Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a well-known philanthropist who operates the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, says that immigration policies in the United States that force overseas students educated in the country to obtain jobs elsewhere are “perverse” and need to be changed for the sake of all concerned.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Friday, Gates said that the United States has a phenomenal amount of innovation when it comes to technology but that the immigration system is badly in need of reform to ensure that the best talent can be retained regardless of where the individual may originally have come from.
“It is kind of perverse to provide the education and then, even somebody who’s being offered a very high-paying job, they’ve got to go to Canada or back to India,” Gates said in an interview on the Fox TV show Opening Bell with Maria Barroom.
US immigration and the need for reform was not the only topic Gates was passionate about. He also believes that the education system in the United States could do with a shake-up, noting that Common Core – a set of national standards that apply from kindergarten through to high school – leaves little room for innovation and that education standards need to be raised to a level high enough for the US to remain competitive with other countries around the world.