Mark Zuckerberg, the 29-year-old billionaire and CEO of Facebook, gave a rare speech at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday to an audience of several hundred who had turned up for the premiere of Jose Antonio Vargas's documentary "Documented". Before he introduced Vargas, Zuckerberg spoke in favor of a comprehensive immigration reform bill and defended his lobby group FWD.us from criticisms portraying it as being solely interested in the fate of the high-tech workers Silicon Valley employs.
"This is something that we believe is really important for the future of our country - and for us to do what's right," Zuckerberg implored, according to the Associated Press.
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The Facebook CEO added that the need for the nation's immigration system to be overhauled first sank in for him while he was volunteering to teach a class on entrepreneurship at a Menlo Park, California school, where many of the students were DREAMers - young undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the US illegally by their parents.
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"No matter where they were born, (these students) are going to be tomorrow's entrepreneurs and people creating jobs in this country," Zuckerberg told the audience. "These are issues that don't just touch our part of the industry, but really touch a whole country."
But his group's ads appear to betray their priorities. A June ad, "Emma", altered Emma Lazarus' 1883 poem "The New Colossus" - one many Americans might recognize, as it is engraved on the Statue of Liberty - so that where the original extended a call to the world's rootless poor, the video's version asked for the "the influencers and the dreamers" and "those dedicated to the doing". This modified message suited the group's emphasis on boosting the number of H1B visas to be allotted to high-skilled workers under an immigration reform bill.
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A month before that, Americans for a Conservative Direction - a wing of FWD.us - aired an ad during conservative talk radio hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh's shows supporting the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform bill which was still being worked on at the time in the upper chamber. But the ad also claimed that not enough was being done in the bill to secure the US-Mexico border. "What we have now," the ad said, "is a national security nightmare waiting to happen."
The group has also run afoul of its progressive members for what it says is a tactic of helping strengthen the conservative bona fides on non-immigration-related issues of Republican supporters of immigration reform. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk withdrew from the group in May after it ran an ad praising Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) for calling for President Barack Obama to allow Arctic drilling and the building of the Keystone XL oil pipeline; environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, as well as MoveOn.org and immigration-rights organizations like Presente.org, also joined him.
"I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes," Musk said upon his departure.
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