Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Pushes for Partisan Amnesty by Reconciliation Maneuver

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for the 8th annual Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group of investors has hired a former Senate staffer to help pass a “reconciliation” amnesty through the Senate without GOP votes, according to the New York Times.

“The pro-immigration group FWD.us hired Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the [reconciliation] maneuver this year,” the New York Times reported May 3.

The news comes as former GOP President George W. Bush steps up his Koch-backed push to get GOP senators’ support for an immigration bill that would allow many more employers to hire visa workers instead of young Americans.

In 2013, Zuckerberg, the extremely wealthy owner of Facebook, joined with other wealthy investors to create the FWD.us lobby group as they tried to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and population expansion bill. The bill was blocked by GOP legislators in the House.

Zuckerberg’s investors win financially whenever the government inflates the U.S. population with extra migrants. Any legal or illegal migrants, or legal refugees, help the investors as lower-wage manual or high-skilled workers, as high-occupancy renters, and as additional consumers of groceries, medical care, welfare, or government K-12 education spending. For example, a 2016 report by the National Academies of Science said states and local governments spent an extra $57 billion per year to support and educate migrants.

Zuckerberg and his billionaire investors are backing Joe Biden’s January 20 amnesty bill, and are funding a wide variety of advocacy groups, including groups that organize street protests.

Biden’s corporatist amnesty legislation would amnesty many migrants, but also allow companies to import an unlimited number of foreign graduates for the jobs needed by diverse American graduates. The foreign graduates would work for cheap because they would be allowed to get the huge prize of citizenship if they please their employers. Foreign graduates are also wanted by the tech sector because they reduce the ability of free-speaking American professionals to gain experience in established tech firms before creating their own rival companies.

The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites. The 2013 founders included Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, Breyer Capital CEO Jim Breyer, and Ron Conway at SV Angel.

The Senate only allows bills to get final yes-or-no votes once bills get support from at least 60 votes in the 100-member Senate. This super-majority rule usually forces the majority to make some concessions to the minority, so boosting compromise and reducing partisan conflict.

However, the Senate can use “reconciliation” rules to bypass the 60-vote requirement.

Reconciliation bills are governed by the Senate’s “Byrd rule” established by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). The Byrd rule says reconciliation bills must be about spending, and cannot include legal provisions that do not have a direct budgetary impact or raise the budget deficit after 10 years.

The power to decide if a bill can pass by reconciliation is given to the Senate’s non-partisan parliamentarian debate referee. The man hired by FWD.us, Kayes, is a former assistant Senate parliamentarian.

Democrats are threatening to use the reconciliation maneuver if the GOP does not agree to some of their amnesty bills. The New York Times reported May 3:

WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, is quietly considering trying to use a fast-track budget maneuver to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants should bipartisan talks on providing a pathway to citizenship fall apart.

Mr. Schumer has privately told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in recent weeks that he is “actively exploring” whether it would be possible to attach a broad revision of immigration laws to President Biden’s infrastructure plan and pass it through a process known as budget reconciliation, according to two people briefed on his comments.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

 

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