After a Stumble, Tech Lobby Refocuses on Immigration

Mr. Green was pressing the flesh to drum up support for Fwd.us, the advocacy group he created with financial backing from his college roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, and several of their mostly young millionaire friends in Silicon Valley. It was a critical moment for the organization, because soon after making its debut this spring, Fwd.us fumbled badly.

Its stated goal was to overhaul immigration law. But its first steps included financing flashy, campaign-style television ads for conservative lawmakers, whose votes were seen as crucial to passing an immigration bill in the Senate. The ads promoted their pet conservative causes, including the Keystone XL pipeline. Fwd.us immediately lost many of its existing and would-be supporters in the valley.

Now the group is trying to turn around its image as it gears up for the fight for immigration overhaul in the House.

For now, its ads focus squarely on immigration rather than other more incendiary issues like drilling in Alaska or health insurance regulation. Its most recent television spot, for example, praised Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, for supporting the Senate bill last week despite significant opposition in her state. Its latest Web ad is a paean to the ultimate American ideal: the Statue of Liberty.

The group also has a new executive director, Todd Schulte, a veteran political aide with the Washington experience that Mr. Green lacks. And it is organizing tried-and-true town hall meetings like the one here to rally industry support for lawmakers who support a more open immigration policy, including provisions to let tech companies bring in many more foreign engineers. Others are planned in critical battleground districts, like Utah and North Carolina.

This evening, Mr. Green invited entrepreneurs to speak about their run-ins with the immigration bureaucracy. A few engineers from overseas had joined the meeting using Skype; slow-moving, teleporting robots wheeled iPads around the room, showing their disembodied faces glowing on screen. One member of Congress was here to hear their complaints: Representative Mike Honda, a Democrat from nearby San Jose.

Despite the apparent tweaks to its approach, Fwd.us contends its original strategy worked, helping rally senators to pass the landmark immigration bill last week.

“I would argue we’ve been pretty consistent,” said Rob Jesmer, campaign manager at Fwd.us. “We are going to use a lot of different things to try and pass this, to try to affect the process.”

After weeks of silence, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly defended his organization’s strategy in mid-June, calling it necessary and “unique.”

“That approach — of actually trying to work with people on both sides — is what makes us unique,” he wrote in response to questions on his Facebook page, adding: “And without bringing people in different parties and with different views together, meaningful reform will never happen.”

His office declined numerous requests for an interview.

The group has not revealed how much money it has raised so far, saying only that it is enough to make a difference in the process. Nor has it revealed any details on how it plans to sway the Republican-controlled House, except that it will back lawmakers who support a favorable immigration bill.

“I like to think we here in Silicon Valley have a different — and I hope, better — way of doing things,” Paul Graham, a venture capitalist and a founder of the technology incubator Y Combinator said about his hopes for Fwd.us.

This is precisely what complicates Fwd.us’s mission. Its principal constituents, the wealthy entrepreneurs of the valley, like to think of themselves as exceptional — except that some of its tactics have been criticized here precisely for reflecting an unexceptional Beltway approach.

In addition to the controversial ads, Fwd.us hired well-known Washington lobbyists. Its subsidiaries count political veterans like Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and a Republican, and Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for the Clinton administration, as board members.

Some Washington lobbyists say rewarding lawmakers with costly television ads could have unforeseen consequences for the industry, not least by considerably raising the price of influence.

“Most companies face multiple issues in D.C.,” said Alan Davidson, who was Google’s legislative director in Washington from 2005 to 2012, and is now a visiting scholar at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“High-profile ad buys on unrelated social issues might help in one debate, but can alienate future allies and set unrealistic expectations,” he said. “Hopefully this is just another sign of the tech community’s evolution and growing engagement in public policy.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that he chose to tackle immigration after hearing the life stories of unauthorized students at a junior high school near Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where he taught a class. Although Mr. Green was his choice to lead Fwd.us, Mr. Zuckerberg has taken the heat for the group’s missteps. Lately, several people in Silicon Valley have singled out Mr. Green for mismanaging the campaign and in turn, damaging Mr. Zuckerberg’s brand.

“If you come out, as Mark did, you come out as a public piñata,” said one investor, who, like many people interviewed for this article, declined to be named, because, he said, he did not want to inflame sentiments. The investor said Mr. Green had asked him this year for a “seven-figure” contribution, with no explanation of Fwd.us’s strategy. He called it a “gun to the temple” approach.

Another industry investor surmised that Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal image had suffered because of the negative attention to the group. “It is not with the masses,” the investor said. “It’s with a few people, insiders in Silicon Valley who have checks to write. A lot of them are angry and disappointed about Joe Green’s approach.”

Mr. Green sent him an e-mail solicitation in early June, the investor said, which he declined because he disagreed with the group’s tactics so far.

Fwd.us declined requests for an interview with Mr. Green. Mr. Jesmer described him as the organization’s “visionary” and said, “We talk to him 14 times a day.”

A graduate of Harvard, Mr. Green in 2007 created a Facebook application for online advocacy and fund-raising, called Causes, and in 2011, joined NationBuilder, a company that makes digital tools for political campaigns. He stayed for just under a year, before joining Fwd.us.

Jonathan Nelson, founder of a networking group, Hackers and Founders, said Mr. Green saw himself as a “pragmatic idealist.” The two met for a beer at Antonio’s Nut House, a popular pub in Palo Alto, in mid-June. Mr. Green, he recalled, said he wanted to win the immigration fight in Washington — and was willing to play ball, Beltway style. Mr. Nelson replied that Mr. Green had misread his fellow geeks.

“It’s a sin in the techno religion to play dirty politics,” Mr. Nelson said.

Bits Blog: Tech Pushes to Keep Its Spoils in Immigration Bill

Charles Dharapak/Associated Press Steve Case, co-founder of America Online and now chief executive of the investment firm Revolution, spoke about immigration reform outside the White House on Tuesday.

Keen to hold on to its winnings in a landmark Senate immigration bill, the technology industry this week put on what one lobbyist called “a full court press” on Capitol Hill, dispatching executives and entrepreneurs to buttonhole lawmakers and rallying people in the industry to dispatch e-mails, telephone calls and Twitter messages to Congress.

Human resource department heads from eight of the country’s largest technology companies popped into the offices of more than a dozen members of Congress. A new group called Engine Advocacy, which has focused on a so-called start-up visa for foreign entrepreneurs, sent its representatives to the Hill and set up a new online platform, called www.keepushere.org, to encourage techies to send Twitter posts to members of Congress. And yet another industry-led coalition, called Partnership for a New American Economy, and supported by New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, was rallying supporters to aim at crucial senators, state by state, to support the bill with a “virtual march.”

.@senatorboxer I’m from CA. #iMarch b/c #immigration reform helps UC STEM programs & creates jobs. http://t.co/0Es5di4fsg

— Dave McClure (@davemcclure) 22 May 13

The efforts all point to a wave of unprecedented effort by Silicon Valley firms to make sure the overhaul of the federal immigration law goes in their favor. The omnibus bill, which arrived on the full Senate floor this week after intense negotiations in the Judiciary Committee, contains several provisions directed specifically at the technology sector. It makes it easier for foreign students who get science and engineering degrees at American universities to get permanent residency, creates a new temporary visa for entrepreneurs, and in the most contested clause, vastly expands how many temporary contract workers can be brought into this country under so-called H-1B visas, while also raising the minimum wages they must be paid.

I just pledged to call my Senator on June 18th to ask for support on comprehensive immigration reform http://t.co/N8vpzuv7YP #KeepUsHere

— Swaroop Kolli (@swaroopkolli) 12 Jun 13

The delicate political agreement could still fall apart, and for Silicon Valley, the temporary work visas expansion is by far the most delicate piece. Labor groups say the law should require these companies to hire Americans first. Industry groups call that undue regulatory interference. Both sides have tried to muster evidence to back their claims. And this week, the industry upped the ante by bringing human resources managers directly to Washington to persuade Congress of their need to bring in foreign workers to fill job openings. Organized by the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that includes companies like Apple and Oracle, the hiring managers told lawmakers that the demand for talent is so competitive that they sometimes blatantly poach from one another.

There are likely to be more calls on the Senate floor to require companies to show that they are making efforts to hire Americans.

Meanwhile, Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, introduced an amendment Wednesday to lower the investments that an entrepreneur would need to get permanent residency. The current bill requires a foreign entrepreneur to raise $100,000 in investments to gain a temporary visa and $500,000 for permanent residency. Among other things, the amendment would lower those thresholds: anyone who raises $250,000 in investments would be eligible for permanent residence.

The biggest push is yet to come. All eyes are on what the industry’s newest, most well-financed lobby, Fwd.us, backed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, will do next. It has stepped into the immigration fight with expensive television advertisements for key Republicans who backed the immigration bill in the Senate Judiciary. Those ads included a television spot that praised the Keystone XL pipeline, a pet project of key Republican senators, and it cost Fwd.us support from some of its backers in Silicon Valley. It remains to be seen what kinds of political advertisements the group will bankroll next, and who they will back.

Latest Product From Tech Firms: An Immigration Bill

But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate mostly to Democrats.

The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.

They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.

Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out the package were informed.

“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for years.”

Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed — which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its individual supporters.

The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and firing Americans.

Silicon Valley was once politically aloof before realizing in recent years that its future profits depended in part on battles here in Washington. Its effort to influence immigration legislation is one of its most sophisticated.

The technology industry “understands there’s probably not a tremendous amount of resistance to their part of the bill,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview last week, saying he welcomed the industry support. “But their future and getting the reform passed is tied to the overall bill.”

The bill has a good chance of winning passage in the Senate. The hardest sell will come in the House, where many conservative Republicans see the deal as too generous to immigrants who came to this nation illegally.

Rob Jesmer, a former top Republican Senate strategist who helps run the new Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit group that sponsored the Rubio ad, insisted that his organization’s push is based on the personal convictions of the executives who donated to the cause and who believe immigration laws need to be changed. Those convictions just happen to line up with what their corporations are lobbying for as well, he said.

“It will give a lot of people who are educated in this country who are already here a chance to remain in the United States,” Mr. Jesmer said, “and encourage entrepreneurs from all over the world to come to the United States and create jobs.”

The profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is illustrated by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in Congress. Facebook’s lobbying budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year.

That boom in spending translates into hiring of top talent in the art of Washington deal-making. These companies have hired people like Joel D. Kaplan, a onetime deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration who now works for Facebook; Susan Molinari, a former House Republican from New York who is now a Google lobbyist; and outside lobbyists like Steven Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader, who works for Facebook.

The immigration fight, which has unified technology companies perhaps more than any other issue, has brought the lobbying effort to new heights. The industry sees it as a fix to a stubborn problem: job vacancies, particularly for engineers.

“We are not able to fill all the jobs that we are creating,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee late last month.

Chief executives met with President Obama to discuss immigration. Venture capitalists testified in Congress. Their lobbyists roamed the Senate corridors to make sure their appeals were considered in the closed-door negotiations among the Gang of Eight, which included Mr. Rubio and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who have been particularly receptive.

In the many phone calls and hallway asides on Capitol Hill this year, those lobbyists realized that they had to give a little to get a lot of what they wanted. At the top of their wish list was an expansion of a temporary visa program called the H-1B, which allows companies to hire foreigners for jobs in the United States. There are a limited number of H-1Bs available each year, and competition for them is fierce.

Companies like Facebook and Intel use them largely to bring workers to their own offices. Consulting companies like Tata, based in India, use them to supply computer workers at American banks, oil companies and sometimes software firms.

Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco. Neha Thirani contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.

Port Chester, N.Y., Is Transformed by Immigration

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Nearly 20 years after he arrived penniless in this country from Mexico, Moises owns two restaurants, with a third on the way. He has five employees, an American wife and a stepdaughter. His food even has a following on Yelp.com.

What Moises does not have is American citizenship, or even a green card permitting him to reside legally in the United States. So he inhabits an economic netherworld, shuttling among his establishments on the bus and train because he cannot get a driver’s license and making do without bank loans or credit cards even as he files for zoning permits and incorporation papers.

While the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally are often portrayed as dishwashers, farmhands, gardeners and other low-paid service workers, increasingly they are also business owners and employers. That is one reason economists say opening the door to entrepreneurs like Moises — whose last name is being withheld because of the risk of deportation — could give the American economy a shot in the arm.

The most prominent feature of the proposed immigration bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last month would provide residents of the United States who overstayed their visas or arrived illegally before Dec. 31, 2011, a long and winding path to citizenship, one that would probably take more than a decade to complete. But less noticed is that the legislation would offer such residents much more immediate provisional status, enabling them to work and travel legally.

That status would make it easier for immigrants here illegally to open businesses, buy big-ticket items like homes and cars and negotiate raises. All of these help explain why immigration reform is one of the few things economists on the left and right generally agree on these days.

While there is considerable debate about whether increased immigration depresses wages on the low end of the pay scale, most experts say allowing more new immigrants and offering a more secure legal footing for workers who are currently in the country illegally would bring the nation broad economic gains.

“We need more legal immigration,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Additional human capital results in more growth.”

Lawrence F. Katz, a liberal professor of economics at Harvard who is among those who say that immigration can push down pay for workers directly competing with new immigrants, nevertheless supports the argument that a freer flow of people from other nations would foster more growth. “No doubt some individuals are harmed,” he said, “but the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Some conservative skeptics, though, see a steep price in a broad amnesty, largely because of increased spending on social services and entitlements.

The pluses and minuses of more immigration are evident in this working-class village of 29,000 about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan that shares a border with affluent Greenwich, Conn.

A wave of Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, has transformed downtown Port Chester, which fell on hard times in the 1980s and ’90s after factories and mills closed and an older generation of Italian immigrants moved away or died off.

Today, 59 percent of the village’s population is of Hispanic origin, said Christopher Gomez, Port Chester’s director of planning and development. From 1990 to 2010, Port Chester’s population jumped by 17 percent, twice as fast as Westchester County as a whole.

The immigrant influx, he said, has become the “lifeblood” of the town. “I don’t know where we’d be without it.”

Mexican and Peruvian restaurants dot the downtown streets, while immigrant-owned stores and markets offer goods from Ecuador and services like money transfers to Guatemala and other Central American countries.

The predominance of Spanish-speaking customers has forced older businesses to adapt. Chris Rubeo, the owner of Feinsod Hardware on North Main Street, hired several Spanish-speaking workers to help him compete with a nearby Home Depot and lure Hispanic contractors and builders.

Guest Workers Are at Crux of Groups’ Deal on Immigration

The progress in the talks, which stalled late last week, had members of a bipartisan group of eight senators that has been working on an immigration bill increasingly optimistic that they would be able to introduce comprehensive legislation in the Senate when Congress returns the second week of April.

“We are very close, closer than we’ve ever been,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate group. “We are very optimistic, but there are a few issues remaining.”

The intense talks, and the willingness of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. — two groups that have often found themselves deeply divided over the immigration debate — to try to hammer out an agreement, was an indication of how much the climate has changed on overhauling the nation’s immigration laws.

When President George W. Bush pushed to revamp immigration laws in 2007, the inability of business and labor to agree on a plan for temporary guest workers was among the main reasons that effort failed. But now the two groups have weathered leaks to the news media and other setbacks in a sign of how serious both Democrats and Republicans are about getting a bill on President Obama’s desk by the end of the year.

Some involved in the negotiations remained hopeful that a deal would be reached by the weekend, but the Congressional recess, along with the Good Friday observance, made it difficult to lock all the moving pieces in place, those close to the talks said. And, while the members of the bipartisan group were optimistic, aides cautioned that no deal would be final until all the senators had signed off on every piece of the legislation.

The Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main federation of labor unions, have been in discussions parallel to those of the Senate group, and have already reached a tentative agreement about the size and scope of a temporary guest worker program, which would grant up to 200,000 new visas annually for low-skilled workers. The labor-business talks came close to breaking down last Friday, on the eve of a two-week Congressional recess, over the issue of what the pay levels should be for low-skilled immigrants — often employed at restaurants and hotels or on construction projects — who could be brought in when employers said they faced labor shortages.

One of the last sticking points in the business-labor negotiations has been the specific type of jobs that would be excluded from the program. The nation’s construction unions, officials in the talks said, have persuaded the negotiators to exclude certain higher-skilled jobs, including crane operators and electricians, from the guest worker program.

Eliseo Medina, the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and one of labor’s most influential voices on immigration issues, said, “We may be very close to a point where the senators will have an announcement soon.”

The tentative agreement seems to satisfy both groups: The business community is likely to see a number of visas that it considers adequate, while the agreement on wages is likely to please labor because it is not expected to affect the labor market adversely.

“The labor movement has been united in making sure aspiring Americans get a road map to citizenship and that any future flow program doesn’t reduce wages for any local workers,” said Tom Snyder, manager of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Citizenship Now campaign. “And we will succeed on both fronts because politicians have heard immigrant communities loud and clear: citizenship now.”

Still, Randy Johnson, the senior vice president for labor, immigration, and employee benefits at the Chamber of Commerce, cautioned that any official agreement would come from the bipartisan Senate group.

“We advise senators on the Hill how to write the bill, and they decide on what bill would make sound legislation,” he said.

According to participants in the conversations, after the business-labor talks came close to breaking down last week, some union officials pressed the labor negotiators to show more flexibility to avoid losing momentum over the guest worker issue. At the same time, some business leaders and Republican lawmakers pressed the Chamber to be more flexible on the guest worker issue so as not to derail the overall immigration overhaul.

Business and labor reached agreement in recent days on the contentious issue of how many guest workers would be admitted each year, several officials said. They said the number would start at 20,000 visas a year and could grow to a maximum of 200,000 annually.

“There is a formula that will allow it to grow and shrink according to economic needs,” said Tamar Jacoby, the president of ImmigrationWorks, a group that represents small businesses on immigration matters.

She said the formula agreed to was not flexible enough to meet the needs of specific industries in specific places.

The number of guest workers allowed in would increase as the nation’s unemployment rate fell and the number of job openings increased. A federal commission would also assess the need for guest workers, with an eye to shortages in specific industries and communities.

In the negotiations, business vigorously objected to labor’s push to have employers pay guest workers more than they pay local workers — an idea labor pushed to encourage employers to increase wages and to discourage them from bringing in guest workers.

To settle that dispute, officials said, the two sides agreed that guest workers would be paid the prevailing industry wage previously used in the guest worker program. These officials said that employers who faced a labor shortage even after the national guest worker quota was filled could request a “safety valve” exemption to bring in workers, but with additional administrative hurdles and at a higher wage rate than the prevailing wage.

“Business and labor leaders both agree that we need a system that responds to the needs of our economy, and we are now in a position where they’re both coming together around key reforms that will fix the broken immigration system and move our economy forward,” said John Feinblatt, the chief policy adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and the chairman of the Partnership for a New American Economy.

Immigration officials want RI lawsuit dismissed

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Federal and state officials are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by a North Providence woman who says she was illegally detained as a possible illegal immigrant.