In a thunderous Wednesday speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Sessions (R-AL) blasted Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for criticizing America and pushing for amnesty legislation on Mexican soil at fellow billionaire Carlos Slim’s charity event.
“Young Mr. Zuckerberg maybe doesn’t know that there’s a deep American tradition–and a tradition in most developed nations, really–you don’t go to a foreign capital to criticize your own government,” Sessions said. “I suppose he doesn’t know about that. They probably didn’t teach him that when he was at one of the elite schools he attended.”
Sessions quoted Zuckerberg, who said at the Friday event in Mexico of America’s immigration laws: “we have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants and it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”
After blasting the Obama administration for meeting with the elite and “cosmopolitan set who scorn and mock the concerns of everyday americans,” Sessions singled out FWD.us, Zuckerberg’s pro-amnesty lobbying group that has employed some of the most prominent consultants on both sides of the aisle. Sessions chided “elected officials, activist groups, the ACLU, and global CEOs who are “openly working to deny the American workers the immigration protections to which they are legally entitled.”
“Well, the masters of the universe are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their aggregated compounds and fenced-off estates,” Sessions said, referring to reports that Zuckerberg spent millions buying houses near his home so that he could get more “privacy.” Like former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who has repeatedly blasted the “wealthy bipartisan elite” who “want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best ‘border security’ money can buy in their own exclusive communities,” Sessions called out the high-tech elite’s hypocrisy regarding borders.
Sessions mentioned that as high-tech executives keep pushing the debunked notion that there is a shortage of American high-tech workers, many tech companies are laying off American workers even as they push for more guest-worker visas for foreigners. Sessions noted that Microsoft announced it would lay off 18,000 workers and posed “a question to Mr. Zuckerberg.”
“Why doesn’t Mr. Zuckerberg call his friend Mr. Gates and say, ‘I have to hire a few hundred people, do you have any resumes you could send over here? Maybe I wouldn’t have to bring in somebody from a foreign country to take a job that an unemployed american might take.'”
Experts that Sessions cited have noted that high-tech companies want a large “flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and middle-class security that should come with them.”
During a time in which a record number of Americans are out of work, Sessions said that this is “a serious matter.”
“We can’t put the parochial demands of a few powerful CEOs ahead of an entire nation’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The basic social contract is that citizens agree to follow the law, pay their taxes, devote their love and loyalty to their country and in exchange, the nation commits to preserve and protect and serve their interest, safeguard their freedom, and return to them in kind their first allegiance of loyalty,” Sessions said. “The job of elected officials is to answer to the people who sent them to Washington–not to scorn them, not to demean them, not to mock them, not to sell their jobs and dreams to the highest bidder.”