The intersection of business and politics

There have been many stories recently about Silicon Valley’s new campaigns to influence immigration policy. Most recently, the New York Times ran a piece analyzing the campaign reminding me that this is an especially interesting topic for business journalists.

Here are excerpts from the Times story, which leads with pointing out that Republican Marco Rubio is the center of commercials sponsored by the technology industry arguing for reform.

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.

Silicon Valley is joining other business groups like the Chamber of Commerce in trying to get the law passed and venturing into new territory in their government relations, the Times said.

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

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.

An Economist story (via Business Insider) points out that many foreign-born entrepreneurs create jobs for those born here, making their contributions even more important as the U.S. works to decrease unemployment:

SHAYAN ZADEH, the co-founder of Zoosk, a popular online-dating service based in San Francisco, is worried.

In the current debate on immigration, few realise that foreign-born entrepreneurs create jobs for locals.

“It’s a real public-relations problem,” bemoans Mr Zadeh, who came to the country as a student from Iran and worked at Microsoft before establishing his own firm, which now employs almost 150 people.

On May 2nd Innovate for America, the new brainchild of Scott Sandell, a venture capitalist, launched a plan to get American firms with at least one immigrant founder to publicise the number of people they have hired in America. Some 40 companies, including Zoosk, BloomReach, a start-up that analyses data to help firms maximise online revenues, and QBotix, a robot-maker, have already signed up.

Politico did an interesting piece outlining the different talking points of the debate and who is saying what. Read the full article here. One of the arguments is that immigration reform will create economic growth:

 This is the argument pro-immigration reform Republicans, like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, are using to make their case.

They insist that economic growth will do a lot to outweigh any costs of the bill, and they got a boost last week when the Congressional Budget Office said it will consider the economic impacts when it estimates the cost of the Gang of Eight bill.

They’ll have strong support from other conservative thinkers, especially Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, who says the economic benefits of immigration reform are the key to any chance of survival of the entitlement programs.

His group put out a paper that concluded immigration reform would speed the pace of economic growth and could reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion. The growth will come because immigrants will participate in the labor force at higher rates, according to the analysis, but also because they’re more likely to own small businesses.

While immigration reform is often written about as a partisan issue, there are conservatives and liberals on both sides of the debate. As the bill moves through the Senate and heads to the House of Representative, I hope we’ll see more business outlets covering the economic aspect of the debate. Many business leaders have been calling to relax visa requirements for years. Only now it’s not writing about a CEO speech, it’s covering spending by some of the largest companies in the U.S.

The outcome will have far reaching affects on policy and business.