Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg Funds Groups Staging Amnesty Marches

Mark Zuckerberg has funded many of the pro-migration groups now staging street marches for
Annie Spratt via Unsplash
Neil Munro

Mark Zuckerberg has funded many of the pro-migration groups now staging street marches for amnesties that would redirect more wealth and power to billionaires.

The Facebook CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan, funneled their pro-amnesty donations via their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the FWD.us advocacy group of wealthy West Coast investors.

Some of the donations went to groups in the WeAreHome campaign, which organized many of the street protests on May 1.

The deputy leader of FWD.us, Alida Garcia, sat on the campaign’s steering committee until she took a White House job in mid-March. The campaign announced March 19:

FWD.us Vice President of Advocacy and We Are Home Steering Committee member Alida Garcia is taking temporary leave to serve as the White House’s Senior Adviser for Migration Outreach and Engagement.

At least four of the 22 groups on the campaign’s steering committee have received money from the Zuckerbergs or FWD.us, including America’s Voice, CASA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and United We Dream.

Many of the groups were also supported during FWD.us’ expensive campaign to sway the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on whether to let President Donald Trump end the DACA work-permit program.

On May 1, the We Are Home campaign announced:

Nationally, FIRM Action and We Are Home partners, including Faith in Action/LaRed, United Farm Workers (UFW), SEIU and others held more than 65 events, including marquee events in D.C., Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles.

Todd Schulte, the president of the FWD.us group, declined to answer questions from Breitbart News. But Schulte retweeted flattering images of May 1 marches that featured the We Are Home campaign, even though many of  the events were so small that organizers were reluctant to show widescreen images:

Given the massive elite support for the campaign, the turnout in Washington D.C. was small:

The Zuckerberg-supported amnesty, worker importation, and population-expansion agenda is very unpopular outside the progressive movement, recent legal immigrants, and media newsrooms.

In an FWD.us polling memo by three Democrat polling companies, released March 2021, nervous legislators were advised:

It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.

If successful, the billionaire-backed amnesty and immigration-expansion campaign would spike Wall Street values, shrink wages, discard U.S. graduates, boost housing prices, further skew job-creating investments towards the coastal states, reduce companies’ use of American-run labor-saving technology, and cement billionaires’ control over the technology sector.

The Zuckerbergs’ Facebook-created wealth is roughly $100 billion, according to Forbes.com. The variety of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months.

As investors, Zuckerberg’s investors gain from immigration because it provides investors with more lower-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-funded consumers, ranging from children in K-12 classes to underpaid workers seeking food stamps to old people in government-run healthcare.

From 2013 to 2018, the Zuckerbergs have given at least $30 million to FWD.us and its non-profit education spin-off.

In January, the Zuckerbergs’ charity group reported that it would provide $100 million over the next three years for advocacy by FWD.us on immigration issues:

FWD.us has played a critical role in the past few years in successfully protecting the DACA program, as well as fighting family separation and reuniting families, and will help lead the charge in 2021 to transform America’s immigration system into one that’s fair, modern and humane, and centered on a pathway to citizenship.

FWD.us reveals little about how it spends the money it gets from the Zuckerberg couple or from its own investor members. But on April 25, it acknowledged its support for the We Are Home campaign.

A coalition of immigration advocacy groups today announced a new $50 million campaign aimed at pressuring lawmakers from both parties to pass a pathway to citizenship. The effort, which comes as the White House is previewing how President Biden will recommit to passing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, PS holders, farm workers and other essential undocumented workers in Joint Address to Congress, includes a $30 million commitment from the “We Are Home” campaign led by advocacy organizations, as well as a $20 million commitment from a handful of other immigration groups including FWD.us.

On May 6, FWD.us announced a pro-amnesty campaign ad, saying:

The ad is running on TV as well as on digital platforms, and it is the first in a series of spots backed by a seven-figure buy – part of a $50 million effort by immigration advocacy groups to urge the swift passage of citizenship legislation.

The funding support from the super-wealthy Zuckerberg couple — and from FWD.us members — is complemented by indirect donations from other wealthy billionaires.

The New York Times outlined spending by Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who lives in the United States. His money flows into several dark money funds, which are then distributed to election campaigns and to street groups:

Between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2020, [Wyss’] Berger Action Fund donated more than $135 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which has become among the leading dark money spenders on the left, filings from the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission show.

One of the nonprofit groups managed by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors, Sixteen Thirty donated more than $63 million to super PACs backing Democrats or opposing Republicans in 2020, including the pro-Biden groups Priorities USA Action and Unite the Country and the scandal-plagued anti-Trump group Lincoln Project, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Another nonprofit managed by Arabella, the New Venture Fund, which is set up under a section of the tax code barring it from partisan political spending, received more than $27.6 million from the Wyss Foundation from 2016 through 2019.

The “We Are Home” campaign’s website says that “We Are Home is a project of the New Venture Fund. It is associated with a separate project, We Are Home Action, which is a project of Sixteen Thirty Fund.”

 

 

 

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