The tech world isn’t down with the President Donald Trump’s plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — and some of the biggest names in the industry are letting it be known.
With Fox News reporting Trump will terminate DACA — which protects hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation — as early as Friday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his social network and said “we need a government that protects Dreamers.”
“They understand all the opportunities they have and want nothing more than the chance to serve their country and their community,” said Zuckerberg. “And Dreamers deserve that chance.”
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104005521334931
Other tech heavyweights echoed Zuckerberg’s concern for Dreamers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared in a blog post he’s a product of two “uniquely American” attributes: “the ingenuity of American technology reaching me where I was growing up, fueling my dreams, and the enlightened immigration policy that allowed me to pursue my dreams.” He then said Microsoft and its workers “care deeply” about undocumented immigrants.
“As a CEO, I see each day the direct contributions that talented employees from around the world bring to our company, our customers and to the broader economy,” said Nadella. “We care deeply about the Dreamers who work at Microsoft and fully support them. We will always stand for diversity and economic opportunity for everyone. It is core to who we are at Microsoft and I believe it is core to what America is.”
BOX chief exec Aaron Levie — one of the youngest and most outspoken critics of President Trump in Silicon Valley — stated simply on Twitter “we must ensure that [Dreamers] can remain in America.”
Dreamers are students, friends, and colleagues. We must ensure that they can remain in America. https://t.co/rQ3LRUr6oG
— Aaron Levie (@levie) September 1, 2017
And an open letter from Fwd.us, an immigration reform organization, calling on President Trump to preserve DACA was signed by a veritable who’s who in tech: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg of Facebook, Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner, and a host of others.
“We call on Congress to pass the bipartisan DREAM Act or legislation that provides these young people raised in our country the permanent solution they deserve,” concluded the letter.