Bill Gates on Immigration

It is a good thing he is the super-rich, because he is not on track for citizen of the year.

AFP, March 12, 2008: Tight US immigration forces outsourcing: Bill Gates.

According to this wise, super-rich, person, our tight immigration policies cause outsourcing.

It is because Congress failed "to pass high-skilled immigration reform" that these problems exist. For example, Gates tells us, "Microsoft was unable to obtain H-1B visas for one-third of the highly qualified foreign-born candidates that we wanted to hire."

It makes it difficult to attract and retain high-skilled immigrants. AND Gates tells us, if we let him hire all the foreign people he wants and let them into the US, he will hire four Americans to help them.

GATES - HERE IS MY SUGGESTION ... I have used your products since 1990. Way back when Windows was still 3.0 I believe or 3.1 for sure. I have been there with every failure and every flaw and learned from them. I used the DOS, erased drives, restored drives, fixed what I believed to be unfixable stuff (made so much more difficult without DOS). Now when I have a problem Bill, I call India for NO HELP. I call Canada, for NO HELP. I know as much as they do Bill, but I do need reassurance before I do catastrophic surgery (and I still make mistakes). I have never found any of those HIGH SKILLED twits very useful and more often they are obstacles. I have very little time Bill, I do not wish to spend the first 15 minutes on salutations and apologies followed by 10 minutes on questions about my system followed by personal data such as phone numbers and the weather. I have 20 minutes total and that was used up needlessly by people who then tell me they cannot help and transfer me on to someone, USUALLY SOMEONE IN THE US and from what I can tell (and I am pretty good now at judging this given my extensive use of India, Canada, Indonesia, and the Philippines for all service assistance), NOT a foreign born someone either.

You lied Bill and I assume you knew you lied because the alternative is you are simply ignorant of the circumstances and you can't be to be among the super-rich (the only criteria for that is to make money).

Here is a suggestion Bill and it will solve ALL your immigration issues. I promise.

Send one of your munchkins to every US university, set up a table at orientation for freshmen. Pay each school $100,000 for some silly statue that will give you access to students every year - and tell the students that you will pay them $80,000 a year to start plus benefits if they take courses that will provide them with the skill-set necessary to fix Microsoft's mistakes.

IF YOU DO THIS YOU WILL GET ALL THE SKILLED LABOR YOU NEED and you will NOT NEED TO bring in foreigners to take jobs Americans can do. You may retort with - but I don't pay my skilled foreign workers $80,000. Bill, dump the human resources that handle all the files on these people, save the money. Dump the immigration lawyers you have and save that money. Dump all the paperwork you must file and process, the time used filing forms and applying, the phone calls and moving expenses ... dump all that and dude ... you will save money hiring Americans at $80,000 to start. If they spur that offer, counter-offer with a promise to pay off 10% of their student loans for every X number of months they work for you. Then what you do is take some of your $30 billion stashed away, bail out Citibank and when you write off the students loans, you will own the loans and won't be losing anything, plus you will get deductions for this act of kindness and pay less in taxes (READ: MAKE money which will keep you in the super-rich category).

Bill, you believe you are helping Microsoft ... you aren't. Those foreigners, some will stay, have children and bring over their families. Fine. Others will leave with the knowledge you provided and go back to their country to help build their national computer company to rival Microsoft and or be used by their governments to work on vulnerabilities to your computer systems (READ: US infrastructure).

Doubt it? Don't.