Pro-Amnesty Tech Groups Ready to 'Re-engage' in Immigration Debate Before Obama Exec Amnesty

by Tony Lee 10 Nov 2014, 4:24 PM PDT

The tech industry is pressuring the White House to quickly enact President Barack Obama's planned executive amnesty.

Linda Moore, the chief executive of TechNet, which has called for more high-tech visas and amnesty legislation on behalf of many Silicon Valley tech interests, told The Hill that the tech industry plans to weigh in on the issue in the coming months.

"We will be engaging in this, yes, in the next couple of months," she said. "They know the kinds of things that we would like to see done. And we will definitely reengage on that." Another tech lobbyist said the industry is "hopeful that the president will use his executive order to help our economy by including meaningful reform of the high-skilled visa crisis."

As Obama considers what executive actions to take on immigration, other pro-amnesty tech groups, including Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us—which has spent millions supporting pro-amnesty candidates and opposing amnesty opponents—have said it is now "go time" on amnesty legislation.

As Breitbart News has reported, the Obama administration, after meetings with leaders in the tech industry, has been "considering awarding 800,000 guest-worker visas via executive action in order to get support from tech executives like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for his executive amnesty.”

At a town hall in California, Obama said he was "committed" to using "all the executive authority that I legally have in order to make fixes in some of the system, and that includes potentially the H-1B system that is often used by tech companies and some of the other elements of our legal immigration system.”

The tech industry has spent millions trying to secure guest-worker visas that would reduce wages and opportunities for American workers and legal immigrants already in the country, even though there is a surplus of American high-tech workers. High-tech companies including Microsoft have been pushing for more guest-worker permits, even as they have been laying off thousands of American workers. Microsoft, for instance, announced this year that it would lay off 18,000 of its American high-tech workers.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...a-Exec-Amnesty