Sessions Fights Fire with Fire, Retaliates Against Facebook’s Zuckerberg – on Facebook!
Published on November 25th, 2013
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions retaliated against Facebook co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, net worth $19 billion, using the best possible forum – Facebook.
For months, Zuckerberg has been front and center in the comprehensive immigration reform battle. Zuckerberg formed Forward.us, a lobbying group, and hosted a “hackathon” event at LinkedIn’s headquarters where 20 young illegal immigrants coded web tools to promote immigration advocacy nationwide. On November 19, Forward.us also launched a mid-six-figure advertising campaign in English and Spanish to further push immigration reform. [“FWS.us: Why We Wait,” by Maggie Haberman, Politico, November 18, 2013]
Sessions beat Zuckerberg at his own game when he wrote on Facebook that the billionaire’s comprehensive immigration reform advocacy never mentions that the House and Senate bills would “double the number of guest workers who are brought in each year just to fill jobs – despite high unemployment.” Many of those foreign-born would come on H-1B visas and would displace some of the very high-tech workers busily helping Zuckerberg promote more immigration.
In his post, Sessions cited a recent Computerworld article that quoted Tufts’ Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Karen Panetta’s warning that “students will face increasing competition from lower-wage H-1B workers if the federal cap on visas rises.’’ Sessions also referenced Rutgers and Rochester Institute of Technology Professors Sal Hazman and Ron Hira who, in the same story, cautioned that high-tech employees under the age of 30 would be especially hard hit economically. Hira said that H-1B visas are “used extensively for cheap labor.” (See more on H-1B visas here.)
Sessions ended by writing that:
Congress should resist the pressure from these special interests and President Obama and intensify our effort to get unemployed American workers – high and low-skilled – into these jobs.
[“Sessions Hammers Zuckerberg Group on Facebook,” by Caroline May, Daily Caller, November 19, 2013]
With more than 20 million Americans unemployed, Session’s counsel should be obvious. But the advocacy of special corporate and ethnic interests grinds on undaunted, with the promise that they’re not going away in 2014.
Like Jeff Sessions on Facebook here.