by Matthew Boyle 4 Feb 2014, 2:35 PM PDT
breitbart



FWD.us, the pro-amnesty brainchild of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, made a big splash at the House GOP retreat last week in Cambridge, Maryland, with a packet distributed to every lawmaker touting the benefits of a big, comprehensive reform bill.

However, the Republicans who received the document might be interested to learn that one of its co-authors is a hardened Democratic party operative.

According to the file properties of a near-final version of the Microsoft Word version of the document obtained by Breitbart News, FWD.us staffer Jennifer Martin was at one point the last person to modify it.

Martin is a “field coordinator” at Zuckerberg’s lobbying group, according to her LinkedIn page.

Prior to coming to FWD.us in July 2013, Martin had a long history of working for Democrats on Capitol Hill to help get Democrats elected to Congress.

From September until November in 2008, Martin worked on the campaign of Democrat Alice Kryzan in New York’s 26th Congressional district. From February 2009 until May 2009, she was the regional field director for now former Democratic Rep. Scott Murphy’s bid for Congress in the special election to fill the seat Kirsten Gillibrand left open when she was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. After Murphy won the special election, Martin became an organizer for the Fairfax County, Virginia, Democratic Party, for about five months, before signing on to be the deputy campaign manager for Murphy’s re-election bid and serving as his outreach director in his congressional office. Later, Martin worked for Rep. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) in her congressional office for about two years before joining FWD.us.

The document attempts to make the case to House Republicans that they should support amnesty and a massive increase in legal immigration, including more cheap tech labor for Zuckerberg’s Facebook. It uses data and information from left-wing groups like the Center for American Progress (CAP) and from President Barack Obama’s White House. It also suggests groups fighting against amnesty, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), are racist.

The packet was also distributed to House Democrats. FWD.us officials specifically touted that it had been given to GOP members ahead of the retreat, and after the retreat, they launched a significant advertisement campaign to sell the GOP leadership's immigration “principles.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...amnesty-packet

The Hill
By Jennifer Martinez - 08/01/13 02:39 PM ET

The California technology and agriculture industries joined forces on Thursday to canvass Capitol Hill and lobby for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents Facebook, Google, Stanford University and Yahoo, and the California Strawberry Commission held a series of back-to-back meetings with lawmakers on Thursday to hammer home a pro-immigration message before Congress breaks for the August recess. The two groups met with House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Thursday, as well as lawmakers from the House New Democrat Coalition, according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Twitter account.

The tech industry has long lobbied Congress to revamp the rules for highly skilled and educated foreign workers. Tech companies have pressed lawmakers to increase the annual cap of temporary worker visas for high-skilled workers and to make more green cards available to foreign graduates that receive advanced technical degrees from U.S. universities.

But the rare momentum behind comprehensive immigration reform this year has reverberated with the tech industry. While it has traditionally focused on the high-skilled section of the immigration debate, tech companies and trade groups have joined forces with the agriculture, hospitality, travel and other industries to push for Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.


Even the once politically shy Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become actively involved in the debate. Zuckerberg invested some of his personal wealth to help launch FWD.us, a group that's currently lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform; Zuckerberg is set to give an address on immigration next week at the premiere of a documentary directed by immigration rights activist and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas.

In a letter sent to Congress earlier this week, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, California Strawberry Commission, California Farm Bureau Federation and other agriculture groups stressed that immigration reform is necessary to ensuring the economic success of their disparate industries, which are among the largest in California.

"Our goods touch the lives of every American every day of the year – whether they are reading email, using a cell phone, opening a refrigerator or enjoying a meal. None of this would be possible without the enormous contributions immigrants have made to our respective industries," the letter reads. "They are essential and integral factors to our success."


http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...gration-reform