The Washington Post produced a three-byline, 2,150-word article on tech investors’ conflicts with former President Donald Trump but did not mention the overriding, all-important divide over migration.
The November 12 article is titled “Why Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel turned against Trump.”
However, the article does not mention voters’ rational support for Trump’s popular promise to curb what investors want — more wage-cutting, rent-spiking migration of foreign consumers, renters, and workers.
The article said:
Just two months before [the] Republican primary season kicks off in Iowa, [tech investor Peter] Thiel is one of several powerful Silicon Valley conservatives reevaluating their participation in politics. Tech heavyweights who helped ignite Trump’s candidacy have told close associates they feel alienated from the GOP and are casting about for a candidate who more closely aligns with their extreme pro-business agenda.
By excluding migration, the article suggests investors have broken with Trump over his claimed failure to reduce regulation. “‘Look at the major agencies. The FTC, the FDA. Did they have any less when Trump left office than when he started? The answer is no,’ said one of the advisers to major Silicon Valley donors.”
The failure to mention immigration “does seem like an absence, a gap, in the story,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He continued:
You would think a reporter would have asked because, if anything, Silicon Valley folks are, generally speaking, the boosters of immigration. If I were a reporter, one of the things that [I] would have asked is “How does the Republican Party’s stance on immigration have anything to do with your own changing attitudes?” Maybe they asked, but they got nothing worth reporting.
These days, there is much evidence that Silicon Valley investors strongly and rationally — from their self-serving perspective — oppose the GOP’s populist opposition to mass migration.
For example, the top-level FWD.us advocacy group for tech investors is loudly opposing Trump’s latest promises to curb illegal migration, according to three reporters at the New York Times:
“Americans should understand these [Trump] policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Mr. [Todd] Schulte said.
Todd Schulte runs FWD.us — the very influential lobby group for billionaire investors founded by Mark Zuckerberg and many other Silicon Valley investors to push the failed “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill in 2013.
FWD.us lobbies because investors recognize that Wall Street’s stock values spike when the federal government skews the economy by importing more renters, consumers, and cheap workers, regardless of the pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans.
The breadth of investors who founded and still fund FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website, but copies exist at the other sites.
Other investors cite migration as a reason to walk away from the GOP’s populists.
“Let me say the quiet part out loud: Trump supporters need to move on from Trump. And from Trump-style politics,” said an April 2022 statement from Jeff Giesea, another tech investor who backed Trump in 2016. He wrote:
I look back on the Trump era with mostly negative emotions. On the one hand, the American political establishment needed a wake-up call to listen to voices it had forgotten. Trump succeeded as a sort of wrecking ball and court jester. He forced necessary conversations and electoral reconfigurations.
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[But] Many of the issues and grievances that fueled Trump in 2016 remain. Immigration is a mess. The country still lacks basic sovereignty. Bold, forward-looking policies around healthcare, energy, and education remain to be seen. Middle Americans are still underserved and taken for granted by our government.
Billionaires are also abandoning Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who promoted himself as a competent governor who could bridge the GOP’s pro-migration donors and low-migration voters:
The right-wing venture capitalist David Sacks was a major DeSantis backer, hosting the launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign on X, formerly Twitter, in the spring. But in recent months, Sacks has soured on DeSantis, according to two people familiar with his thinking, and has thrown fundraisers for rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, then running as a Democrat.
Many polls show that the party cannot accept the investors’ demands for more and more migration, no matter how much money the investors dangle in donations.
For example, immigration is the top issue for 26 percent of Republican voters, according to a poll by Reuters announced on November 7. The 26 percent score is four points above the 22 percent who said the closely related economic issue is the most important.
Swing voters also oppose migration. In October, for example, a majority of the Democrat-leaning Jewish community in New York agreed that migration is more of a burden than a benefit.
Curiously, the Washington Post’s do-not-mention-migration article mentioned Republican presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley just once — even though she is getting funds from Silicon Valley investors while promising them an immigration giveaway.
In September, Politico reported on Haley’s investor donors:
They include billionaire WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who has donated $5 million to a super PAC supporting her campaign, venture capitalist Tim Draper, who gave $1.1 million, and million-dollar donor Steven Stull, another venture capitalist, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“We need to [think about immigration] based on merit. We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What do you need that you don’t have?'” Haley told supporters in New Hampshire on November 2. “So think agriculture, think tourism, think tech, we want the talent that’s going to make us better.”
Yet the Washington Post suggested that Haley is getting donations from investors because of her foreign policy record. It quoted Keith Rabois — a general partner at Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund who backs Haley — saying, “DeSantis hasn’t demonstrated sophisticated expertise in foreign policy and the economy.”
The article cited investor support for Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy but declined to explain his pro-investor immigration and trade policies.
On the Democrat side, President Joe Biden and his deputies have lavished Silicon Valley investors with favors and giveaways since well before the 2020 election.
In October, Breitbart News reported more Biden giveaways to high-tech investors:
President Joe Biden told his deputies Monday to import more foreign graduates for the Fortune 500 white-collar careers needed by indebted U.S. graduates and their families.
The directive is described in a White House fact sheet outlining the directive, “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.”
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Biden is “setting up another wave of indentured servitude workers,” responded Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. TechWorkers.
The visa programs include the infamous H-1B program, which grants roughly 200,000 three-year work permits each year to low-skill and mid-skill foreign graduates.
The programs “are used to bring in ordinary [mid-skilled foreign] workers to not only displace Americans but allow [CEOs and investors] to control these people during their entire tenure in the country,” Lynn said. The CEOs and university presidents can control their indentured workers by dangling the hope of green cards and the threat of exile back home, he said.
There should be little surprise when reporters at establishment sites fail to follow the money in migration, said Krikorian. “It’s not so much because [Washington Post owner and high-tech investor] Jeff Bezos is telling them what to do — it’s because they’re in a newsroom where peer pressure would militate against that,” he said.
“In fact, they’re pre-selected [by hiring managers] to not even think about that question,” he added.
Many reporters for the New York Times post many excellent articles about the economic abuse and poverty of migrants, such as child labor and rising rents, but the top editors are pro-migration, so the newspaper does not connect the dots and describe the pocketbook damage of migration to ordinary Americans.
Ordinary Americans — especially black Americans — enjoyed a long and steady rise in prosperity after Congress curbed migration in 1925, but lobbyists persuaded Congress to reopen migration in 1965, double it in 1990, and largely open the border in 2021. The result has been a colossal transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans over to CEOs, investors, and Wall Street.
The government’s migration stimulus for Wall Street policy greatly reduces U.S. innovation, imposes chaotic diversity on American society, and extracts human resources from many poor countries.