Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, a “pro-immigration conservative” lobbying group, is leading a multi-faceted campaign for comprehensive immigration reform.
FWD.us is organizing a hackathon in California headquarters of LinkedIn on November 20-21. The event brings together DREAMers who will be split in teams and asked to create projects that help supporters share their immigration related stories, contact Congress members and show everyone why the country’s broken immigration system needs a fix. Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, Drew Houston from Dropbox and Andrew Mason from Groupon will mentor these children.
In addition, the pro immigration reform group is co-sponsoring trips and media campaigns to Washington DC where non profit representatives and business leaders will meet next week.
Although, immigration reform appears mostly dead, there are some who believe that supporting immigration reform would be just what the Republicans need right now. This will take the attention away from the shutdown loss and repair their party’s image.
House Republicans are currently drafting their own versions of the immigration bill targeting the different elements of the huge bill; however, their win or loss will be defined by how they deal with the situation of the 11 million undocumented currently living in the country.
With the pressure from business leaders and tech giants like Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and the major Latino voters which the Republican Party needs to win for the upcoming elections, it seems likely that immigration reform may still be taken up for a vote in the House. However, it is difficult to say how soon that will happen since there are only 23 legislative days left in the current year and the next year is the election year.
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