The Cowardice of Mark Zuckerberg
He used to care about immigrants and Dreamers. Now he remains quiet when his voice would send a powerful message.
MARK ZUCKERBERG TOOK it personally.
Just hours after Donald Trump signed the executive order that would come to be known as the “Muslim ban” on January 27, 2017, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook at the time, posted a response on his social network. He began by saying that his own great grandparents had come from Germany, Austria, and Poland, and his wife’s parents had fled China and Vietnam to eventually be welcomed to America as refugees. These and other deeply personal connections to the issue framed the concerns he then raised about the implications of Trump’s order.
“The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we should be proud of that,” he wrote.
We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation.
The stances weren’t new for Zuckerberg, who in 2013 had launched the immigration-focused advocacy organization FWD.us. In a Washington Post op-ed announcing the initiative, he called the American immigration system “unfit for today’s world,” a judgment he arrived at following his experiences teaching local middle-schoolers about entrepreneurship in an after-school program; he discovered that some of his most talented students were undocumented. From the beginning, to his credit, Zuckerberg called for a comprehensive immigration fix—one that would go far beyond the H-1B visas that would most benefit his business, which reportedly employs the second-most workers living in America under that visa type after Amazon. Among the larger reforms he called for in his 2013 editorial were increased border security, a path to citizenship, and more rigorous STEM education.
In his Facebook post after the Muslim ban, he said he was heartened that Trump was going to “work something out” for Dreamers—recipients of DACA, just like some of the kids he’d taught about business. Zuckerberg described his undocumented students as “our future, too.”
He even welcomed Dreamers into his Palo Alto home for a Facebook Live event in 2017. Sitting on couches in front of a sun-lit wall of small white window frames with three Dreamers, Zuckerberg admonished the Trump administration, saying “To offer the American dream to people and then take it away and punish them for trusting the government is one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in a long time in our country.”
“If we don’t have the moral strength to say that we’re going to stand up for people who have been in this country since childhood, who didn’t choose to come here on their own, who are contributing to their communities and to the economy, then, for a lot of us, it makes us question, ‘What can we assume that our fellow people in this country are going to stand for?’” Zuckerberg added.
Oh, how things have changed.
Now, DACA recipients are being detained on Christmas eve, and some are even deported. Days ago, an ICE agent shot a U.S. citizen at point blank range, killing her and leaving her 6-year-old son an orphan. But the fifth-richest man in the world remains silent.