Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington

Abstract

As Silicon Valley companies have grown, with skyrocketing profits and public approbation, their executives have been startled recently to encounter an obstacle beyond their control: government regulation. Facebook now employs enough H1-B visa holders to trigger limits on its employment of hightech immigrant workers. For a company that has built a global empire on “sharing,” or moving user data through Facebook’s system as freely as possible, the prospect of limits—whether on the distribution of data or human resources—is not welcome. Facebook’s slogan, “move fast and break things,” takes as a given that the company is firmly in the driver’s seat, choosing its speed and what limits it will surpass, without its pace regulated by outside forces. Accustomed to relative technical sovereignty, Facebook and its cohort see the prospect of federal immigration restrictions not as a divergence of their interests with that of the public, but as an outdated threat from Washington, the imposition of old values on an ecosystem that has transcended them.