WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday. Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
Gates echoed the concerns of other business and education leaders who warn that the United States must improve science education and boost spending on research and development to avoid falling behind India, China and other countries that are rapidly gaining ground.
But he reserved his sharpest criticism for the visa caps, which he called "almost a case of a centrally controlled economy."
"If the demand is there, why have the regulation at all?" he said.
Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for skilled professionals at 65,000 in 2004 and 2005 in an effort to increase border security and ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers.
That is a third of the 195,000 work visas issued annually during the high-tech boom years from 2001 to 2003.
The entire quota of H-1B visas was snapped up the first day of the fiscal year last October by U.S. employers anxious to recruit foreigners for jobs in medicine, engineering, education, research and programing, among other fields.
While increasing the number of H-1B visas is important, "we can't be so naive to believe that there is not a very serious border-security problem that we need to deal with," said California Republican Rep. David Dreier, who heads the House Rules Committee.
Undersecretary of Commerce Phil Bond, a top Bush administration technology official, pointed out that the unemployment rate for engineers is above the national average.
But Gates said his company was hiring at all levels, from recent college graduates to those with more advanced skills. "Anybody who's got a good computer-security education, they're not out there unemployed," he said. "We're just not seeing an available labor pool."
Even with the labor shortage, Microsoft plans to keep most of its operations in the United States, Gates said. While the company just opened a research office in Beijing, "our development's going to stay in the United States," he said.
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