Washington Post
By Ed O’Keefe
June 12, 2013
As the Senate begins debating a
bipartisan immigration bill this week, a coalition
of technology firms and larger special interest
groups is launching a new way for people to directly
contact lawmakers as the debate continues.
Engine Advocacy, a coalition of
tech firms including Google, Firefox and Yelp and
smaller firms like the online ride-share firm Uber
and CoffeeHouseCoders — a social network for hackers
— is launching “Keep Us Here,” a site designed to
help people directly contact lawmakers through
e-mail, Twitter and phone calls. By visiting the
site, KeepUsHere.org,
people can insert their home state, ZIP code and
telephone number and will receive reminders to
contact lawmakers as the debate moves through the
Senate and House.
Mike McGeary, Engine’s chief
strategist, said the group decided to launch Keep Us
Here after hearing for years from tech firms
concerned about how the nation’s outdated
immigration laws were affecting their ability to do
business.
“When you talk to [tech companies],
as we have for the last couple of years, if we were
to make a list of the top five issues that are
important, the first four would be immigration
back-to-back,” McGeary said. “It’s that level of
importance to this community, because it affects our
friends, our co-workers, our ability to grow. So we
developed Keep Us Here as an opportunity to give
these entrepreneurs a platform and to build a
coalition to talk about the virtue of making reform
to the high-skill, high-tech sector of our
immigration, but largely to build an immigration
system that works at all levels.”
The project is backed by an array
of corporations and corporate and conservative
interest groups, including the Consumer Electronics
Association; the Partnership for a New American
Economy, a project launched by New York Mayor
Michael I. Bloomberg; the company Revolution founded
by AOL founder Steve Case; and Americans for Tax
Reform, the group founded by anti-tax crusader
Grover Norquist.
It also has the support of Sen.
Mark Warner (D-Va.), a former tech executive, who is
encouraging constituents to use Keep Us Here to
reach out to Congress.
Case said in a statement that his
company is joining the project because “Immigration
reform is key to keeping talented people here in our
country to start new companies, in turn leading to
economic growth and job creation. This issue has
direct domestic economic impacts, and will also help
to keep us competitive in the global arena.”
Jeremy Robbins, with the
Partnership for the New American Economy, said
Bloomberg and other members of the group are backing
Keep Us Here because “we believe it’s an important
way to highlight how immigration directly impacts
the economy, directly impacts job creation.”
Considering the group’s makeup, it
should be no surprise that member firms are most
eager to see the new immigration bill expand the
number of visas distributed annually to high-tech
workers.
The bill under consideration in the
Senate would raise the annual limit of high-tech visas, known as H-1B, from 65,000 to as many as
180,000. But some Republican senators are lobbying
to eliminate other restrictions on U.S. companies
seeking to hire engineers and programmers from
abroad.
Changes made to the bill before it
was referred to the full Senate lift the requirement
that companies first offer tech jobs to Americans
for all firms except those that depend on foreigners
for more than 15 percent of their workforce and
relaxes the formula for determining the annual
number of foreign high-tech workers.
Keep Us Here’s leaders hope to
generate enough interest in the coming days ahead of
the group’s first national day of action scheduled
for June 18, when it will ask participants to make
calls to congressional offices.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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