Thread: Bill Gates Lies About Guest Worker Visas

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From the VDARE Blog:


Bill Gates Lies about Guest Worker Visas
By Randall Burns


Robert Oak writes at Direct Democracy(crossposted at Daily Kos):

Bill Gates has been busted in a big fat lie and we've got the statistics to prove it.

Last year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates told Washington Post columnist David Broder that the types of people they were bringing in on H-1B Visas, 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, he said, but Microsoft does 85 percent of its research and development 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."

Gates was pounding the halls of Congress at time of this interview, demanding more H-1B Visas along with the ITAA.

Unfortunately for Bill Gates, when a Corporation sponsors a green card, they must publish the actual salary along with the application.

From the graph above and the table below, only 3.3%, or 40 employees, of the 1202 total green card applications submitted by Microsoft had wages above $100k.

In fact, more applications, 8.3%, or 92 employees, were paid salaries below $60k. Most of the jobs titles of the 1202 applications were Software Engineer, an entry level job indicator.

The median salary for all was $71k, well below the $100k that Bill Gates touted in his claim of a great shortage of "talent" in America (read cheap, controllable and young).


I wonder if Gates did this in his testimony to congress? If so, he should be tried for perjury and appropriately punished.

Now, it is amazing what someone can say when they are making huge sums of money by a legal policy. As I have previously shown, each H-1b visa Microsoft(and other companies like Oracle) get a nominal fee, has a monetary value of about $50,000.
If such visas are to exist at all, their cost must be much higher if there is to be any kind of equilibrium in US and foreign labor markets.

I also think that those opposed to large levels of immigration must learn to oppose immigration at several different levels. You can't be credible opposing immigration while supporting increased concentration of wealth(which I would argue is the mix of policies we've seen advocated by Tom Tancredo, for example, when he endorsed both lower immigration levels and replacement of the federal income tax with a sales tax.)

I would suggest that not only should the companies and individuals profiting from immigration be head accountable for the costs they pass on to other Americans citizens(to the tune of $100,000 per immigrant), but high concentration of wealth should be opposed by advocates of immigration restriction. This might take the form of the tax of 1% on assets over $5 Million per family that Ralph Nader has endorsed(and removal of all federal income taxes on income under $100,000 per family).

Ultimately, high immigration is one of several tools by which wealthy elites maintain their position--and those advocates of high immigration are best opposed at a variety of levels.

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Yes, I have seen him stomping his feet at congress before. I didn't believe him then and I don't believe him now.

I hated it when Oprah had him on her show, which I rarely watch anymore. Lou Dobbs replaced Oprah for me.

This shouldn't be any surprise to anyone in the software industry. These things are quite commonly known. The H1B has been and continues to be a vehicle to replace the US worker with cheap foreign substitutes - all under the auspices of a 'legal' program. However, in reality, the whole system is plagued with several problems - namely:

The USCIS either won't publish or doesn't know the true number of people admitted under H1B status for the past several years (Dobbs covered this on a program a month or two ago).

Second, the 'documentation' compiled by US firms to justify the application often are highly inaccurate (intentionally misleading???) with respect to prevailing wage rate and other aspects of a job.

Third, the quality of the engineer/scientist is not always a 1:1 equivalent proportion. Many US engineers have complained bitterly that their newly-arrived foreign replacement lacks critical technical or communication skills necessary to competently do the job, etc.

In the final analysis, it comes back around to the re-institutionalization of slavery - even for highly educated, technical people - that's all.

I wonder if Gates did this in his testimony to congress? If so, he should be tried for perjury and appropriately punished.

Sounds reasonable to me.