Thread: Bill Gates criticizes U.S. immigration policies

Gates urges help for 'bottom third'
Microsoft chair calls on CMU students to aid world's poor
Friday, February 22, 2008
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Retiring Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates addresses the students and faculty of Carnegie Mellon University yesterday.As he gets ready to shift his full-time energies to philanthropy, outgoing Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates urged Carnegie Mellon University students yesterday to pay attention to "the bottom 2 billion people" of the world.

Mr. Gates, whose talk was heard by more than 1,000 students and faculty packed into two auditoriums, said that when he quit college in 1975 to start Microsoft, "I left without any awareness of the poorest 2 billion" people who make up the bottom third of the world's population.

About 15 years later, he was reading about how a germ known as rotavirus kills a half-million children per year, and he thought, "What's rotavirus? I've never heard of it. Is somebody working on it?"

As it turned out, he said, not many people were paying attention to the virus, which causes severe diarrhea in infants, because there were no market incentives to do so.

It is that kind of thinking he is hoping to change, and which projects by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are starting to have an impact on, Mr. Gates said.

"The market directs itself to solve problems based on economic signals," Mr. Gates said, "and the top 2 billion [people in the world] can send very strong economic signals.

"A good example of that is that these top 2 billion don't like being bald, so billions of dollars are being spent on curing baldness. Nobody's dying, but boy, they've got their money out on the table.

"Among the bottom 2 billion," he said, "a million children die each year from malaria, yet there's less than 10 percent as much put into malaria research as into baldness research."

In trying to reverse those kinds of priorities, Mr. Gates said, his foundation has learned that sometimes the kind of computer technology his company is famous for doesn't do much good.

He pointed to the health and nutrition problems facing India's poorest farmers, who have no electricity and no available cell phone networks.

But a project supported by the Gates Foundation produced a DVD showing how some farmers were able to improve their yields with better practices, and workers could take a battery-powered DVD player and TV set to different villages to show that video.

At a university that has long been ranked one of the top computer science schools in the world, Mr. Gates had the impact of a rock star.

Students applauded loudly and whooped and hollered when he came on stage, used their cell phones to take pictures of him, asked him to sign their posters and gave him a standing ovation when he was done.

Many of those students were from Asian nations and other foreign countries, and in a news conference after his talk, Mr. Gates criticized U.S. government immigration policies that force many of those students to leave the country after they graduate.

"We're hopefully the loudest voice out there saying how insane it is that these hyperqualified students ... are forced to leave the U.S."

Every software engineer who can find a job in this country creates an average of four or five more jobs, he said, "so you're not just exporting the engineer's job but all the others."

"Entry-level software engineers can make $90,000 a year, so they end up being good taxpaying citizens, and yet this country turns them away. If there was one thing Congress could do for competitiveness in this country that would be purely a win, it would be to allow highly qualified people to stay in this country."

And even though he was glad to talk about the opportunities he sees for young people in such fields as software development, robotics and other technical fields, he also hoped at least some of them would harken to his message about giving back to society.

"I hope you've gotten a sense of the incredible optimism I have about the advances that will be made." Mr. Gates told them. "In fact, I expect a lot of them to be made by the people here. I think you're in this field at the most amazing time ever, so I'll be fascinated to see the wonderful things you do."

As a symbolic show of gratitude for his philanthropic work, Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon presented Mr. Gates with the office chair that school founder Andrew Carnegie had once used.

"From the world's greatest philanthropist of the 20th century to the greatest philanthropist of the 21st century, we present you with this gift," Mr. Cohon said.

Mr. Gates pronounced the plain wooden chair "very cool."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08053/859565-53.stm

It's not the American taxpayers job to subsidize the bottom 2 billion, Bill! We are barely making a living as it is, thanks to freeloading illegals.

Well Bill I suggest you give $100 to every poor person in the world and retire in Angola.

He then laid out the framework the students could use to achieve philanthropic status...

1. Steal others ideas. Try Xerox first.
2. Publish the ideas as your own and get companies to sign exclusivity contracts.
3. Make a terrible product and turn it into a monopoly.
4. Agressively attack other business people and destroy peoples lives.
5. Give money to University of Washington as long as the research is Microsoft oriented.
6. Make federal government do what you say.
7. Host Chinese president at your home.
8. Set up tax free charity.
9. Turn it into a potential cheap labor harvesting device by creating labor villages everywhere you can get the foreign governments to let you.
10. Call it philanthropy.

Chosen: I think you nailed it.

Sounds like you're quite knowledgeable about the software industry

Well he is probably holding hands with Obama and his global tax for the poor.

Right on Chosen.

Think my next computer will be an Apple.........

Originally Posted by agrneydgrl

Well he is probably holding hands with Obama and his global tax for the poor.

You bet they are. Bill not with my money you greedy globalest give all your money to the poor then talk to me about it.

Maybe Bill has a guilt problem?

So some foreign students get educated here and then they go back to their poorer countries and improve it. Bill says he wants to improve the world. What's the problem? Of course the real problem is that he wants all the cheap labor to come to the US and work for him so he can make more profit. What a jackass.