Team Zuckerberg: Democrats Will Lose in 2024 if They Back Border Reform

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - MAY 13: A U.S. Border Patrol agent (2nd R) speaks to immigrants be
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The Democrat Party will lose in 2024 if it accepts Republican demands to close the parole loophole at the border, says Todd Schulte, president of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group for pro-migration investors.

Schulte issued his political warning on December 11 as GOP Senators and representatives continue to shrug off the threatening demands from Democrats for billions of dollars to accelerate and hide the very unpopular inflow of more border migrants during the 2024 election year.

Schulte posted his warning in a memo to Democrat legislators, media, and his allies in many business-backed, pro-migration advocacy groups:

Ending the current usage of parole would eliminate safe, orderly pathways and push thousands of people to cross between ports of entry–spurring more chaos. It is a huge trap for Democrats. President Biden’s Parole Pathways are the single most effective tool to reduce pressure on the border.

The memo is titled “Awful Policy and Terrible Politics: 6 Extreme Demands in the Senate Immigration Talks”:

Schutle’s group, FWD.us, was created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his investor allies in 2013 to help push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill through Congress. The breadth of investors who helped found and fund FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in early 2021, but copies exist at other sites.

Schulte’s memo has a point: Hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive each month at the border hoping to be admitted under the parole rules set by Biden’s Cuban-born, pro-migration homeland defense chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. Also, hundreds of thousands more migrant workers, consumers, and renters are on the 3,000-mile boat and bus trail from Ecuador to Texas that Mayorkas built with backing from FWD.us.

So if Congress blocks Mayorkas’s parole loopholes, there likely will be a massive pile-up of migrants at Mayorkas’s border.

That would create short-term PR risks for Democrats unless they are willing to portray the pile-up as evidence of their success in guarding the border.

But the current Mayorkas policy is also creating pile-ups of migrants at the borders and in a growing number of blue cities as huge numbers of migrants rationally rush towards Mayorkas’s eager welcome, regardless of the parole loophole:

Many Democrat politicians recognize the political damage of Mayorkas’s pile-up:

Schulte’s memo has clout. In addition to providing donations, his investors also fund a variety of pro-migration advocacy groups that are now slamming GOP proposals and prodding Democrat legislators back into line.

So far, there are few signs that Democrats are willing to make a U.S. border on their pro-migration policy despite the policy’s pocketbook damage to many millions of ordinary Americans.

That policy has smashed public support for migration, dropped poll numbers for Democrat mayors, and threatened Biden’s reelection but also boosted the White House’s corps of wealthy donors.

For example, in April, FWD.us said Mayorkas’s parole programs had provided 450,000 wage-cutting foreign workers to U.S. employers:

New FWD.us estimates show that people recently granted parole—largely from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Latin American countries—have had a profoundly positive impact on our economy, particularly at a time when worker shortages have contributed to soaring inflation.

Since April, Mayorkas has imported another 180,000 parole workers from airports in their home countries.

Many progressives support the government-directed inflow of foreign workers, renters, and consumers into Americans’ workplaces and communities. For example, progressive Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent recently used a Twitter argument to tout his alliance — “We” — with Schulte’s demand for the parole loophole:

Meanwhile, Democrats are touting their claimed immunity to GOP pressure as they push the GOP to surrender.

For example, Democrats are bringing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington on Tuesday to lobby for more aid to Ukraine and to tar GOP legislators as Russian stooges.

The tactic is only possible because Democrats deliberately attached Ukraine’s aid package and war aid for Israel to their $14 billion plan to accelerate and hide the flow of migrants to American cities.

Top GOP Senators are deriding that $14 billion plan as a migrant “magnet.”

So far, Democrats have rejected all of the GOP’s compromise plans, aside from token changes to asylum rules. Moreover, Mayorkas is trying to get final approval for a deal with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that would shut down border enforcement against migrants who bring children across the border.

GOP Senators are shrugging off the pressure.

“We’re dealing with a Democrat Senate and a Democratic president who intentionally are looking for ways to be able to keep the border open,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told Fox News on December 8. “They do not want to be able to slow down the flow here, or if they want to slow it down, they’ve been very clear they want to just reduce it a little bit on it,” he added. 

“I care about Ukraine’s homeland Security; I care about Israel’s homeland security, but it would be immoral for me to put those two ahead of what I think is a clear and present threat to our homeland security,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), one of the most pro-migration GOP senators and one of the four GOP senators negotiating a migration deal with Democrats, said on December 7.

“I will not go back to South Carolina and try to explain why I helped Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel and did nothing to secure our border,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is the top GOP member of the Senate’s judiciary committee and usually a cheerleader for more migration. “I will help all of our allies, but we’ve got to help ourselves first,” he added.

In 2013 and 2014, Graham pushed the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that would have further flooded the U.S. labor market for at least ten years. But amid Biden’s migrant flood, he has suddenly moved to the center.

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