If your political priority were to make your nation more welcoming to talented young immigrants, and if you then backed politicians for urging “border security on steroids” (as one newspaper put it), people might think you either cynical or confused. That is why billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has found himself the object of protest in recent weeks, and some users have even urged boycotting his social network.
In April, Mr Zuckerberg announced the formation of FWD.us, a tax-exempt advocacy group led by one of his university friends and backed by Silicon Valley moguls – Bill Gates of Microsoft, Eric Schmidt of Google and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, among others. The programme is simple: to bring more foreign-born techies to the US. The immigration bill now before Congress will do that. FWD.us backs it. The problem is that the bill needs the votes of legislators in the parts of the country, especially the south and west, where immigration is least popular and the views of Bay Area billionaires cut the least ice.
To this seemingly insoluble political problem, FWD.us has applied Silicon Valley ingenuity. It has gathered a group of Republican warhorses, including former party chairman Haley Barbour and various senior aides and ex-politicians, under the name Americans for a Conservative Direction. ACD uses FWD.us money to advertise the rightwing credentials of any legislator willing to throw open the country’s gates to engineers. In television spots, senator Lindsey Graham is presented as someone who “stands up for South Carolina values” against President Barack Obama’s “seedy Chicago-style politics”. Democratic senator Mark Begich, meanwhile, is depicted as the kind of fellow who would promote his state’s economy by drilling for oil in the pristine Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.