Does Mark Zuckerberg really care about immigration reform?

Here’s a Facebook dilemma.

Should we “like” Mark Zuckerberg’s passion for immigration reform?

What’s not to like? His new organization, FWD.us, is pushing for comprehensive immigration reform and it touches on all the right buzz words – “bipartisan”, “knowledge economy”, “effective border security” and attracting “the most talented and most hard-working people”. And music to Indian ears - more H1Bs.

And he has lined up the who’s who of the tech world behind it – Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Aditya Agarwal (Dropbox), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and many others.[caption id=“attachment_746419” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. AP[/caption]

If you go the FWD.us landing page, you’ll see a beautiful old black and white photograph of would-be immigrants, a little girl with ribbons in her hair, a boy being held up by a man, his shirtsleeves rolled up, all gazing out at the hazy New York skyline across the water. Across it the headline simply reads – Join to support comprehensive immigration reform. And below that – Connect using Facebook.

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So far, so good. So why is Adrian Chen of Gawker having misgivings calling his immigration crusade “self-serving”?

The problem is no one knows whether Mark Zuckerberg really cares about immigration reform or does he just care about his company (more H1-B workers, less restrictions, easier way to get them etc.)? The temptation is to say who cares as long as what’s good for Facebook is good for immigration reform - a happy confluence.

But Chen argues it does matter. It’s one thing if Zuckerberg is going to Congress to plead his case, like any company CEO, for more H1B workers for his business. That’s perfectly transparent and part of his job. It’s another thing if he is marshalling other tech tycoons and creating the faade of what looks like a “social movement” but which is really still all about their companies’ bottomline.

The Washington Post reports that Facebook lobbyists were “pressing to insert a few new words helpful to Facebook’s business interests” into the immigration reform bill being drafted in Congress. For example, they don’t want to have to make a “good faith” attempt to find American workers for their jobs anymore or pay higher wages to foreign workers.

These are all perfectly valid corporate objectives and lobbyists get paid big bucks to push for language like this in all kinds of bills. But as Chen writes Fwd.us’ “true innovation is recasting the mundane political work of lobbying for laws that favor corporations as an exciting social movement to ‘fix’ Washington with innovative new political tools”.

It’s creating a chimera of a social movement and capitalizing on the fact that technology, unlike say tobacco or defence, has an aura of basic decency about it in the public eye. Anything that brings together Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook sounds like something we should all be happy to “like”.

FWD.us is clearly, and nakedly, aware of this soft power. A memo by the group’s president Joe Green sent to potential supporters (and published by Politico) makes that amply clear. The memo listed three reasons why the tech industry can be “one of the most powerful voices” in politics:

It controls “massive distribution channels”. It’s “broadly popular with Americans”. It has “individuals with a lot of money”.

It sounds like Big Brother with the happy face emoticon. Green later backed away saying his language was “poorly chosen” but not that it was not true.

As if to indisputably prove that this “social movement” really has very shallow ideological roots, the group has created two ideologically opposed subsidiary groups - the right-leaning Americans for a Conservative Direction and the left-leaning Council for American Job Growth.

Now there is bipartisanism and then there is rank opportunism. The ACD funded ads trashing Obama’s health care reform - an issue that is not about immigration reform. But it has everything to do with bolstering Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, one of the few Republican supporters of immigration reform. It’s also run ads supporting oil drilling in the Arctic.

It begs the question what does FWD.us actually stand for. Will it run ads against sensible gun-control legislation if its supporter happens to also support immigration reform? In the world according to FWD.us is immigration reform all about more H1Bs with less red tape or is it about a larger humanistic attitude towards immigrants?

There have been those in the immigration movement who have long tried to create two buckets of immigrants - the desirable STEM (science, tech, engineering, mathematics) ones and the less desirable farmworker/dishwasher ones. If push comes to shove, will FWD.us eventually throw one group under the bus to smooth the path for the other one?

Chen rightly identifies all the reasons why we should be a little wary, if not queasy, about Silicon Valley turning into a knight in shining armour for immigration reform. But he falls into the same trap so many immigration activists do - he appears to dismiss the need for immigration reform for the H1B engineer just because he might be paid a little more and be working in an office instead of picking strawberries under the hot sun.

As commenter 20times2 writes on Gawker:

So, wait, I’m confused - what’s the politically correct stance we’re supposed to take again? Be for immigration reform, but only if we’re talking about blue-collar low-skill jobs (that don’t affect Gawker’s friends and high-skilled workers?)

Some of us might only care about more H1Bs. Some of us might only care about not having to work 12 hour shifts without bathroom breaks in a poultry farm in middle America. But a fixation on either forgets the simple fact that the much-bandied phrase “comprehensive immigration reform” has three words. Immigration and reform signal the end goal. But only “comprehensive” can make “immigration reform” truly meaningful.

Read Adrian Chen’s entire Gawker story here.