Microsoft CEO Bill Gates had a conversation with Long Beach’s kinda-sorta congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Misfortune) in Washington, D.C., today, and it was as much of a mismatch as you’d expect.

Gates was on Capitol Hill pleading for reform of the H-1B visa program that Microsoft and other companies use to hire foreign workers in the United States. Gates contends that the ability to employ the best minds—wherever they were born, especially since most of them have been  educated in the best U.S. universities—helps stimulate the employment of Americans because four or five support jobs are created around each of them. As evidence, he cited a recent study of technology companies in the S&P 500.

Rohrabacher, who somehow is sitting on the House Committee on Science and Technology, had some trouble getting his head around that concept—about as much trouble as I’m having with the fact that Rohrabacher has a seat on the House Committee on Science and Technology! When it was his turn to question Gates, here’s a partial transcript of what transpired:

Rohrabacher: If we bring in more people from the outside, realizing that we’re bringing the most talented people from other countries, will it not hurt those countries? And will it also not depress the wages in our own country that people like yourself would have to pay your employees in order to get quality people or in order to train people within our own society?

Gates: No, no. These top people are going to be hired. It’s just a question of what country they do their work in.

Rohrabacher: I’m really not talking about top people here. You know … there’s a lot of other people in society rather than just the top people. It’s the B and C students that fight for our country and kept it free so that people like yourself would have the opportunity that you’ve had. Those people, whether or not they get displaced by the top people from another country is not our goal. Our goal isn’t to replace the job of the B students with A students from India, because those B students deserve to have good jobs and high-paying jobs.

Gates: That’s right, and what I’ve said here is that when we bring in these world-class engineers, we create jobs around them. … The B and C students are the ones who get those jobs around these top engineers. And if these top engineers are forced to work, say, in India, we will hire the B and C students from India to work around them.

Rohrabacher: But according to BusinessWeek, almost 150,000 computer programmers have lost their job in this country since the year 2000. Now, my reading of all of this is that there are plenty of people out there to hire but people want to have the top quality people from India and China and elsewhere, and they’re willing to have these 150,000 American computer programmers just go unemployed.

Gates: Actually, BusinessWeek doesn’t do surveys. I think you’re referring to a quote in BusinessWeek from an Urban Institute study …

Rohrabacher: That’s what I said, according to BusinessWeek, yeah.

Gates: It’s not according to BusinessWeek. There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeply flawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobs are going begging, we’re in business every day. We’re not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and the result is that in a competitive economy …

Rohrabacher: You’d have to raise wages.

Gates: No, wages are –

Rohrabacher: If a job’s going begging, you raise wages, now in a –

Gates: No, it’s not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs. And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.

Rohrabacher: Well, let me give you one example –

Thankfully, nobody had to endure Rohrabacher’s example because at that point, committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tennessee) announced that Rohrabacher’s time was up.

Would that it were truly so.

Tags: Bill Gates, dana rohrabacher, H1B visa, House Committee on Science and Technology, Microsoft