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| Quote : | "Bill Gates goes to Washington
3/21/2006 By DAVID BRODER
When the Senate comes back to work next week, it is scheduled to take up the issue of immigration. And that is what brought Bill Gates to Washington for a rare visit last week.
The Microsoft billionaire does not love the capital, but he decided to add his personal voice to his Washington office's lobbying effort to expand the number of foreign-born computer scientists allowed to work in this country under a special program known as H1B visas.
In an interview sandwiched between meetings on Capitol Hill, Gates told me that the "high-skills immigration issue is by far the No. 1 thing" on the Washington agenda for Microsoft and for the electronics industry generally.
Since autumn 2003, Congress has limited the number of people admitted annually on H1B visas to 65,000. To qualify, a person must have at least a bachelor's degree and specialized knowledge and a job offer from an American employer. The visa is generally good for six years, with the possibility of applying for extensions.
So great is the demand for such skills in the high-tech world that in August 2005, the last of the visas available for fiscal 2006 were issued. That means a 14-month shutdown of the program, until October of this year.
The draft bill that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has been trying to prepare for floor consideration would expand the annual H1B limit to 115,000. By excluding dependents (who now are counted against the cap) from the total, it might mean the entry of as many as 300,000 people a year - one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
As Gates said, these are highly paid, highly qualified individuals. Salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start at about $100,000 a year. Their counterparts can be hired more cheaply in China or India, Gates said, but Microsoft does 85 percent of its R&D work in the United States because it wants its computer scientists interacting directly with its program managers and its marketing people on its own campus.
President Bush and his administration support the expansion of H1B visas. And Gates, in turn, is enthusiastic about the White House and bipartisan congressional efforts to boost the teaching of math and science in American high schools with the long-term goal of expanding the supply of qualified Americans for these jobs.
He is backing that effort both with gifts of technology from the company and grants of $300 million a year from his foundation for innovation in high schools. "But the benefit of things like that has got a fair time lag," he said, "and the next four or five years, it really hangs in the balance: How many of these talented people we want to hire, and who want to come here, can we hire?"
The answer is by no means certain. Opposition to the H1B program grew during the dot-com bust, when groups representing domestic electrical engineers and computer technicians argued that foreigners were taking away their jobs. In 2003, they succeeded in cutting the quota from 195,000 to 65,000, and they continue to oppose its expansion.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports unemployment among computer and mathematical operators is less than 3 percent. Gates said, "If you're graduating from a reasonable university in this country with a degree in computer science, you have many job offers."
Still, there is reluctance - especially in the House of Representatives - to lift the ceiling on H1B visas in an election year.
The House has responded to public pressure to close the borders to illegal immigration and seems incapable of distinguishing that problem from the value of encouraging high-skill workers to bring their talents to the United States.
That's why Bill Gates comes to Washington.
Washington Post Writers Group" |
gg Bill 3/22/2006 2:11:35 PM
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