Does open source make Gates right on immigration?

Bill Gates went before the U.S. Senate yesterday and said something startling.

"Even though it may not be realistic, I don't think there should be any limit," to immigration by highly-skilled workers, he said. It was an aside in a hearing where he advocated more U.S. tech education, but it hit like a bomb.

Why, you would think Gates had burned an American flag right in the hearing room, lit with a $10,000 bill out of his own pocket.  The Huffington Post alone got hundreds of responses, most of them quite indignant.

But thanks to open source and the Internet, we're already in the world Gates described. As I pointed out yesterday, valuable software can come from anywhere. When you work with open source you are embracing a world market, where people are judged not by color or accent but by the content of their code.

Or am I the one blowing smoke? If Microsoft can't find the people it wants here, at the price it's willing to pay, one would think it can certainly find them elsewhere and export the work. Yet Gates said Microsoft has 1,500 positions it can't fill, right now.

Is the problem then that Microsoft is just too proprietary? And if open source does eliminate trade barriers, why aren't American open source programmers making what their Sri Lankan counterparts are making?

Discuss.