Mark Zuckerberg, head of Billionaires for Cheap Labor, asks Congress for more foreign workers through 'comprehensive immigration reform'

SANTA BARBARA, CA — September 23, 2013 — Feeling the pinch of a tight economy, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg travelled to Washington, DC, to meet with Republican and Democratic leaders and ask for more foreign workers. Zuckerberg founded Billionaires for Cheap Labor, also known as FWD.us, to lobby for the Senate immigration bill that would bring in additional millions of foreign workers, even though more than 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate immigration bill will decrease average wages through 2025 and raise the unemployment rate through 2020. Real household income has already declined 8.3 percent over the past five years.

Zuckerberg, with a net worth of $23.2 billion, is the 27th wealthiest individual in the world. Other members of Billionaires for Cheap Labor include Bill Gates of Microsoft, net worth of $73.5 billion, and Eric Schmidt of Google, net worth of $8.6 billion.

A number of large corporations have joined Zuckerberg in his quest for more foreign workers through “comprehensive immigration reform” and have sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Among the signers were Hewlett-Packard, which laid off 29,000 employees in 2012, and Cisco Systems, which announced it would lay off 4,000 workers in addition to the 8,000 jobs it cut over the past two years.

There are more than 2 million unemployed residents of the United States with a bachelor’s or higher STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degree. Moreover, there are about 10 million Americans with STEM degrees not working in their specialties, many of whom could be lured back to those fields with appropriate incentives. Zuckerberg, however, apparently believes that Americans are too stupid or too lazy for jobs in technology.

In the second quarter of this year, Facebook spent $1.3 million on lobbying through an in-house staff of seven registered lobbyists and 20 additional lobbyists from five outside firms. At this time, it is not known how many politicians Zuckerberg purchased during his Washington trip.

“We sympathize with Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Gates during these tough economic times,” said Jo Wideman, executive director of Californians for Population Stabilization. “Unemployed Americans should try to understand the needs of these billionaires.”

– Warning: This release may contain satire. As far as we know, billionaires for cheap labor do not refer to themselves as Billionaires for Cheap Labor. –