Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group is warning Democrat and GOP legislators to ignore jobs and wages when talking to voters about amnesty bills, and to instead tell stories about “family separation.”
In a FWD.us-funded polling memo by three Democrat polling companies, the legislators were advised that:
It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.
“What hypocrisy,” responded Rosemary Jenks, the policy director at NumbersUSA. FWD.us is “all about the economics of importing poverty — and yet they don’t want to talk about poverty?” She added:
Americans recognize the [economic] issues that the [investors] don’t want to talk about. But their view is so cynical that they think that they can just prey on our sympathy or compassion [for migrnats] and get cheap labor they want. That’s a pretty dim view of the awareness level of the American people — and the awareness level of members of Congress.
The Democrats’ support for President Joe Biden’s big amnesty bill is “dismal,” Politico reported March 4.
The polling memo is a form of advocacy where politicians’ pollsters can be hired by companies to promote issues to their regular clients. In 2014, Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group hired 10 polling firms to push their pro-amnesty message — but their pitch was delivered the morning after GOP primary voters had defeated pro-amnesty Rep. Eric Cantor (D-VA).
The investors at FWD.us are playing a leading role in the Democrats’ amnesty push, in part, by helping to fund a wide variety of pro-migration groups, including the Cato Insitute and Immigration Voice.
The FWD.us memo urges Democrats to focus voters’ attention on what they claim are deserving migrants, such as illegals who took Americans’ jobs in economic sectors that are deemed essential:
• Amplify the stories and situations of those affected. Support is massive for providing citizenship for many different groups, but some of the more sympathetic groups include healthcare workers, farm and ranch workers, and school employees and teachers. Within the essential worker groups, after health care workers, the top groups include PPEfactory workers and sanitation workers.
• Reminding voters of the criteria for citizenship also boosts support and adds to the public’s comfort with granting citizenship. Some of the more popular criteria for citizenship inclusion are being regularly employed and paying taxes, having a spouse or child who has served in the military, living in America for many years, and being in danger upon a return to their home country.
▪ While voters across partisan lines find the idea of employment and paying taxes to be important, there is additional nuance to these findings by partisanship, with Democrats tending to be more sympathetic to what might happen to immigrants (that they would be in danger as they came here seeking freedom from oppression) while Republicans tend to be more sympathetic to the idea of immigrants’ contributions in the U.S. (being employed, having family serving in [the] military, being independent and not reliant on government).
• Adapting family separation messaging to the debate over citizenship is our most resonant message. Voters strongly support Biden’s action to end family separation policy at the border, and in testing a variety of messages in support of citizenship, the item below tests best: “It is cruel and wrong to deport people who have family roots in the United States, and work, pay taxes, and contribute to our communities. We must stop separating families and allow hardworking immigrants to gain legal status and a pathway to citizenship so that we keep families together.”
FWD did not describe the questions or show the details of their poll. Instead, it said:
Global Strategy Group, Garin-Hart-Yang, and LD Insights conducted an online survey of 1,200 nationwide voters and an oversample of 350 Latino voters who participated in the 2020 election between February 20-26, 2021 … All interviews were conducted via [a] web-based panel … Swing Voters as the remaining voters in the middle of the electorate who do not fall into either group.
The memo also tries to reframe the various amnesty and cheap labor bills as “citizenship proposals” — even though the bill would displace millions of Americans from a wide variety of jobs and further weaken Americans’ right to their own national labor market.
A press statement said the poll shows Democrats should unite for amnesty — or “citizenship legislation”:
“Passing major citizenship legislation isn’t just good policy, it’s good politics,” said Alida Garcia, Vice President of Advocacy at FWD.us. “Voters know that our immigration system is broken and stand ready to reward their elected officials for action or punish them for inaction. We’ve seen Republicans try to weaponize anti-immigration rhetoric and scare tactics year after year and fail consistently, it’s time for Democrats to realize that this is a winning issue that must be acted upon. The time for real action on citizenship is now.”
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal immigration, to illegal labor migration, and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
For example, a Harvard-Harris poll in February 2021 asked 1,800 adults: “Do you think that people who cross the border from Mexico illegally should be turned back to Mexico or released into the U.S. with a court date?” Sixty-seven percent said they should be returned to Mexico, while 33 percent said they should be released into the United States.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants. “For many voters, they’re well disposed toward immigrants, so when they’re asked [an amnesty] question by a pollster, they’re going to say, ‘Sure, that sounds great,’” said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “But when it comes to making priorities for policymakers, that’s a different story … It’s like asking: Do you like puppies? Sure! Do you want to own one? No!”
The ambivalent attitude is reflected in the Harvard-Harris poll, which asked 1,800 adults to rank their political priorities. Just 6 percent of Americans said Biden should deal with immigration first, and just 9 percent gave it a second ranking.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that both legal and illegal migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
FWD.us was created by wealthy West Coast investors to push the 2013 “Gang of Eight” legislation, which would have dramatically raised population growth in the United States and moved a bigger share of Americans’ white-collar and blue-collar wages to Wall Street. That bill would have been good for investors who profit from the extra supply of government-funded consumers, lower-wage workers, and high-occupancy renters.
In June 2019, Breitbart News reported the campaign by FWD.us to get driver’s licenses for illegals in New York City, and spotlight s September 2918 statement by the group:
Immigration powers the American economy, and ensuring that immigrant families living here today can thrive means greater benefits for all U.S. residents and our children in the future. The earning potential of immigrants and their contributions to the labor-force and economy grows over time and over generations …
Tony Xu, the founder of DoorDash, embodies this story … in 2013 Tony founded DoorDash, an incredibly successful meal delivery service. Today, DoorDash is valued at $4 billion, using recent investment to expand into 1,200 new cities and to hire 250 new employees, in addition to over 100,000 part-time gigs already created for delivery drivers across the country.”
DoorDash’s investors include Sequoia Capital, KPCB, SV Angel, CRV, Khosla, and Y Combinator. Their investments have paid off hugely as the company’s apparent stock value has recently climbed past $43 billion in value. Executives at the first three investment firms helped to create FWD.us, while executives of the second three investors helped fund the lobbying group.
FWD.us’s self-serving pitch about “separated families” is a diversion, said Jenks. “Every single illegal alien has a right to reunite with his or her family — by going home,” she said.
In the end, she said, FWD.us is just “demanding that American taxpayers subsidize their cheap labor.”