Chief executive officers (CEOs) of top American tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have formed a lobby group in order to change the United States’ immigration policies.
In an editorial article for the Washington Post yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of FWD.us, an organisation formed to “focus on these issues and advocate a bipartisan policy agenda to build the knowledge economy the United States needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment”.
The group includes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Zynga CEO Marc Pincus and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, among others.
“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”
Zuckerberg said FWD.us would work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration and state and local officials to change the country’s immigration policy, using social media to mobilise public support.
“To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people,” he wrote. “We need to train and attract the best. We need those middle-school students to be tomorrow’s leaders.
“Given all this, why do we kick out the more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens after educating them? Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return? Why don’t we let entrepreneurs move here when they have what it takes to start companies that will create even more jobs?”
