Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg defended President Barack Obama’s troubled Obamacare website HealthCare.gov in an interview with ABC News’ This Week in which he pushed for amnesty.
“You know, sometimes stuff doesn’t work when you want it to. We’ve certainly had plenty of mistakes and things that haven’t worked the way that we want to,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook’s website when asked by ABC News about Obamacare’s website failure. “The right thing here is just to keep on focusing on building the service that you think is right in the long term.”
In the interview, Zuckerberg attempted to frame granting amnesty to America’s at least 11 million illegal aliens as a “civil rights issue”–a talking point used by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this year.
“When you meet these children who are really talented, and they’ve grown up in America and they really don’t know any other country besides that, but they don’t have the opportunities that… we all enjoy, it’s really heartbreaking–right? That seems like it’s one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time,” Zuckerberg said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about that… and a lot of them came here because they just want to work. They want to help out their families and they want to contribute.”
Zuckerberg alluded in the interview that his goal in pushing for amnesty is to get tech workers from abroad for his company, rather than hiring Americans for jobs at Facebook.
“The future of our economy is a knowledge economy,” Zuckerberg said. “And that means that getting the most talented people into this country is the most important thing that we can do to make sure that the companies of tomorrow are founded here.”
Zuckerberg’s interview came as he and a group of illegal aliens last week conducted a “hackathon” to push for amnesty.
“One of the things that the ‘dreamers’ here today show is that even if, you know, you’re a child of someone who came here who wouldn’t be considered one of the higher-skilled workers… you can be one of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said of the hackathon. “That’s the American dream.”
Zuckerberg was asked, too, about how thus far amnesty efforts have been stalled in Congress, despite all the money he has spent through FWD.us and other lobbyists have spent through their respective outfits pushing to create support in Washington for comprehensive immigration reform. He said he still thinks there is a possibility an amnesty could be passed into law.
“I’m fundamentally an optimistic person, as an entrepreneur,” he said. “The vast majority of Americans want this to happen.”
Zuckerberg has relaunched advertising efforts to push for an immigration bill out of the House this Congress.