Zuckerberg’s Amnesty Lobbyists Reveal Tactics for Manipulating Media

US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies during a US Senate Appropri
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s border chief is inviting more lawfully deported migrants back into the United States so they can reunify with their left-behind migrant children.

That is all good news for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor group, which is quietly funding a huge lobbying campaign for more amnesty and more migration. The campaign leaders say the videos of emotional reunifications of the deported migrants are helping them to shift TV coverage away from the alarming inflow of economic migrants encouraged by President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“Some of the family reunifications that we saw that sort of changed the coverage in May of this year and started humanizing what exactly is happening,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a director at FWD.us’s PR firm, Bully Pulpit Interactive. She spoke during a May 26 video presentation to Zuckerberg-tied amnesty campaigners.

“They were able to change [the] national narrative at a time when their issue was under the absolute national spotlight,” said Paulette Aniskoff, a partner at the PR firm.

The invited return of the lawfully deported migrants is being portrayed as “reunifying families” by Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That portrayal is possible because the deported migrant parents choose to leave their children in the United States to begin their own, years-long process of asking for asylum for themselves.

The migrant parents were sent home because they were found to be economic migrants who had no right to take jobs in the United States and no justification for legal asylum.

“The Department of Homeland Security is committed to the relentless pursuit of reunifying families who were cruelly separated by the previous Administration,” Mayorkas said in a DHS statement. He continued:

When we reunified the first seven families last month, I said that this was just the beginning. In the coming weeks, we will reunify 29 more families. In close coordination with non-governmental organizations, legal, and interagency partners, the Task Force will continue this critical work.

The Task Force has also announced in its report the anticipated 29 additional families to be reunified in the United States in the coming weeks. More reunifications are to follow, as nearly 50 requests have been filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Thirty-seven of these requests have already been reviewed and granted humanitarian parole. Once they enter the United States, these individuals will be allowed to remain for an initial 36-month period with the opportunity to apply for work authorization. This includes individuals from the families who were reunited in May as well as the 29 families that will reunite in the weeks ahead.

“The big thing that … I and others have taken away from this is [that] defining the frame of what [immigration] means [is the single] most political important thing you can do,” said Todd Schulte, who acts as the stage manager for FWD.us’s concealed orchestra of subsidized allies and front groups. He spoke on May 26 with the PR executives.

Schulte and his deputies said they try to reframe the national debate about migration around the TV-magnified personal emotions of individual migrants.

The reframing is intended to exclude any media recognition of Americans’ economic and ideological concerns about society, law, crime, border violations, and the huge impact of migration on wages and housing prices. For example, a March 9 FWD.us-funded polling memo advised pro-amnesty legislators to avoid talking about the economics of migration:

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.

The group’s reframing task is eased by the donor-funded GOP establishment. GOP leaders prefer that the media frame migration issue as all about chaos, crime, and border violations, not Americans’ wages, jobs, housing, and opportunities. However, GOP Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and his Republican Study Committee are working hard to spotlight the public’s worries about the economics of migration.

FWD.us’s reframing is deeply discordant with journalism’s need to focus on the concerns of their readers and viewers. In effect, FWD.us is prodding the news media to prioritize the concerns of foreign, law-breaking economic migrants above the economic and family concerns of roughly 30 million nightly viewers.

Schulte declined to answer questions from Breitbart News, but the evidence indicates that he works under the guidance of David Plouffe. Plouffe is the Democratic strategist who was hired by Zuckerberg in 2017 to block President Donald Trump’s lower-migration campaign promises.

Above Plouffe and Schulte, Zuckerberg has spent tens of millions of dollars to build the orchestra of advocacy groups to argue for immigration increases.

The demand for more people makes sense for Zuckerberg and his investor allies because every migrant — young or old, healthy or ill — helps to spike consumer demand for the investors’ companies, which include Walmart, Uber, GrubHub, and many more.

Each additional migrant also spur demands for real estate — and FWD.us co-founder Bill Gates is reportedly now the nation’s largest landowner.

Every additional legal or illegal migrant of working-age adds to the pool of labor, so nudging down wages and helping the investors boost profits. And every extra dollar in profits creates roughly $20 in extra stock value on Wall Street.

For Schulte, Plouffe, and Zuckerberg, the PR problem began in March when the TV networks began broadcasting images of many migrants — especially children — crossing Biden’s border, Schulte said.

He continued:

To be pretty clear about it, conditions [in March] on the ground with an increase in the number of children, combined with what the media want to dub a crisis, combined with the entire Republican Party deciding to go all in … really created this huge spike —  and I want to be totally clear — really bad media coverage for like, two, three weeks, like super duper bad … So you know we all looked around and decided whatever we were doing now wasn’t working, we decided to like dig in and see how could we, like, put a different situation to place.

Hinojosa jumped in, saying:

We had wall-to-wall coverage of — especially on Fox News, pretty much all the networks — not only of the border, but we weren’t telling the story about what the actual issue is, which is asylum and a lot of people fleeing terrible conditions to seek asylum. And part of that narrative is the Trump administration — he obviously made things worse, and the Biden administration has been working day and night to ensure that they are turning things around.

So what we quickly did, is we changed the narrative and talked about and humanized the stories of people who are now reunified with their families. We want to go ahead and show you this one clip that we were able to work with ABC on. It is a family who had been separated, a mother who had been separated from her children in 2017 and hadn’t seen her children since 2017, So this ended up getting covered on World News Tonight, Good Morning America, and ended up on a number of networks  … This will just humanize what is actually happening.

As you can see, this is a very moving story of a mother who is actually surprising her son’. She is from Honduras, and she was one of the first families who was reunified with her children. This was because of the hard work of the administration  …. We wanted to give you a sense of some of the family reunifications that we saw that sort of changed the coverage in May of this year and started humanizing what exactly is happening.

FWD.us and its allies tweeted the videos:

ABC News did not respond to questions from Breitbart News. Their coverage of the videos can be seen here and here.

Mayorkas added his own voice to the campaign. “Our highest priority is to reunite these families … It’s not about righting the wrong of the past; it’s about restoring the conscience of our government,” Mayorkas said in a May 4 appearance on MSNBC.

“The big lesson over the last decade that is if you can pick the playing field and go on offense, this [immigration] is a huge winning issue,” said Schulte. “If you sit back, it gets really hard.”

Schulte continued:

I think you saw during that big spike was that the administration was allowing the opposition in a very crass and gross way to define the [debate]. And so we have really seen as a sea change over the last two months, as you’ve seen the administration go on offense … Not only have they regained their footing on this police in like a big rebound of the polls on immigration and look from like some be clear like a hard, hard, hard March. And so I think the big thing that Jess and I and others have taken away from this is defining the frame of what this means is the single most politically important thing you can do.

“One of the things we learned is your ability to drive conversation matters a lot,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, the president of Families Belong Together. Her campaign is part of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which gets funding from Zuckerberg’s FWD.us.

Rocketto continued:

When you’re not driving conversation, people are filling that with their unique sort of story, and when you don’t have people who drive conversation — individuals, organizations, whatever — it’s very, very difficult to get in the mix, in the day-to-day, on an issue and keep them there. One of the things we’re most proud of the Families Belong Together [campaign] is that we’ve made it so that family separation is a front-page issue whenever it comes up. And that is really, really important to the success of our efforts … we need that media attention to keep driving the story …. That media narrative — in particular social media’s ability to turn around conversation — is pretty critical. It is also completely one-sided, but it is really critical.

“So much has been put on the hundreds of groups that both Todd and I have deep partnerships within our organizations around this work,” Rocketto said, adding:

When we are a chorus of voices talking about our work and really showing the connections that we have, I believe that we are able to [ensure] the sensationalized [border crisis] story is not the one that we will tell, and instead [we] will tell something more nuanced and ultimately more helpful to our longer-term goals.

Schulte and his networks use the parole videos to keep prodding reporters and activists to accept their reframing of the immigration dispute:

Schulte represents investors who are worth more than $300 billion and who also manage many additional billions of dollars for other investors. So he made sure to motivate his online allies with a progressive message of a diverse, multi-cultural society:

Ultimately, I think what we were having a big conversation about this country and a fight about is: Are we going to become a diverse and diversifying democracy or not? That’s what voting rights restrictions are about. That is what January 6 is about. It is what conversations around immigration are ultimately about.

Schulte insisted that amnesty is popular but also warned that the public is very sensitive to border chaos. “So, like on the border, in particular, you know, look this stuff gets trickier,” he said, adding:

The big lessons we have here are [that] people want a secure and orderly border. I want to be very clear about that. That is important, and that is not [just] important to Republicans — that is important to Democrats and independents. People want the idea that people will come legally to this country. They view people’s ability to come and seek asylum — which is a legal right — and they want a humane process. But they don’t really know what that has meant…

The big thing I would like everybody to understand about what’s happening is that there are no good short-term solutions when it comes to dealing with influxes of people within a fundamentally failed system. And if you were advising candidates, they should not defend a failed system just because their party may be the party in government right now.

Then he made the investors’ pitch:

Democrats should be the party who are in favor of a fundamental overhaul. We should have a refugee system for the Western Hemisphere. People should be able to work through a work-based visa system. We should have a family-based immigration system.

Schulte was a little coy as he pushed for “a work-based visa system.”

But Biden’s January 20 amnesty bill is FWD.us wish list — and it includes a slightly hidden mechanism that would allow Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors to fill all their white-collar jobs with an unlimited number of foreign graduates.

Those foreign graduates would accept low wages and would work without complaint because Biden’s bill allows their executives to pay them with green cards and citizenship after 1o years of indentured servitude. The resulting flood of foreign white-collar labor would reduce wages for many American graduates, pressure up their rents, and force them to live further from work and friends.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep, non-partisan. 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, bipartisan, rational, persistent, 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.

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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