Gates to appear again before Congress on eve of H-1B visa rush

[OhioChick]

For second straight year, Microsoft exec will testify weeks before application process begins

March 3, 2008 (Computerworld) Next week, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates will testify before the House Committee on Science and Technology at a hearing "on the future of innovation and U.S. competitiveness," at which he likely will renew his appeal for more foreign workers to be allowed into the country.

The topic of the hearing is familiar ground for Gates on Capitol Hill. But what makes his scheduled appearance on March 12 potentially explosive is its timing, less than three weeks before the start of the annual application rush for H-1B visas.

April 1 is the first day that U.S. immigration authorities will begin accepting H-1B applications for the federal government's 2009 fiscal year, which begins in October. Last year, the government stopped taking applications after receiving about 150,000 in a single day — far more than enough to exhaust the annual cap of 65,000 regular visas and 20,000 set aside for foreign nationals who have advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

Last month, Gates called the H-1B program "a disaster," in response to a question about immigration during a talk he gave at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "If I could just change one law in the U.S., it would be this," Gates said. An excerpt featuring that comment has been posted on YouTube, and a video of the full speech can be viewed on the university's Web site.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9066460&intsrc=hm_list

Gates is Desperate for That Cheap-Ass Labor. :mad:

[ixion]

1. Gates is correct. The program is a disaster... for the American technology professional

it has done nothing but dry up the job market and lower wages tech professionals can command, enriching people like Bill Gates at their expense. :grr:

[BearSquirrel2]

3. And ...

And discouraging young technies from pursuing degrees in computer science. NAFTA/WTO was sold to us as a transformational imputus into an information economy. The truth is that they are having the opposite effect as it is trivially easy to migrate code over the internet.

[ChromeFoundry]

2. Gates is a money hungry POS. n/t