Gates Calls for End to Foreign Worker Visa Limits

Grant Gross, IDG News Service

WASHINGTON--Congress should do away with limits on how many foreign workers technology companies can bring into the United States, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said today.

Asked what he would do if he were king for a day and could make any changes to U.S. policy, Gates said that he'd eliminate the H1-B program, which limits the number of visas businesses can grant to highly skilled foreign workers. Gates participated in a Microsoft-sponsored panel discussion in Washington, D.C., about ways to spur U.S. innovation and help the country compete with other nations.

"The whole idea behind the H1-B thing is, 'Don't let too many smart people come into the country,'" Gates said. "The thing basically doesn't make sense. That's just wounding ourselves in this global competition."

Gates and Richard Rashid, senior vice president for Microsoft research, both complained that the company cannot find enough qualified computer science applicants, and that the H1-B visa limit, which now stands at 65,000 workers per year, has restricted Microsoft's ability to attract top IT workers.

The U.S. education system produces fewer math and science graduates than countries such as India and China, and top IT workers in those and other countries often opt to stay home rather than join the queue to work at a U.S. company, Gates said.

September 11 Effect?

Gates met with little opposition to his H1-B stance at the forum, which included two U.S. lawmakers and a university president. Phillip Bond, undersecretary for technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce, noted that the H1-B debate is complicated because U.S. engineers currently suffer from a higher unemployment rate than the does the U.S. population as a whole.

Bond suggested that companies like Microsoft may view the prospect of more visas for foreign workers as offering a way to recruit cutting-edge talent, but he pointed out that there are U.S. IT workers looking for work.

Gates doesn't encounter a lot of unemployed IT workers, he said. "I think there must be a categorization problem," Gates added. "Anybody who's got some computer science skills is not looking for work."

Some members of the panel blamed strict U.S. immigration policies following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for the shortfall in foreign IT workers available. Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman said that U.S. universities had experienced a 25 percent decline in graduate applications from overseas two years ago and another 5 percent decline this past year.

Gates also commented on the U.S. education system. "Dramatic" changes are needed in primary and secondary education, he said. But even if he were king for a day, Gates said, he wasn't sure what he could do to fix education because states and local school districts exercise far more control over schools than the federal government does.

On a related issue, Gates and other panelists called for the U.S. government to increase its spending on research and development. Bond noted that government spending on research and development has increased during the past five years, coinciding with the administration of President George Bush, and he said that funding for the National Science Foundation has increased by 26 percent since 2001.

Most panel members expressed confidence that the United States can continue to be the world's leading technology innovator, but they believe that other countries will continue to become more competitive. Asian countries are trying to copy the U.S. system of higher education to give their students home-grown opportunities for an excellent education, Bond said.

"India and China and others are becoming competitive," Bond said. "The United States has this in common with Microsoft: When you're number one, everybody is gunning for you."