Gates Warns on U.S. Immigration Curbs
In the same speech before the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, Gates says the following:
“It makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled individuals, many of whom are educated at our top colleges and universities, that the United States does not welcome or value them,”
and
“America cannot maintain its innovation leadership if it does not educate world-class innovators and train its workforce to use innovations effectively. Unfortunately, available data suggest that we are failing to do so . . . especially in our high schools.”
So our institutions of higher learning are capable of producing well-trained, highly skilled individuals, but none of our USA-born high school graduates are attending these great schools? Is that what he's saying?
Let's also mention that, if Mr. Gates was so concerned with being unable to hire people to work for his States-side facilities, he also has sites all over the world, including sites in India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. Abu Typesthecode in India can write the same snippet of code that will do "something" in Vista that Joe Coder in Seattle can. Microsoft is a big enough corporation that, aside from manufacturing concerns, where you do your work in the world doesn't matter as long as the work gets done.
Maybe if Mr. Gates would pull his head out of the clouds he could see about doing something to really improve this country's problems regarding education, rather than complain about not being able to find (or retain!) a quality workforce. When I graduated college I didn't have program managers beating down my door to find me, even though it seemed like everyone was saying software engineers were in high demand.
Oh but wait. Doing something productive regarding education would cost money. Precisely what he's trying to save by "fixing" immigration.
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7 comments:
I've heard Gates argue this Immigration thing in the past, and I have found it curious, but there must be some reason for his position other than just to save a money on employees.
Gates isn't afraid to throw money at problems. The B&MG foundation is one of the biggest contributors to foreign aid in the world ahead of most countries.
Then I wonder what his raison d'etre for his position is, because I really can't see why else he would benefit from encouraging looser immigration laws, and considering the United States is possibly one of the least strict when it comes to immigration.
I don't know.
I recently heard an interview with Gates on the Charlie Rose show. He did bring up promoting some school in the states where math skills were taught and then applied in a real world situation. He said something funny like, we won't teach you calculus and tell you what to do with it later.
I got the impression he is spending at least some money educating in the states.
I'm sure he does, I think he gives out scholarships as well.
I don't understand how loosening up immigration laws are going to improve American innovation. If companies truly relied on foreign minds, they would either have sites overseas (which many already do), or do the things (help with paperwork, etc), to ensure their foreign employees will stay in the States.
I'm not sure he wants to loosen up immigration in general, I think he just wants it back to the level it was for highly skilled workers, before this whole homeland security thing. I think that was his main complaint. I think part of it has to do with doctors and health care and other such people as well as SEs.
But I'm trying to remember things from at least two different interviews. I do realize that some of those SEs were coming over and willing to work for less, or at least I've heard such reports.
I heard he's not working for Microsoft anymore, and has move on to philanthropy. Plus there's some speculation he might go into politics. His statements probably reflect a future platform more than they reflect Microsoft policy.
It's true though, that the US university system is the envy of the world, and that the pre-university level education is sub-par compared to the rest of the developed world. So you get a situation of foreign students coming in and getting a valuable university-level and post-graduate level education then going back to their home countries, which benefit from it.
Speaking as a software engineer, I don't think that allowing more immigration for engineers necessarily hurts the local job market. If there's a large enough pool of skilled engineers locally (which may include foreigners), then there are advantages to setting up a local development site, whereas if all of the best engineers are in India, then that's where the new dev site will go, which doesn't help U.S. engineers very much...
I think that's a good point c.l.
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