- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens
to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology,
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday.
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- Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers
within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers
is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at
the Library of Congress.
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- "The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't
let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't
make sense," Gates said.
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- Gates echoed the concerns of other business and education
leaders who warn that the United States must improve science education
and boost spending on research and development to avoid falling behind
India, China and other countries that are rapidly gaining ground.
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- But he reserved his sharpest criticism for the visa caps,
which he called "almost a case of a centrally controlled economy."
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- "If the demand is there, why have the regulation
at all?" he said.
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- Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for
skilled professionals at 65,000 in 2004 and 2005 in an effort to increase
border security and ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers.
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- That is a third of the 195,000 work visas issued annually
during the high-tech boom years from 2001 to 2003.
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- The entire quota of H-1B visas was snapped up the first
day of the fiscal year last October by U.S. employers anxious to recruit
foreigners for jobs in medicine, engineering, education, research and programming,
among other fields.
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- While increasing the number of H-1B visas is important,
"we can't be so naive to believe that there is not a very serious
border-security problem that we need to deal with," said California
Republican Rep. David Dreier, who heads the House Rules Committee.
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- Undersecretary of Commerce Phil Bond, a top Bush administration
technology official, pointed out that the unemployment rate for engineers
is above the national average.
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- But Gates said his company was hiring at all levels,
from recent college graduates to those with more advanced skills. "Anybody
who's got a good computer-security education, they're not out there unemployed,"
he said. "We're just not seeing an available labor pool."
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- Even with the labor shortage, Microsoft plans to keep
most of its operations in the United States, Gates said. While the company
just opened a research office in Beijing, "our development's going
to stay in the United States," he said.
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