Elon Musk Quits Mark Zuckerberg's Lobbying Club 71
theodp writes "Valleywag's Adrian Chen wasn't the only one troubled by the tactics of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us political lobbying group. Composed of a Who's Who of tech millionaires and billionaires, the group boasted its control of massive distribution channels, broad popularity with Americans, and money would make it a political force to be reckoned with. But the group came under fire for embracing decidedly old-school political tactics, forming both left-leaning and right-leaning subsidiaries, thus broadening its appeal to those who might help advance its agenda. Reports that FWD.us had funded ads praising Arctic oil drilling drew fire from critics, including Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who FWD.us listed as a 'Major Supporter.' Not anymore. Valleywag reports that Musk has quit Zuckerberg's lobbying cabal, apparently feeling that the group's ends did not justify their hit-both-sides-of-the-aisle-to-get-what-you-want means. 'I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause,' Musk said. 'This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.' By the way, didn't members of the Zuck PACk create, fund, and appear on Code.org, which lamented the sad state of U.S. CS education and featured a slick documentary showing technically clueless little kids, just weeks before launching their pro-techie immigration push? Hey, all's fair in love and lobbying!"
Re:Stupid summary (Score:4, Informative)
Those aren't "studies", they are a screwball's collected and biased web links. Matloff hasn't done "studies".
Have a look at his earlier web pages, where he was talking about the supposed evils of immigration in general:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/Imm.html [ucdavis.edu]
He switched over to flaming just against H-1B because that's presumably more politically correct.
First of all, they are qualified to do the low-level tech jobs they get hired for, otherwise employers wouldn't hire them. And I don't think it's "a bit much". You can see a good economic analysis here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2013/04/24/an-alternative-theory-of-the-skills-shortage/ [forbes.com]
In effect, US companies are willing to pay up to a certain amount for tech workers, but no more. If the price of labor rose more, companies would just move the jobs themselves overseas.
So, Matloff is right to the degree that H-1B visas are about keeping wages down. He's wrong in believing that that's a bad thing, since the alternative to hiring the H-1Bs is not higher-paid IT jobs for Americans, it is losing IT jobs from the US altogether.