Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Pushing For Immigration Reform America has always been a nation of immigrants, but today, there is general agreement that the U.S. immigration system is broken. The southern border remains porous, there are 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the shadows, and tens of thousands of the most promising immigrants are forced to leave the country thanks to outdated visa rules. Now, some of the wealthiest and most successful tech executives and investors in the country — led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – are calling for immigration reform. “We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote Thursday in The Washington Post. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.” Zuckerberg has joined forces with top executives and founders from Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to launch a new organization called FWD.us, with the goal of influencing the current debate. Several top venture capitalists are also participating. “To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We need to train and attract the best.” (MORE: Vivek Wadhwa: Stop the U.S. Highly-Skilled ‘Immigrant Exodus’ Now) Visa reform is particularly important for these tech titans, because immigrants have played such an important role in Silicon Valley. “Immigrants are far more likely than natives to study science and engineering and more likely to produce innovations in the form of patents,” University of California economist Gordon Hanson wrote in a 2011 study. “Expanding the supply of immigration visas for high-skilled workers increases patenting activity in science and engineering, particularly in US high-tech firms.” But thanks to outdated visa rules, tens of thousands of skilled immigrants are forced to return home — after being educated in the U.S. — because the government does not issue enough H-1B visas. This has led to what author Vivek Wadhwa has called America’s “immigrant exodus.” This “reverse brain drain” of talent is having real consequences. The proportion of immigrant-founded companies nationwide has slipped from 25.3% to 24.3% since 2005, and in Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrant-founded startups declined from 52.4% to 43.9% during that time, according to a recent
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