or a political issue, but an American issue,” said Sarah Sunderman, representative of the ISU Democrats and senior in liberal studies.

All the speakers said the world needs competition on the trade market, but they all agree that it needs to be fair.

“Shame on our government and on us if we don’t have that level playing field,” DiMicco said.