Zuckerberg’s Team, Koch Allies, Unite to Lobby for DACA Amnesty

Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, David Koch Getty:AP
Getty/AP Photos
Neil Munro

Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty by February 15.

In a letter to the joint House and Senate committee, which is drafting a 2019 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, the Democrat-aligned Internet investors and the GOP-aligned retail, real estate, and industrial investors jointly declared:

We are joining together now to endorse this approach. The time is right to act. We urge lawmakers and the president to set aside partisan concerns and lead on this important goal immediately.

The two unified blocs of investors and lobbyists, however, face a huge political hurdle — politicians learned from the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that the vast majority of Americans want to welcome some inflow of legal immigrants, but really do not want to be crowded out of their careers and communities by a flood of cheap workers and welfare-funded consumers.

The DACA amnesty is sought by the investors because it would provide them with firm legal access to roughly three million DACA-eligible domestic consumers and workers. Also, the amnesty would sharply reduce the president’s bargaining power as he tries to get Democrats to reform the nation’s border laws and to reduce the annual inflow of legal immigrants. Also, by pushing for the amnesty, the business groups are distracting media outlets from the economic impact of their economic policies.

The federal subsidy would aid investors, spur sales, spike housing rents, and suppress wage growth for millions of blue-collar Americans.

In contrast, President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy has boosted wages by an average of three percent in 2018, with greater gains going to some categories of blue-collar Americans. Productivity is also rising as companies buy American-made labor-saving technology. The “Hire American” policy has worked by trimming the inflow of refugees and by denying investors’ pleas for amnesties and more visa workers, and it is raising public hopes for more wage growth before the 2020 election.

White-collar Americans have not done as well in Trump’s economy partly because business and Congress oppose any cutbacks in the population of white-collar outsourcing workers, such as H-1B workers. The resident population of 1.5 million college graduate visa workers aids investors by suppressing salaries for Americans who graduate from college with degrees in science, healthcare, business, engineering, design, and software.

Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group, for example, has strongly opposed reforms to the H-1B visa program. It also supports the “country caps” bill that would offer the government-granted prize of citizenship to more Indian and Chinese visa workers who agree to take Americans’ white-collar jobs.

Zuckerberg’s lobbying group was founded by a group of Internet investors, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Most of the founders are relatively unknown investors, such as John Doerr, a partner at the investment firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, but they have great influence over Democratic legislators.

The Koch network keeps its membership list secret, but it reportedly includes investors in consumer companies, real estate, and manufacturing. The group has a huge influence over GOP legislators.

The joint lobbying push also includes a series of advocacy groups that seem independent of business donations. But many of these groups, including the Libre Initiative and the National Immigration Forum, receive funding from businesses which are eager for more consumers and cheaper workers.

The Republicans on the committee include Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, Texas Rep. Kay Granger, Tennesee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, and Mississippi Rep. Steven Palazzo.

Committee members are also being pushed to endorse the “country caps” legislation pushed by Rep. Kevin Yoder in 2018. Yoder lost his election in November, partly because American graduates publicly slammed his bill. The legislation would provide the federal reward of fast-track citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese graduates who agree to take jobs from new American graduates and middle-aged American graduates.

The Democrats are Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, New York Rep. Nita Lowey, California Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, North Carolina Rep. David Price, California Rep. Barbara Lee, Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, and California Rep. Pete Aguilar.

The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.

The cheap labor policy 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 millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland, California.

 

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