Mark Zuckerberg has spent much of the past year getting involved in political issues, from education in New Jersey to infrastructure development in Africa. But his most prominent action is likely on immigration reform, which Facebook’s founder is pushing through the FWD.us group he formed this spring.
FWD.us had a rough start, and then immigration reform fell to the wayside as fiscal issues dominated debate in Washington. But with the government open again and the debt ceiling lifted, some observers think this is immigration reform’s moment. President Obama is pushing the issue hard, and House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday he may try to hold a vote on immigration reform by the end of the year.
The tech industry is jumping on the opportunity. Next week FWD.us and other business groups are meeting with Republican lawmakers to push for new legislation, part of a broader effort by immigration-reform advocates. (Another group participating is the Partnership for a New American Economy, whose chairman, Michael Bloomberg, owns the company that publishes Bloomberg Businessweek.) Zuckerberg himself is hosting a hackathon for undocumented immigrants who want to help build tech tools that can be used by immigration advocates.
Silicon Valley’s main interest here is clear: The tech companies want to be able to hire all the talented foreign engineers they need. This means more H1B visas for high-skilled workers and an easier process for getting green cards for immigrants once they’ve been hired. But FWD.us and others are making a point to talk up their support for things that have no direct impact on their businesses, like a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In one sense, this is just a reflection of Silicon Valley’s culture—pro-business with a socially liberal bent—but it’s also a political tactic.
“The only way to get high skilled immigration passed, for example, is part of a comprehensive solution,” AOL founder Steve Case said on Bloomberg TV. “It creates that broader political coalition that’s necessary to deal with it.”
Case has been playing an increasingly prominent role in Washington politics and lead the effort to pull Silicon Valley into the fray, said Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “It has worked for tech interests as well as everyone else’s,” he says.
Things will be kumbaya next week, but the progressive wing of the immigration reform movement harbors some suspicions about its allies in business. In the past, pro-immigration groups have blocked attempts by business to push smaller, self-serving bills on their own. And the specifics of the legislative path from here looks designed to pull apart a wider coalition. Unlike the Senate, which passed a sweeping immigration bill in June, the House will deal with the immigration issues by breaking it down to its parts. This means that border security, temporary visas, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants will all be considered separately.
A former lobbyist who has advocated for business interests on immigration said this was a worrying sign, giving House Republicans will have an easy mechanism for leaving the thorniest issues on the table while still being able to say they’ve done something. The head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently told Buzzfeed he doesn’t think the House will pass a big immigration bill.
Noorani and FWD.us insist they’re not worried. Eventually, piecemeal bills backed by the House GOP will be packaged and reconciled with the Senate’s version. FWD.us takes the view that different approaches in the House and Senate is just a question of process, according to a person familiar with the group’s thinking, and is focusing on the pressure Republicans are feeling at a moment of extreme unpopularity. “All the fundamentals for why both of the parities should pursue immigration reform are still there, and in the case of the Republicans, they’re even stronger,” the person says. “This is a specific, tangible and achievable thing they can do now.”
And if not now, when? The window could be relatively small: At the beginning of next year, Congress will likely turn back to devouring itself over fiscal issues and then the primary season will kick off in earnest. In the end, immigration reform’s fate may not boil down to the issues but to the as-yet unanswered question of whether Congress can do anything at all.
