I don’t think it was ever that successful. I can say years back I decided not to renew my ACM subscription because of a lot of little things like a really clueless Vint Cerf article and their unrelenting promotion of H-1B visas. I switched to the IEEE Computer Society because they were agnostic on the H-1B which was a position I could accept.

I’ve worked side-by-side with H1Bs and I can say the I probably felt the worst I ever felt when I wanted to tell a guy who was being abused by management that “your skills are really in demand you can go across the street and get a better job” but I couldn’t because that wasn’t true. I can accept giving out more green cards or some other programs but there is so much wrong with H-1B that if you are sticking up for computing practitioners I think it’s a problem to be enthusiastic.

Although ACM Queue's audience is practitioners, author submissions to Queue are invite-only. CACM's new Practice section encourages submissions from outside academia.