SILICON VALLEY: Americans Aren’t Skilled Enough To Do The Jobs We Need
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg jumped into the center of the immigration debate Thursday with the launch of a new lobbying group aimed at fixing the country’s “strange immigration policy.”
“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Washington Post op-ed announcing his new group, FWD.us. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”
FWD.us has offices in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., and is lead by entrepreneurial and technology stars, along with political operatives from both left and right. More than 30 high-profile names in Silicon Valley are backing the initiative, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, and Eric Schmidt of Google.
The group will call on lawmakers to adopt a new approach to the immigration issue for the “knowledge economy,” asking them to offer talented immigrants a path to citizenship, specifically by streamlining the H-1B visa process. Zuckerberg also calls for a greater focus in science, technology, engineering, and math — an area in which the U.S. has fallen further behind.
