Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

This post is really about Bill Gates, but first... Will the French rebuff the proposed EU Constitution in their referendum at the end of May? The momentum is with the non-sayers right now and some of the rejectionist feeling is due to worries that an expanded EU with Turkish membership would see a dam burst of cheap labour flooding France and taking jobs from the natives. Unease is widespread in Germany, too, where the proposal to bring Bulgaria and Romania into the EU in 2007 is running up against opposition for a similar reason: fear of competition for scarce jobs.

Across the Atlantic, the labour mobility debate has been warped by post-9/11 fallout, which has seen a clampdown on visas for workers and students. This is turning into a major headache for the tech industry and it's led to the stage where Bill Gates is now demanding that the doors be opened, wide. US tech companies have long complained about restrictions on the H-1B visa program, which lets them bring foreign workers to the US. Washington has capped the number of H1-Bs that can be issued — 65,000 last year — thereby shrinking the recruiting pool. On Wednesday, Gates reiterated the industry's position, and then went a step further when he argued that the US should get rid of the caps altogether. Hire the best workers, regardless of nationality, and improve the competitiveness of the company, industry and economy he said. As in Europe, however, opponents of the movement of free labour insist that more foreign workers mean fewer jobs for the locals.

Sound bite: "Gates' comments verged on sarcastic. He said that 'it's almost an issue of a centrally-controlled economy versus' and then trailed off." What could he have meant?