Wall Street Journal
By Jessica E. Lessin and Miriam Jordan
May 16, 2013
Laurene Powell Jobs has taken on a public role, backing one of the most contentious causes in the U.S. today: immigration reform. And she is doing it using some of the tactics that her late husband, Apple Inc. AAPL +1.32% co-founder Steve Jobs, employed to great effect at the technology giant.
Ms. Powell Jobs has ramped up her years-long crusade for the Dream Act, which would give citizenship to young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally. She says she also wants Congress to pass "common-sense immigration reform" for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants. She has commissioned polling, lobbied Congress, urged President Barack Obama to take action and funded a documentary about undocumented youth.
She has also broken with her long tradition of operating behind the scenes.
"I didn't know if being public would be effective," Ms. Powell Jobs told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview during which she was willing to speak only about immigration.
Several years ago, Ms. Powell Jobs was an education reformer best known as the wife of the man who created the iPhone. Now, the 49-year-old has become one of the Silicon Valley's high-profile political agitators. "Her profile is rising only of necessity and passion to change the system," said Ron Conway, a startup investor who is a friend. "I don't think she necessarily wants to be in Washington all the time. I think it is based on the necessity of the issue." He described her as "a catalyst, not a lobbyist."
With a fortune valued in the billions of dollars that includes large holdings in Walt Disney Co. DIS -1.81% and Apple, she has been a generous contributor to Democrats. She is also a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were guests at the Jobs's Woodside, Calif., home when their daughter, Chelsea, attended nearby Stanford University. And she remains close to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook.
She has brought other elements of her husband's calculated approach to the immigration campaign, controlling her message by dictating the terms under which she speaks and choosing her venues carefully. An attendee at a more than $30,000-a-head fundraiser for President Obama in San Francisco last year said that her comments on immigration at the round-table discussion had the "rapt attention of the whole room."
Ms. Powell Jobs's activism has drawn criticism from opponents of an immigration overhaul, who say that she and other wealthy individuals have made it trendy. "Immigration is very fashionable, and it's her pet cause," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a national organization that campaigns against the legalization of illegal immigrants.
Ms. Powell Jobs, or "Lo" as she is known to family and close friends, grew up in New Jersey and is the daughter of a Marine pilot and a teacher. She attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she met Mr. Jobs. They married in 1991 and had three children.
She has long had an entrepreneurial bent. In the early 1990s, she started a health-food business that sold sandwiches to health-food stores. She found some captive customers: the employees of NeXT, the computer company Mr. Jobs started after being pushed out of Apple.
Ms. Powell Jobs started tutoring low-income students on the side in 1995. Three years later, she channeled her passion for education into College Track, an after-school program she founded to help low-income students get into college. College Track offers tutoring, extra-curricular activities and leadership classes.
The program put her in contact with students who couldn't get financial aid for college because they were in the country illegally, usually brought here as children. Among them was Nora Razon, who received tutoring in English at the first College Track center in East Palo Alto, Calif., starting in 1999. In her senior year of high school, after skipping sessions dedicated to preparing college applications, Ms. Razon broke down and told the center's director that she was undocumented.
College Track helped Miss Razon, who has since become a legal resident, find private scholarships and donations that enabled her to enroll at San Francisco State University and helped pay for books and rent.
But after graduation, undocumented students couldn't work in their field because of their status. "Year after year we saw potential wasted," recalls Ms. Powell Jobs. College Track eventually created a scholarship fund for undocumented students.
In 2006, Ms. Powell Jobs backed an effort led by College Track students to collect signatures backing passage of the Dream Act, a federal bill to put an estimated two million young people on a path to citizenship. "We actually thought we could affect some change," she recalled. But in 2010, the Dream Act failed to pass again.
On the home front, Mr. Jobs took his second medical leave early in 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. When he passed away on Oct. 5, his widow went back to work and the community.
She attended Demo Days for Y-Combinator, an investment firm involved in early-stage startups, and eventually invested in the education-technology company Clever, according to people familiar with the matter.
She and her team also invested in small startups, including others that develop educational technology, through a stealth investment arm of her philanthropic firm, Emerson Collective.
But she has invested the bulk of her energy in immigration. Frustrated by the failure of the Dream Act to pass, Ms. Powell Jobs hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to conduct focus groups to gauge voter attitudes toward an overhaul. The results showed solid support, and Ms. Powell Jobs was determined to share the results with Washington.
Her star power helped her land meetings with potential supporters, and she steered clear of opponents. She told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada that President Obama had the authority to act without Congress to halt the deportation of undocumented young people, allowing them to work.
"She had done her homework," says a person who was in attendance. In June 2012, President Obama announced a policy that implemented just that.
But she still wanted a permanent solution for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. So she turned to the media to craft a mass message, just as her husband had. Davis Guggenheim, the film director and producer, agreed to develop a documentary last September. "For her, it was all about impact; how do we convince people so that this legislation gets passed," he said. Ms. Powell Jobs pushed to have the project completed within months to coincide with national discussions around an immigration bill.
That same month, she tapped her Valley influence to arrange for former President Clinton to meet young Silicon Valley founders. Immigration was a hot topic. Over lunch at the Village Pub in Woodside, entrepreneurs including Dropbox Inc.'s Drew Houston and Sebastian Thrun of the online-courses site Udacity Inc. told the former President about challenges they had faced, such as getting visas for employees, according to people who attended.
Early this year, Ms. Powell Jobs launched her campaign with TheDreamIsNow.org website, which features videos uploaded by young immigrants. She also worked her connections to get Mr. Guggenheim's film screened at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center and provided influential friends with copies.
Ms. Powell Jobs has continued to work behind the scenes, meeting, for example, with Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and John McCain, who were part of a bipartisan group that drafted an immigration bill, and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California. "We are very deliberately working with Republicans and Democrats," she said.
These days, she's keeping a close eye on the immigration bill as it evolves in Washington and monitoring amendments that could unravel it. The movie is being screened on college campuses, and some churches have expressed interest in showing it too. She also plans another trip to Washington. Despite College Track's growth to six sites around the country serving more than 1,200 students, Ms. Powell Jobs has continued to advise students like Itzy Gutierrez, whose undocumented father, a construction worker, was deported to Mexico.
It was Ms. Powell Jobs who encouraged her to apply to Stanford, Ms. Gutierrez says. After she was admitted, Ms. Powell Jobs accepted an invitation to dinner at the Gutierrez home, a cramped, two-bedroom cottage where they celebrated over Spanish rice with tilapia and steamed vegetables.
"I'm in touch with many of my former advisees," Ms. Powell Jobs said. "I will keep working on their behalf."
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