There is little reason to raise the cap on H-1 visas until the Department of Homeland Security's immigration service addresses it approval policies for B-1 visas to applicants from "job shop" operations (discriminating against American job seekers) and tightens up its review of the credentials of so-called eligible applicants who have academic credentials which are no stronger than those of a U.S. college BA/BS grad. Having personally interviewed hundreds of these applicant and their qualifications, I find the H-1B program fatally flawed. Time for the Congress to carry out some major immigration reforms.

Raising the cap is just a way for Microsoft to buy cheap labor. There are plenty of these professionals dying to work for Microsoft.

It is perverse for Bill to ask for increase in H-1 visa when less than 10% of the people who apply for a position at Microsoft even get an interview.

There is a simple solution for motivating students to get into IT field - PAY MORE. Kids are not stupid. They see clearly that being a doctor, lawyer, and working on Wall Street pays far more than working in a high-tech field.

But no, Bill just wants more cheap labor. Pretty pathetic.

BusinessWeek
Bill Gate
Business
Accountant

Never mind that there is plenty of indigenous talent withering on the vine, including myself. I have two degrees in Electrical Engineering, including a Masters, but I'm north of 40 and lack the freshly minted, flavor-of-the-month skills they seek.

I would advise any young folks out there to avoid this field like the plague, because they will burn you out, then kick you to the curb. I personally knew a very gifted software engineer who dutifully completed the project he was working on, then promptly committed suicide. He worked two years at Microsoft before taking a job at another Seattle-area software firm I shall not name.

Why does Bill Gates want foreigners occupy more of our jobs&land? Why not Bill Gates go into American INDIAN reservations and train these great untapped nations? Why does he not go into the inner cities train our children? Why does he not go into the Apalachian Mountain and educate our children? Our country DOES NOT NEED ANYMORE FOREIGNERS!!!!!

A company I used to work for listed a job for an engineer no their website. When I inquired about this job for a friend who was interested, I was told that this is a "fake" job posting. It was posted so the company could hire an H-1B.

The H1B loophole
--------------------
There is a loophole in H1B that allows outsourcing companies to bring in foreign labor for out-placement and contracting positions. This needs to be banned. These outsourcing companies apply for H1B visas in bulk and depending on how many they get from the lottery, they ship these people out to work at client sites all over the country.

This hurts Bill Gates' company because they genuinely need foreign talent to work for them and only apply for people that they really need and only get some of them in a lottery system.

In comparison, the outsourcing/out-placement companies apply for H1B in bulk and then ship their H1B work force all over the country at different client locations as lower cost contractors.

H1B is not bad if followed to its true intent (helping American companies hire foreign talent to DIRECTLY work for them).

Any out-placement of H1B workers to work for other companies (clients) should be banned. This will immediately fix the problem of exceeding the 65,000 quota.

As American gets soaked with cheap labor from all over world. Bill Gates of Microsoft is stating that American children are not skillful enough to fill the jobs he is outsourcing for?

Perhaps if our schools were not overcrowded with the children of the 12 to 20 million illegal foreign workers. There might be a marked difference in American children's educational grades. When teachers are forced to give more attention to children who have little or no English skills, then no wonder our academic standards have descended to a new low? Predator employers are to blame for this mass of illegal humanity, who have wreaked havoc with American workers jobs. They have brought this educational pestilence on themselves in the name of greed and more wealth.

Microsoft just opened an office in Canada so they could retain the foreign employees being kicked out of the US. Cisco opened an office in India for the same reason. The more uninformed opposition and vitriol there is to our hi tech companies employing foreign talents, the less comptetitive their US operations are going to be and so they are gonna ship out. Remember also that Intel, Sun, Yahoo, Hotmail, Google wer all founded or co-founded by highly skilled immigrants.

No American citizen with the right skills for the right job can be passed over for a foreigner. That is ILLEGAL. If you have solid proof of this, take it to the DOL and see what happens.

Raising the H1B cap is important no matter what the xenophobes and protectionists say, but more important is the need to retain the skilled workers already here by fixing the green card backlogs.

The green card process wich took 1-2 years is now taking 7-10 years for Indians. The indentured service is not good for both immigrant and domestic workers because it has the potential to depress wages if not fixed this year.

What Bill Gates is saying is 200% correct. Educating local people will take another 10-20 years. By that time the other countries will be on the top and Unites States will be ranked around 10 to 15 in top 20 list. Perfectionists dont know much about what is going on outside in the world. Other countries are developing at an exponential rate. Some people think its only benefit to Microsoft. Go check with any major company. Outsourcing is bad to US economy. At the same time we need talent. I guess its good to keep the talent in Unites States. See the past records. Billions in economy are boosted by high skilled workers. Perfectionists fear about jobs for locals, but high skilled workers are only a small part of employment in United States. Finally the government is not allowing great talent nor developing the talent her in US. The result is outsourcing. Think about it.

I attended the Washington, DC hearing. I appreciated that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was able to take Bill Gates to task for pushing for more H-1Bs. Rohrabacher was able to establish the relevance of salary to the availability of labor and I believe he cited the March 6, 2008 BusinessWeek article, "Guess Who's Getting the Most Work Visas - Indian outsourcers top the list of companies bringing foreign workers to the U.S. on the H-1B program" - and an earlier BusinessWeek article that mentioned that 150,000 computer programmers have lost their jobs in the U.S. Gates attempted to impugn the accuracy of the earlier BusinessWeek article by indicating that the magazine was citing someone else's survey - and then attempting to raise doubts regarding the accuracy of the Urban Institute study - and repeated his earlier claim "that these jobs are going begging." Rohrabacher noted that Gates might have to increase wages. Before he could get to the conclusion of his line of questions, Rohrabacher was cut off by Chairman Bart Gordon at 37 min and 1 second into my digital recording.

Duhhh....we've become a nation of dull TV watchers. Other nations are "hungry" in various ways. Going metaphorically hungry for a few hours is a REAL fast way to become conscious of many things!

Right now, a penny costs almost 2 cents to manufacture. I guess we've gone from the gold standard to not even being able to keep the "zinc" standard!

How many will spend W's $1500 tax "rebate" for a big screen TV to sit in a stupor and watch "American Idol?"..how about some books instead?

Maybe "Idol" should only feature only amazing composers, concert artists, ballet dancers and creative people, a la Bill Gates .

Several years ago, I graduated with a tech degree. I am a skilled professional with years of skills. I needed some entry level skills to start a career. I offered to work for free as an intern position that was open at Microsoft. I never received a call back.