Mark Zuckerberg’s wealthy investor group is pressuring Joe Biden to declare his 2024 version of the 2012 DACA amnesty — and is buying TV ads to reassure progressive Democrats who are worried about another amnesty’s impact on the upcoming election.
The group’s soft-focus sentimental video pitch is titled “An American Love Story,” and it downplays the economic and pocketbook damage to Americans. It ignores the national rejection of Biden’s open-borders policy, and wraps up with a plea to “Protect American Families Today.”
NEW @FWDus TV and digital ad campaign highlights the urgent need to expand Parole in Place (PIP) to #ProtectAmericanFamilies, including long-term undocumented individuals married to U.S. citizens. Meet @amerifamsunited’s Everk and Rosa: pic.twitter.com/umwoMCfvUZ
— FWD.us (@FWDus) June 11, 2024
The couple lives in Phoenix, Arizona. The man, Everk Sanchez, is a Spanish-accented citizen who works in marketing and radio. His wife is an illegal immigrant who was protected by President Barack Obama’s illegal Deferred Action for Childhood Migrants (DACA) amnesty. They have five children.
The amnesty pitch asks Biden to grant “parole” to at least one million illegal migrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
The amnesty is being pushed by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, an advocacy group for investors created in 2013 by Zuckerberg and other wealthy, consumer-economy investors.
FWD.us and its allies have also been the major cheerleaders for President Barack Obama’s DACA program, partly because the controversy diverts attention from the inflow of white-collar visa workers that boosts investors’ stock values.
“It’s the same kind of thing [as DACA] where they’re using sympathetic characters to try to push a broader agenda,” noted Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The long-standing parole loophole in the border laws was narrowed in 1996 to cover border emergencies such as a sick passenger on an international flight, or a person rushing to a U.S. funeral. But Biden’s deputies have used parole to pull more than a million economic migrants into U.S. jobs, partly because federal judges are not using their legal power to curb the White House’s easy-migration policy. In Congress, Democrats and business-first Republicans have blocked enforcement of the parole laws.
The massive and damaging inflow has deeply damaged Biden’s polls before the 2024 election.
The FWD.us campaign is also wooing the Democrats’ progressives who view themselves as champions for minorities, such as African migrants, regardless of the impact on their fellow Americans:
If you had told this young kid that he would someday be an Attorney in the U.S., he would have laughed. However, This is what the American dream is about, and that same American dream that DACA allowed me to pursue is what I am asking the administration to create through PIP https://t.co/QFr8WP0LIC pic.twitter.com/2se6Yk0F1Q
— Foday Turay, Esq (@foday_turay_esq) June 13, 2024
The FWD.us pitch also highlights an illegal migrant healthcare technician in Montana as it suggests the parole amnesty is an extension of Obama’s DACA giveaway:
Meet Nereyda, a #DACA recipient and essential worker in Montana. Her journey reflects the resilience of immigrants. With support from organizations like @FWDus, she's making a difference in her community, contributing to society, and shaping a brighter future for her children. pic.twitter.com/5JDLk913qu
— Immigration Hub (@USImmHUB) June 13, 2024
The parole-for-marriage proposal — if enacted — would extend the parole loophole beyond the border and encourage more illegal migration and more parole amnesties, said Rob Law, the director of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the American First Policy Institute.
“It is going to create further pull factors [by telling migrants] that ‘if you too can just find your way into the United States and marry a U.S. citizen, you will find a way to a green card and a permanent life here’ in complete violation of the immigration laws, in complete disregard of our border security and national sovereignty,” he told Breitbart News.
The “parole in place” plan is “legally questionable (at best),” wrote Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. “If the White House gets away with it, expect a cascade of other Parole in Place programs for illegal parents of U.S. citizens, and then parents of green-card holders, and so on,” Arthur added.
The amnesty parole likely would be extended to other groups, such as the millions of illegal migrants who are parents of U.S. citizens, or the illegal-migrant siblings of citizens, said Law.
Since 2021, Biden has stimulated the economy by welcoming more than 10 million legal, illegal, temporary, and quasi-legal migrant workers, consumers, and renters. The flood has reduced Americans’ wages and career opportunities, and it has also raised housing costs, mortgage rates, and crime victimization. The flood has also refloated former President Donald Trump’s ambitions and washed away Biden’s reelection chances.
Advocates suggest the parole amnesty will revive Latino support, which is now lagging because Latinos suffer disproportionately from Biden’s immigration policy.
“I don’t think it would actually move the needle very much,” responded Krikorian, adding:
I can’t predict the future because it hasn’t happened yet, but it doesn’t seem likely that it will overcome all of the other issues [facing Latino voters] … Generally speaking, they’re worried about the same things as anybody else — economic issues, disorder at the border, their communities, and crime and all that stuff … Republicans get third of the Hispanic voters, and Trump might get close to half. He might even win the Hispanic vote, although that would be a reach. But you know, they’re regular voters, treat them like regular voters,
But an amnesty might be damaging for Biden if it is seen as “one more example of executive lawlessness,” Krikorian added.