Rep.:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher got confrontational with Microsoft founder Bill Gates at a Wednesday committee hearing, speaking in opposition to Gates’ call for more H-1B visas for foreign workers.

The controversial visas, used especially by technology firms, allow companies to hire foreign workers for up to six years. Gates had argued that the current allowance of 85,000 per year was too few for the tech industry’s needs.

But a study showed 150,000 American computer programmers had lost their jobs since 2000, Rohrabacher said. Gates and others in the technology sector were being selfish, he said.

“You’ve got a lot of people with skills in our country who are not working now,” Rohrabacher said. “And for us to be putting out more H-1B visas, it’s a betrayal of our own people.”

Rohrabacher called Gates out of touch with the needs of working Americans.

“He’s a computer geek who made it big, and I don’t think he relates to regular working people at all,” Rohrabacher said. “Bill Gates is so rich he doesn’t feel the American people are his own people; he probably feels himself a man of the world.”

— Michael Alexander