Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is out with an attack ad targeting Donald Trump ahead of tonight’s GOP debate through his immigration lobbying group FWD.us
In an ad entitled, “The Parable of Pete Wilson,” Zuckerberg’s group lectures the Republican Party on the need to pass so-called “immigration reform,” which, in this context, means mass amnesty combined with more foreign workers on visas for big businesses.
Although Zuckerberg is a liberal progressive, his group claims to be concerned that the Republican Party will “lose ground” in the general election if it doesn’t capitulate to the big business immigration agenda.
The ad warns that Governor Pete Wilsons’ 1994 pledge to crack down on illegal immigration permanently soured California Hispanic voters on the Republican Party. The group cites Proposition 187, a popular ballot initiative championed by Wilson which would have prevented illegal aliens from accessing public benefits paid for by taxpayers. Shortly after the initiative was passed overwhelmingly by California voters, a federal judge blocked it.
“Wilson’s attack upon Latinos had a very serious unintended consequence,” Zuckerberg’s immigration ad says. “Inert Hispanic citizens woke up and became registered voters. Look at the numbers. Since then the share of California voters who are Lation has more than doubled, and not surprisingly, they are voting Democratic.”
As a result of Wilson’s campaign platform, “The home of Ronald Reagan, a state that elected Republican candidates in six straight presidential elections, is [now] a lock for Democrats,” the ad argues.
Studies and experts, however, have repeatedly proven this talking point to be false.
The actual reason California turned blue after the Wilson’s popular prop 187 was blocked was because the ensuing flood of immigrant voters into California favored big government policies by a margin of 2-1.
Today, after four decades of record-high green card issuances, half of California children have a foreign-born parent.
Studies have documented that where immigration increases, so too does the enrollment of the Democratic party.
A 2014 report authored by University of Maryland professor James Gimpel, found that, “the enormous flow of legal immigrants in to the country — 29.5 million 1980 to 2012 — has remade and continues to remake the nation’s electorate in favor of the Democratic Party.”
Examining the data in this study led Washington Examiner columnist Byron York to conclude: “The bottom line is that more immigration favors Democrats; there is no prediction of Democratic electoral ascendancy that doesn’t rely on demographic factors as the main engine of the party’s dominance.”
As Reuters has reported: “Immigrants favor Democratic candidates and liberal policies by a wide margin, surveys show, and they have moved formerly competitive states like Illinois firmly into the Democratic column and could turn Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas into battlegrounds in the years to come.” Indeed, Breitbart News has previously exposed how the same electoral transformation is underway in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Experts say that Hispanics’ support for Democrats has nothing to do with Republican rhetoric. Rather, the Republican will struggle to court Hispanic voters unless they drop their platform of limited government policies. As political scientists R. Michael Alvarez and Lisa Garcia Bedolla argue: “The fact that this partisan identification is based on policy issue preferences suggests that, unless the parties fundamentally change their issue positions, these Latinos’ identifications with those parties should remain fairly stable.”
Yet Zuckerberg’s ad ignores the findings of experts. “As Republicans continue to block immigration reform, that trend is making it harder and harder for Republicans to win the White House,” the ad declares.
Zuckerberg’s ad makes no mention of the fact that polls show the GOP presidential frontrunner– who has built his campaign on a message on a platform of immigration reductions– is virtually tied with Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head match up.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Zuckerberg has tired to manipulate the results a Republican primary election. For instance, in 2014 his decidedly pro-amnesty lobbying group ran ads in North Carolina telling conservative voters to elect Congresswoman Renee Ellmers because she is “anti-amnesty.” Zuckerberg’s group spent $150,000 on the deceptive ad-buy to reinstate this Congresswoman who supports the group’s agenda for expanding immigration.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley immigration lobbying coalition—comprised of CEOs from Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies– stand to gain enormously from the importation of foreign labor because an over-saturated labor market would allow these companies to drive down wages.
For instance, in the tech industry, the surplus of labor is so great that average wages in the IT industry remain the same as those that prevailed when Bill Clinton was president. Yet Zuckerberg continues to lobby for more low-wage tech workers through an H-1B visa bill introduced by Senator Marco Rubio.
Even as skilled American workers around the country are being axed and replaced with low-wage, untrained foreign labor, Silicon Valley continues to urge Congress for more foreign workers and trumpets the narrative that these low-wage foreign laborers are more skilled than Americans. Just yesterday Carly Fiorina’s former company Hewlett-Packard announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers while lobbying for more guest workers workers.
The number of immigrants in the U.S. is currently at a record high of 42.1 million. Nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents was born in a foreign country. In eight years time, the foreign born share of the U.S. population will reach an all-time high. If Silicon Valley’s lobbying efforts prove successful, that record with be shattered with even greater force and rapidity.
When the European immigration wave caused the foreign-born population share to peak in 1910, reforms were soon after enacted that slashed immigration into the United States for the next half century. Now, unlike then, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Silicon Valley and compliant lawmakers like Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio– whom Trump famously called “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator”– immigration will continue climbing year after year establishing new records never before witnessed in American history.
Silicon Valley is giddy at the prospect of this “new American century.” In fact, in a celebration of the emerging change brought to bear by four decades of record-high green card issuances, Google has launched a program called Code2040— whose name “refers to the year the population of minorities in the U.S. is expected to overtake whites.”