By: iPadfanzz Editor on April 12, 2013
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new political action group, FWD.us (pronounced Forward US), to push for immigration reform, describing America's current system as "unfit for today's world."
Zuckerberg announced the move through an editorial in The Washington Post, called U.S. immigration policy "strange" for a nation of immigrants and "unfit for today's world."
Supporting his cause are top tech executives who have banded to together to push a bipartisan policy agenda to change how the U.S. approaches immigration. The group has vowed to work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration, and state and local officials. It plans to use online and offline advocacy tools to build support for policy changes.
The members of FWD.us include: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer; Dropbox CEO Drew Houston; angel investor Ron Conway; Chamath Palihapitiya of the Social+Capital Partnership VC fund; Joe Green, co-founder of the Causes Facebook app; Jim Breyer of the Accel Partners VC fund; Matt Cohler of the Benchmark VC fund; John Doerr and Mary Meeker of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC fund; Paul Graham, co-founder of the Y Combinator seed capital firm; PayPal co-founder Max Levchin; Aditya Agarwal, VP of engineering at Dropbox; and Ruchi Sanghvi, a former Facebook engineer who started a company later acquired by Dropbox.
"We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it's a policy unfit for today's world," Zuckerberg wrote in an editorial for The Washington Post to launch the lobby group.
"To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people. We need to train and attract the best. We need those middle-school students to be tomorrow's leaders," he wrote.
"Given all this, why do we kick out the more than 40% of math and science graduate students who are not US citizens after educating them?"
The things that the group believes need to be implemented:
* Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.
* Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.
* Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.
A lot of technology companies based in the US have been advocating for reforms in the immigration policy, so that more foreign engineers and scientists remain in the U.S. post-graduation. They have been hoping for prompt action for a pair of bills introduced this year that would ease the shortage of skilled workers, in part by expanding the H-1B visa program.
Zuckerberg noted in his editorial that the economy of the last century was based on natural resources, industrial machines, and manual labor -- all areas with finite opportunities for wealth. But today's economy is based on knowledge and ideas, which are renewable and available to everyone, he pointed out.
He argued that in the so-called knowledge economy, the nation needs the most talented and hardest-working people, and that means the U.S. needs to change its policy toward immigrants.
