Bill Gates, the King of Microsoft, is a poor little rich boy who's always starving for more H-1B visas. These are the free passes to foreigners to come to America for high tech employment. According to Bill, as he recently made his pitch on Capitol Hill, "America will lose its status as a leader in technological innovation unless it allows more skilled workers to enter the country." As far as Bill is concerned, engineering, computer programming and the like are jobs that lazy, ignorant, good-for-nothing Americans won't do — or at least in sufficient numbers.

Specifically, Bill wants to increase the present annual cap of 65,000 on H-1Bs. That limit went into effect a few years ago after the visas soared through the roof at almost 200,000 a year. The big demand for H-1B workers began in the mid to late nineties. With all of Gates' hype and hoopla about them being so essential, one wonders how we survived before that time without their services. Have we really dumbed down that much in scarcely more than a decade?

The H-1B program has legal requirements that forbid U.S. companies from hiring foreign workers unless they can prove that no qualified Americans are available to fill the positions. Also they are supposed to pay the foreigners prevailing U.S. wages. These laws, unfortunately, have counted for little. As documented by a Labor Department study in 1996, the companies devised numerous shenanigans to skirt the requirements, and not much has changed since then. Last year a wildly circulated video on YouTube exposed members of a prominent law firm offering companies advice on how to avoid hiring Americans.

It's not that skilled Americans aren't there, it's just that the companies want employees who will tolerate less pay and more difficult working conditions than most Americans. Significantly, many H-1B workers aren't particularly skilled, observed Dr. Ron Hira, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Hira noted that "[Bill] Gates has characterized H-1B workers as possessing 'unique talent' and skills and being paid large sums of compensation ($100k). But the facts belie all these characterizations. The typical H-1B holder holds a Bachelor's degree and is being paid $50k."

Most revealing too is the observation of Dr. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California (Davis). "The hidden agenda here is industry access to cheap labor. Several university studies and two congressionally commissioned reports have shown that H-1B visa holders are paid less than Americans. Though the law requires H-1B holders to be paid the 'prevailing wage,' the definition of that term is filled with numerous gaping loopholes, as a 2003 congressional report showed."

Matloff added that in times past, when Gates was crying "worker shortage," Microsoft was temporarily laying off workers and keeping wages below the inflation rate. This, he said, did not square with the company's claim of a shortage.

Thanks to the flood of H-1Bs many skilled and talented Americans, particularly older ones, cannot find work commensurate with their talents. To a significant degree this is also true for younger graduates in tech fields. BusinessWeek (10/ 26/08) reported that 45 percent of students who graduated between 1993 and 2001 with bachelors degrees in science and engineering were working in other fields, as were 31 percent of the Masters graduates.

The high tech situation for Americans today is most ironic, given the predictions in the early nineties when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was moving toward passage. Its proponents admitted that its "free trade" would eliminate the manufacturing jobs that provided a middle class income to many Americans. But they told us not to worry because all these people could retrain for high paying jobs as computer programmers and software engineers.

How sad the reality has been — not that the multi-billionaire Gates seems to care. Cheap labor will continue to augment his loot and the loot of his fellow elites. Possibly to gain a good conscience Gates gives lots of his money away to Third World countries and various global causes. What a shame it is that his heart seems to bleed much less for his countrymen as they watch their nation slide to Third World status, thanks to "free trade," outsourcing, and mass immigration.

If we Americans hope to have a decent future, it's time to close the gates on H-1Bs and all the other nation-wrecking schemes of Bill and his ilk. What they tell us just doesn't compute.