Mark Zuckerberg Lobbyist Says Elite Editor Posted ‘False Garbage’ on Immigration

The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Neil Munro

Mark Zuckerberg’s lobbyist in Washington, DC, is slamming the Atlantic magazine for admitting some Americans are harmed by cheap-labor migration.

Todd Schulte runs a pro-immigration lobbying group, FWD.us, which was set up by several billionaire and millionaire investors and CEOs, including Facebook’s Zuckerberg.

His target is Jeffrey Goldberg, the progressive editor of the Atlantic magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs, the wealthy liberal widow and heir of Apple founder Steve Jobs, bought the magazine in 2017.

“The Atlantic has great journalism— [but] constantly publishes disproven, veritably false garbage too on immigration,” Schulte tweeted to Goldberg on November 24.

Schulte’s quick insult was directed at Goldberg’s decision to publish an immigration-related article titled “The Democrats’ White-People Problem.” The article said the Democrat Party would gain votes if it recognized the painful economic impact of business-backed cheap-labor immigration on many voters who backed Donald Trump in 2016:

“You’re gonna go with false job displacement stuff? You’re gonna prop up that Democrats are for ‘open borders’?” Schulte jeered.

The article in the Atlantic was written by a left-wing university professor and was aimed at the Atlantic‘s readership of non-business progressives, many of whom despise President Trump and his voters for supposedly being racists.

The four-step article said Democrats can appeal to the white voters who have been hit hard by cheap-labor immigration — without staining their own claimed status as progressive opponents of racists.

White voters will be a majority of voters for many years, author Joan Williams wrote:

Writing off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term.

…

“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”

Economic concerns helped elect Trump, Williams wrote:

Virtually all Americans born in the 1940s outearned their parents; only about half of those born in the 1980s will. Simultaneously, the share of national income earned by Americans in the middle of the income distribution is declining.

Does conceding that populism involves economics mean ignoring bigotry? No.

Cheap-labor immigration hurts many American voters, she said:

The first step is to acknowledge that immigration sometimes hurts American workers, primarily those without high-school degrees. Immigration may have a positive effect on the economy overall, but people don’t live averages: They live where they live, and see what they see, which is that some employers use immigrant workers to drive down wages and undermine unions. Why not admit this and insist that everyone, immigrants included, deserves the dignity of a paycheck that lasts the week (to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr.)?

Democrats can win an important slice of economy-minded “anti-elite” voters from Trump in 2020, despite fervent claims that Trump’s voters are deplorably and irredeemably racist, Williams wrote:

Crucially, only 13 percent of them believed their children would achieve a standard of living better than their own. This is the group Democrats should target. But there’s one sure way to guarantee failure: smug condescension that lumps all Trump voters together as uninformed racists.

Schulte responded by trying to shame Goldberg, Williams, and other independent progressives, smear them as racists, and herd them back to the pro-migration, cheap-labor, anti-blue-collar line that business and wealthy elites favor:

Oh you’re gonna take Steve Bannon at his word this is about “economic nationalism”? Or ignore data and show rise in “populism” is primarily driven by economics as section indicates?

One more problem here. After propping up (paraphrasing) “open borders Dems should say sometimes immigration hurt Americans” it cites the massively problematic story by @PeterBeinart as evidence. It’s like a Möbius strip of “I’m so reasonable imma say Bannon’s right”

Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former executive chairman of Breitbart News. Many progressives prefer to smear Bannon as a racist, despite his populist push to raise the wages and security of all Americans, regardless of color.

Schulte also sneered at an immigration-related article in the Atlantic by Peter Beinart. The article was published in 2017 and was titled “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration: In the past decade, liberals have avoided inconvenient truths about the issue.”

Beinart’s article sidelined the economic impact of cheap-labor migration but showed how Democrats have lost power because voters dislike the painful diversity that is being imposed by businesses’ demand for cheap-labor immigration:

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

The Schulte vs. Goldberg fight is an indirect multi-billionaire vs. multi-billionaire spat that highlights the huge importance of immigration for people who live on investments in the stock market. The investments rise and fall in line with routine changes in the economy — and also with changes in the government-supplied inflow of immigrant consumers and workers.

Trump has tried to reduce this inflow amid opposition from agency officials, as well as from GOP and Democrat legislators. But his pressure is forcing investors to transfer stock market values into higher wages.

The initial beneficiaries have been new hires and employees in high-turnover jobs, such as Latino restaurant workers in Monterey, warehouse workers in California, resort workers in Hilton Head, construction workers, meatpackers, Superbowl workers, truckers, and workers at small businesses. The benefits are also going to formerly sidelined workers, such as black bakers in Chicago, disabled people nationwide, high schoolers, and interns:

Unsurprisingly, investors and business groups are stepping up their lobbying for more imported workers, including refugees, asylum-seekers, illegals, visa-workers, legal immigrants, and college-grad outsourcing workers.

Wages for middle class Americans and college graduates remain flat, partly because Schulte and other business lobbyists have minimized changes to the visa-worker programs for cheap foreign graduates.

The visa-programs programs keep roughly 1.5 million, non-immigrant, foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, alongside more than one million foreign graduates who received green cards after arriving as visa workers.

The population of white collar outsourcing workers includes roughly 650,000 H-1B employees, roughly 400,000 OPT and CPT employees, roughly 400,000 L-1 employees, 100,000 H4 EAD workers, as well as additional TN and E-2 workers. The resident population of foreign college-grads is almost twice the population of 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in 2017.

The multi-millionaires and billionaires who founded FWD.us use Schulte to lobby for high levels of immigrant consumers and blue-collar workers but principally for extra white collar workers. The group has also jumped into debates about deportations and the migrant caravan to distract Congress and the media from the more valuable inflow of the foreign college grads sought by FWD.us’s investors.

Schulte’s bosses include billionaires such as Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, as well as very wealthy investors, such as John Doerr, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, and Jim Breyer. The group also gets funding from a series of other prominent CEOs and investors, including Barry Diller, Stanley Druckenmiller, Reed Hastings, Irwin Jacobs, Marissa Meyer, Eric Schmidt, and Brad Smith.

In the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.

The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.

Note: The author previously worked for the publishing company that owned the Atlantic until 2017.

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