Senator Alan Simpson thought he did. Then he ran into a postpartisan, ideologically androgynous political colaition that included formerly DC-phobic Silicon Valley. The immigration battle of 1996 was turning point for high tech- and for Washington, too.
José Arreola, a pleasant, soft-spoken 46-year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, tortoise-shell glasses, and a PhD in transistor physics and electrical engineering, might seem an unlikely political scapegoat. Arreola is the director of technology development at Cypress Semiconductor. From his nondescript cubicle in the firm's San Jose headquarters, he manages a team of 40-odd engineers who work on what Cypress CEO T. J. Rodgers calls "our most advanced technologies for the future." "My division," José adds with a grin, "is where the science is."
But at a rally one night before the Iowa caucuses last February, Pat Buchanan let loose with the blunt message he planned to deliver, if elected, to the hordes of foreigners amassed at the country's borders: "Listen, José, you're not coming in this time!" It was, actually, the only instance in the whole campaign that Buchanan mentioned the name - but it stuck. Soon, in headlines and in editorials, in cartoons and in commentaries, "José" had become vivid shorthand for Buchanan's nativism and a symbol of the simmering anti-immigrant sentiment in the electorate at large.
"I was truly pissed off," says Arreola, a native of Mexico City who came to the US for graduate school in 1974, went home for a time, then returned a few years later on an employment visa and, in 1985, became a citizen. "First of all, I felt it was a personal insult, because it was very specifically directed at one segment of the population: Mexicans. And, well, my name is José, so it touched me directly. Of course, he was just making a political statement. But I think the guy really didn't know what he was talking about. I mean, it doesn't make much sense to keep people like me on the other side of a wall."
Which is quite an understatement, considering that people like José - immigrant engineers and scientists - are the lifeblood of an array of leading-edge industries. The computer hardware and software businesses, pharmaceuticals and finance, biotech, telecom, and electronics are all driven, to one degree or another, by the firing of foreign-born synapses. From high-profile figures like Intel's Andy Grove, who is from Hungary, and French-born Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland and now CEO of Starfish Software, to scores of lesser-known names, immigrants make Silicon Valley hum. Fully a third of the Valley's engineers hail from abroad; on Arreola's team at Cypress, the figure is closer to two-thirds. A map on the wall is covered with pins that show where his people came from: Shanghai, India, Iran, Cuba, even Mongolia.
At the start of this year, however, it was the image of Buchanan's José and not the reality of Cypress's that seemed to hold the nation's political class in its sway. In the wake of California's Proposition 187 and on the cusp of the presidential election, a consensus had formed at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that it was time to do something about immigration.
On Capitol Hill, Congress was poised to pass the most severe anti immigration legislation since the 1920s. Significantly, measures designed to crack down on illegals were paired with plans to slash legal immigration by 40 percent. Senator Alan Simpson and Representative Lamar Smith, the two leading Republican voices on immigration, were pushing the bills hard. The White House was sounding supportive, having been given cover to back the cuts by a set of similarly restrictive recommendations from a bipartisan commission chaired by the late, famously liberal Barbara Jordan. It was a powerful, if unlikely, alliance. And with no politician daring to risk being called "weak" on immigration in an election year, it seemed an unstoppable one as well.
But six months later, the unstoppable alliance had been hacked to pieces by another, equally unlikely one. Proposed cuts in legal immigration had not been modified, or delayed, or scaled back - they'd been scrapped altogether. Simpson and Smith had been routed. The White House had come around and done the right thing, albeit reluctantly. The final bill dealing with illegal aliens still contained provisions that staunch pro immigrationists found troubling, but there was no question that a potential disaster had been averted.
"The restrictionists wanted to impose a régime that was as close as America could ever get to Europe's zero-immigration policies, and that goal was within their grasp," says Frank Sharry, head of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington, DC-based pro-immigrant advocacy group. "But they failed. Not only did we keep them from getting everything they wanted on legal immigration, we kept them from getting almost anything. The deck was stacked in their favor, but we outfoxed them. It was, I think, an astonishing victory."
And all the more so for the way it was won. For when Sharry talks about "we," he is talking about a loose, informal, uneasy, tenuous, fractious, chaotic, but ultimately successful pro-immigration coalition which bound together as allies some of the strangest bedfellows imaginable: the libertarian right, the old-school left, Christian conservatives, supply-side Wall Streeters, ethnic groups, and the business community. Strangest of all - perhaps even historic - was the presence of a clutch of companies from Silicon Valley.
No industry since the dawn of the New Deal has developed more free of the hand of government than the bit business; and, not coincidentally, no industry has been so disengaged from the ins and outs of politics and policy. "The high-tech community's view of Washington has traditionally been that it's this alien entity on the other coast," says William Archey, president of the American Electronics Association. "Our government relations policy has boiled down to Keep those bastards off our backs." But as the hardware and software industries have grown, and as the Feds have cast an increasingly attentive eye on their doings, the Valley has found itself, by necessity and by choice, more alert to the affairs of the capital. Offices have been set up in DC. Schmoozing has gone on; even some boozing. The atmosphere was unhurried, exploratory, tinged with aloofness - until the immigration debate fiared. Suddenly, high tech had no choice but to dive headlong into a hot, politically charged, election-year battle, in which the stakes involved not only the industry's own bottom line, but the fate of tens of thousands of wannabe Americans and the country's competitive position in the new economy.
It was a fight for which high tech was profoundly unprepared - and it showed. Time and again during the ensuing months, the industry fiirted with disaster: by behaving stupidly, or selfishly, or with exactly the same cluelessness about Washington that it routinely accuses DC of displaying toward the Valley. Yet, time and again, high tech was saved: by its own energy and rare moments of clarity, by the savvy of its unlikely allies, and, most critically, by the grand miscalculations of Alan Simpson, an overblown and decrepit figure who nonetheless seemed likely to win this, his last battle to close the golden door of immigration.
Mostly, the industry just got lucky. And, therefore, so did we.
The broker, the head banger, the guy who gets in and mixes it up" is how Rick Swartz describes himself, and nobody who's worked with him, let alone against him, disagrees. "Politics is a contact sport with Rick," Sharry says. "He's a rumbler. He says to people, This is what you should be doing; if you don't, I'm going to jam you."
Sharry and Swartz are old friends and allies in the immigration wars. It was Swartz, a liberal lawyer and activist, who in 1982 founded the National Immigration Forum. Eight years later Sharry took over, and Swartz went solo as a consultant. He quickly landed his first big-time client: Richard Gilder, a wealthy Wall Street stockbroker with close ties to the Jack Kemp-Steve Forbes wing of the Republican Party. What Gilder wanted was someone who could find common ground among groups from across the ideological spectrum, in favor of causes such as immigration and free trade. Swartz, who saw his work at the forum in precisely those terms, agreed to make it happen.
And so it was that, during the 1990s, Swartz developed a unique specialty: building what he calls "left-right coalitions." First came the Immigration Act of 1990, a piece of legislation that had been conceived as a way of limiting legal entries into the US but instead, due partly to Swartz's work, had ended up increasing them. On NAFTA, he served as a bridge between Hispanic groups, the White House, and congressional Republicans. At one point, Swartz even took a stab at tax reform, trying (and failing) to broker a deal between the ethnic left and the supply-side right.
Given this history, it was all but inevitable that Swartz would find himself, in the spring of 1995, talking to Gilder about another left-right coalition, this time to fend off what Simpson and Smith had in mind. "After 15 years of working on immigration, I could see how badly the politics were shaping up," Swartz recalls. "You have this whole anti immigration thing in the public coming out of Prop. 187. You have two Republican committee chairs who are completely hostile. You have a Clinton administration that's totally untrustworthy. It's just obvious to me that if we don't have a left-right coalition, we're going to lose, and lose badly, on everything."
That April, Swartz started pulling together a far-fiung assortment of advocates, who would meet every two weeks for the rest of the year. It was, by any standard, a crew of staggering ideological eclecticism. There were libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Center for Equal Opportunity. There were ethnic groups like La Raza and the Organization of Chinese Americans. There were liberal activists from the ACLU, and religious ones from the US Catholic Conference and the American Jewish Committee. There were business lobbyists from the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. There were congressional staffers of both parties. And there was Grover Norquist, a well-known antitax crusader and a fixture in Newt Gingrich's inner circle.
Swartz's embryonic coalition was immediately forced to confront the fact that its members had different objectives. What moved those on the right were proposals by Simpson and Smith that to combat illegal immigration, the government should create a national worker computer registry, perhaps even issuing national ID cards, complete with "biometric data" such as fingerprints and retina scans. These ideas bothered some on the left, too, but what moved them even more were the proposals to cut family-based immigration (about 500,000 visas last year) by a third, and to cut refugee and asylum admissions (90,000) in half. And business wanted mainly to protect the 140,000 permanent and 65,000 temporary employment visas issued each year.
Still, by midsummer, necessity had proven to be the mother of strategy, and the left-right group had settled on a core goal: legal and illegal immigration, which Simpson and Smith planned to combine in a single legislative package, should be dealt with separately. This split-the-bill concept was the brainchild of Cato's Stephen Moore, who believed the Republican chairs were "intentionally blurring the distinctions between the two issues and that if we could separate them, there would be considerable public support for continuing legal immigration."
Moore's strategy would create a patch of common ground on which the disparate factions of the coalition could all comfortably stand. "Ethnics didn't have to say nice things about business immigration, and business didn't have to say anything about family visas," Sharry explains. "All everybody had to say was: legal immigration's good, so split the bill. At first, I'll admit, it was mostly a tactical thing. But it was right on the merits, and gradually, it became a powerful, unifying theme."
The only trouble was the business community remained unconvinced. Phyllis Eisen, NAM's immigration lobbyist and a former employee of Swartz's at the forum, was a regular at the left-right meetings; Swartz himself was advising Microsoft. But the coalition's other contacts with high tech were spotty at best. Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, and other firms were buzzing round Washington, but they weren't really organized, and they hadn't made any commitments to push for splitting the bill. As October rolled around and Smith prepared to put his measure before the House Judiciary Committee, the pro-immigration alliance was shaky. Swartz feared that Smith would try to buy the business faction off.
Which is precisely what he did. By offering a compromise on worker visas, Smith was able to extract from business an agreement to abandon split the-bill. Playing a novel and slightly awkward role, the high-tech firms led the way in cutting the deal with Smith. They knew the compromise he offered was far from perfect, but they feared that the momentum was all in his direction, and that Swartz's left-right coalition simply didn't have legs.
"We looked at this split-the-bill alliance and decided it was just too fragile to stay together for the long term," says a senior high-tech industry lobbyist. "I heard people say, 'I can't go to my CEO and say, We're not taking Smith's deal because we're working with these family and ethnic groups.' Plus, we weren't sure those guys would be with us in the end, anyway. When people started screaming about businesses importing immigrants as cheap labor, maybe they'd join in and we'd get screwed. It was just a clash of cultures."
With business's defection from the coalition, the issue became a partisan one: every Republican on the committee save one voted with Smith to keep legal and illegal immigration together in one piece of legislation. When the dust settled, family immigration had been creamed - in terms of raw numbers, and in terms of taking away the ability of naturalized US citizens to bring their parents, siblings, or adult children into the country from abroad - and the number of refugee admissions had been chopped in half.
"The ethnic groups, the church groups, even the groups on the right all felt that they'd been double-crossed by business, that they'd been misled," Swartz says. "My feeling was that the business people had made a huge mistake in terms of their self-interest. If they'd hung tough on split-the bill, even if we'd lost, it would have sent a message to Simpson and the Senate. But by abandoning split-the-bill, I figured it would give Simpson the courage to introduce a really dramatic bill that would be a catastrophe for everyone."
A few weeks later, it happened. Simpson's bill was the harshest, most draconian piece of anti-immigration legislation to be considered seriously in decades. It attacked family immigration, and it ravaged business immigration with a set of provisions that would have been especially devastating to Silicon Valley. Permanent employment-based visas were to be reduced from 140,000 to 90,000. An "immigrant tax" of US$10,000, or 10 percent of the worker's first-year salary, would be levied on firms. Any foreign-born student would need two years' work experience outside the US before an American company could hire him or her on a temporary visa - an effective ban on campus recruiting. And so on.
The high-tech community had just learned a hard lesson in Capitol Hill dealmaking. It had also just heard the first of many loud, nasty roars from the man known in some quarters as "the lion of immigration." It was like the end of the world," says Ira Rubinstein, Microsoft's point person on immigration. "It was as if the contributions of immigrants to high-tech firms had never occurred. As if Andy Grove never existed. As if the huge percentage of foreign students in US graduate programs had been waved away. As if the realities of our whole business had been completely ignored and all that was left was the ideology of restriction."
Rubinstein's reaction typifies the awakening that rapidly occurred within the high-tech world. What had been a loose alliance of firms became, almost overnight, a formal organization: American Business for Legal Immigration. ABLI, run by Jennifer Eisen, Phyllis's daughter and fellow immigration lobbyist, set to work planning a "lobby day" on which a hundred execs, many from the Valley, would hit Capitol Hill en masse. ABLI also commissioned studies to refute Simpson's claims that high-tech firms use immigrants as cheap labor and that immigrants steal jobs from equally qualified native-born engineers and scientists.
Of course, Simpson was prone to putting those claims more colorfully. "Business advocates continually give me the babble: All we want is the best and the brightest. I say: Bull! You want the best, brightest, and cheapest, and I for one am going to bust up your playhouse!" In one of the ABLI- and Empower America-funded studies, Cato's Stuart Anderson dismantled the cheap-labor thesis with data from the National Academy of Sciences, showing that foreign-born engineers and scientists typically earn higher salaries than their American-born counterparts who completed advanced degrees in the same year. (Another report, from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, showed that one in four patents in America are created by immigrants.) As Anderson argued, with the jobless rates for computer scientists and top-fiight engineers at 1 to 2 percent, with salaries in these fields soaring, and with high-end jobs going unfilled at many Silicon Valley companies, native-born propellerheads don't seem to be suffering too grievously from competition with legal immigrants.
To anyone familiar with the high-tech industry, Anderson's conclusions were fairly obvious. But since few congresspeople fell into that category, the Valley had some serious schooling of its own to do.
"Last November, Bill Gates was quoted saying that if you want to prevent firms like Microsoft from doing work in the US, then the Simpson bill was a masterpiece," a high-tech lobbyist recalls. "Simpson responded by saying he'd never want to stop Gates from getting 'the best guy in Germany to do some kinda X chip.' I thought, Jesus, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He thinks Microsoft makes chips!"
Ignorant or not, Simpson had jolted high tech to life. And he'd done something else as well: resurrected split-the-bill. With Simpson palpably hostile to business, and with Edward Kennedy, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Democratic leader on immigration, aching to turn skilled worker visas into a populist, anti-foreigner campaign issue, Silicon Valley began to appreciate the wisdom of isolating legal immigration. Prodded by Phyllis and Jennifer Eisen, the high-tech forces began gravitating back toward Swartz's coalition - which was in the process of being adopted by a rather unexpected champion: the first-term Republican senator from Michigan, Spencer Abraham.
In another life, in another era, Simpson and Abraham would have made an ideal silent-film comedy team. A rail-thin, bald-headed, stoop-shouldered WASP from Wyoming, Simpson has the look of a scarecrow left out too long in the sun. Abraham is Max Klinger in a suit - relentlessly ethnic, screamingly urban (if not urbane), as textured as his counterpart is brittle. At 6-foot-7, Simpson is the Senate's tallest member. With too many chins to count, Abraham is its chubbiest.
The contrasts between the two men extend to the political, at least where immigration is concerned. During his 18 years in office, Simpson has cultivated a reputation as Congress's leading authority on the subject; certainly he is its leading restrictionist. Abraham is a neophyte, but his every instinct pushes in the direction of openness. The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, he was by temperament the ideal champion for split-the-bill in the Senate. For while the main tension in the left-right coalition was between those concerned with family immigration and those concerned with business immigration, Abraham was passionate about both. "Spence believes families should be able to reunite, and he believes that immigrants have given the country a big economic edge, especially in high tech," says Cesar Conda, his legislative director. "He also understands that key people in places like Silicon Valley come in on family visas as often as they come in on business visas."
Yet, because Abraham was a mere freshman in an institution that reveres seniority above all else (apart, perhaps, from the ability to get on television), he seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge to Simpson. A wily legislator and an expert on both the intricacies of immigration law and the arcane rules of Senate procedure, Simpson also happened to have announced that he would retire at the end of 1996. The immigration bill, therefore, was to be his lasting legacy, a landmark piece of legislation to deal with what he called "the strain on the fabric of America" that the infiux of newcomers was causing. So confident was Simpson that in November, when Abraham first met with him privately and said he planned to oppose cuts in legal immigration, Simpson's reaction was, in essence: So what?
He was equally dismissive of the high-tech crowd. For almost two decades, Simpson had been violently at odds with the pro-immigration forces - "the groups," he called them. These newest players were as irksome as the others, and plainly naïve. Simpson was in no mood to try to accommodate them. "This time, he didn't want to deal with the groups," says a senior Senate aide. "He wanted to beat 'em, just roll right over 'em."
Even after the harshness of Simpson's bill, his unrelenting intransigence in the weeks that followed came as a surprise to high tech and the rest of the business lobby. Considering the bill, they knew a deal would be very difficult to cut; what amazed them was that no credible deal was even offered. "You'd come out of these meetings with Simpson's staff and say to yourself, Were those Republicans we just talked to?" one high-tech lobbyist remembers. "Isn't there supposed to be an affinity here? We are US business, after all."
In fact, Simpson's prime target was family immigration, where the numbers were highest. But he knew to expect stiff resistance on that front from Kennedy, who would be eager in the bargain to sound the alarm over cheap imported labor stealing American jobs. So business would be Simpson's bartering tool; in the deal he foresaw striking, Kennedy would make concessions on family immigration and Simpson would deliver a solid whack to corporate America. From Simpson's point of view, business had no room to maneuver. If he wouldn't do a deal with them, who would?
What all this added up to was Simpson's fundamental delusion: that he was in control of the process.
In fact, the ground was shifting all around him. In January, for instance, Swartz managed to worm his way into the White House to meet with Rahm Emanuel, the president's main political hand on immigration. A few months before, Clinton, sprinting desperately to the "center," had endorsed the Jordan commission's recommendation that legal immigration be cut by a third. With one eye permanently locked on California, where the anti-immigrant feelings ran strongest, Emanuel was skeptical of split the-bill. But Swartz convinced him that it wasn't a hopeless cause, and that protecting family visas was good politics in the swing-state ethnic communities critical to Clinton's survival. In the end, Emanuel agreed that the White House would encourage - ever so discreetly - the committee's Democrats, especially Kennedy, to support split-the-bill.
At the same time, Simpson's assumption that business had nowhere to turn was being demolished by Abraham, whom high tech (as well as the rest of the split-the-bill alliance) embraced with a grateful fervor. On the inside, Abraham wheedled and cajoled his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. On the outside, Op-Ed pieces began appearing in the pages of The Wall Street Journal by the likes of Grove and T. J. Rodgers. (Rodgers trumpeted the fact that four of Cypress's ten vice presidents were immigrants, while using the example of José Arreola as a rebuke to Buchanan, whose victory in the New Hampshire primary in February had turned up the heat even further on the immigration debate.) ABLI's studies were fed to friendly editorialists at the Journal and elsewhere, who started a steady drumbeat of criticism for Simpson's proposals and support for split-the-bill. As Swartz puts it, "Business was slamming, especially high tech - I mean just going nuts."
And yet, even then, the left-right coalition remained in some ways as fragile and full of suspicion as ever. Some of the suspicion was well founded, for as it started to dawn on Simpson that he might actually lose the vote on splitting the bill, the chances rose that he, too, would try to buy business off. And for all the energy they had been expending on behalf of split-the-bill, large chunks of the business coalition were still perfectly willing to be bought.
Three days before the Judiciary Committee was to take up Simpson's bill, and the day before ABLI's "lobby day," the senator met with five of the group's leaders to talk about a deal. "If one could've been cut that day, I could've taken it to everyone the next morning, and the whole debate might have changed," says Jennifer Eisen, who was in the room. "But he didn't offer a deal. We ended up arguing over the merits of the bill - the merits of an immigrant tax, the merits of making companies pay prevailing wage, the merits of limiting numbers. All non-negotiable points. He wanted to stick with his bill as the framework, and we couldn't live with that. Like, will we accept a $10,000 tax or a $50,000 tax? Neither!" The next day, after the 100-plus executives had canvassed the three Senate Office Buildings, another meeting was held with Simpson, this time with around 40 of ABLI's people. Simpson gave a speech - his this-is-my-swan-song-so-don't-fuck with-me speech, says one lobbyist who was there - and then settled in to listen to the group's complaints. "He seemed taken aback, by their depth, their passion, their comprehensiveness," the lobbyist recalls. "I don't think he'd planned to do what he did next." Which was, astonishingly, to declare that he was going to jettison all of the bill's provisions on business immigration. "I'm done dealing with you people," Simpson told them, visibly annoyed. "I can never do enough."
Business was baffied, and set about, over the next 36 hours, trying to figure out what, if anything, it should do. On the face of it, Simpson seemed to be offering the ultimate deal: everything they wanted in exchange, presumably, for their backing off split-the-bill. But that seemed too good to be true, especially in light of the way Simpson had been treating them over the past few months. "He wasn't really offering a deal; he was offering a unilateral decision," Eisen says. "But what did it mean? Did he have the votes to strike all the business provisions? Would we see them again on the Senate fioor?"
Business, it seemed, was confronted with what is known in football parlance as a Hail Mary pass - and one being thrown by an out-front restrictionist whose every utterance throughout the debate had been antithetical to the goals of pro-immigrationists of all stripes. The possibility of being suckered was very real. Then there was Abraham, who had brought them so far, and who had made it clear the day after Simpson's declaration that if business blew off split-the-bill, he would infiict pain on them later. There was also the appeal of staying tight with the family-immigration groups, for in the wake of Buchanan's triumph, the two words business and immigration seemed a ripe target for populist ire. And, most important, there was the fact that victory was in sight - that they had the votes in hand to split the bill.
By the morning the Senate Judiciary Committee began its work, high tech and the rest of the business bloc had declared their intention to stick with the coalition, no matter what Simpson did.
In three successive sessions over two weeks, Simpson whined and squawked and stalled, keeping Abraham and his two primary allies, Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, and Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, from making their bid to split the bill. Having expected great deference, Simpson instead found himself listening to these three freshmen - two from his own party, no less - make windy speeches on the glories of immigration. Plainly exasperated, he became so angry that at one point he lashed out at his friend, the committee's chair, Orrin Hatch.
But it was all piss and wind. On March 14, six of the committee's eight Democrats joined with six of ten Republicans (Hatch among them) and sided with Abraham over Simpson. The vote to split the bill passed, 12-6.
Twelves votes. Sometimes in Washington, that's all it takes to transform a debate. The momentum shifts and, unexpectedly, you've got a juggernaut on your hands.
It could easily have been otherwise, of course. High tech had ultimately played a decisive role in the battle for the Senate Judiciary Committee, but along the way it had again demonstrated its capacity for self-serving myopia. It had made the right call in the end, but Simpson's spectacular miscalculations were largely responsible.
"Simpson fell prey to a kind of Gallipoli phenomenon, where if he'd done the things he did just a little bit earlier, he would've won," says Conda, Abraham's aide. "If he'd offered to pull out the business provisions, or even just offered a decent deal, just a month earlier, I have no doubt that he would have picked off the high techs and blown the split-the-bill coalition apart. We wouldn't have stood a chance."
Still, with the House fioor vote on Lamar Smith's bill scheduled to take place precisely one week after the vote in the Senate committee in late March, the pro-immigration forces had no time to celebrate. Having come out of nowhere to defeat the lion of immigration in its den, they had all the energy on their side. They had all the arguments. They had a straightforward message that seemed to be resonating with the public, despite piles of punditocratic gibber about how Americans didn't see the difference between legal and illegal immigration. And the analysis and anecdotes put forward in research like Stuart Anderson's made it plain to House members (and especially to Republicans) how reliant high tech was on foreign-born talent.
What the pro-immigration forces didn't have in the House, however, was high tech. The earlier bargain with Smith compelled companies not to lobby for split-the-bill on the fioor. Some firms, realizing that splitting the bill was in their best interest, and cursing the fact that they had ever made the deal with Smith, made it quietly known to congresspeople which outcome they favored. Other firms had, as ever, trouble seeing the forest for the trees. Not realizing that splitting the bill on the House fioor would probably be the death knell for legal-immigration "reform" this year, they divined some advantage in currying favor with Smith. It was these companies that most worried Swartz, Sharry, and the others. They knew well that Smith would put immense pressure on high tech and other businesses to do more for him than remain neutral.
Swartz's worst nightmare seemed to be coming true a couple of days later when a Hill Democrat phoned to tell him that Intel and Hewlett-Packard had started to lobby actively against split-the-bill. Moving into sharpshooter mode, Swartz called Conda, who summoned Intel's lobbyist, Eva Jack, to Abraham's office. "We weren't messing around," Conda says. "We told her that they were singlehandedly threatening everything we'd achieved. We told her they were crazy to be doing this. And we threatened to haul Intel's chair in here if they kept it up." They didn't.
Meanwhile, Swartz's cross-ideological cadres were kicking out the jambs. With the supposedly pro-immigration GOP House leaders Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey remaining pathetically silent, Swartz had turned to two freshmen - Sam Brownback of Kansas and Dick Chrysler of Michigan - to be their Republican champions. Along with Democrat Howard Berman, Brownback and Chrysler issued a series of highly infiuential, deeply devastating "Dear Colleague" letters educating their peers about the hazards of Smith's bill. The letters were mainly the work of Cato's Anderson and Paul Ryan, Brownback's legislative director, whose ties to the pro-immigration mafia ran deep. A protégé of Conda and an ally of Swartz, Ryan was the staffer who had aided Jack Kemp and William Bennett in their crusade against Proposition 187.
"Smith was getting a free ride because he knew immigration law so much better than most of the other members," Ryan says, noting that Smith even claimed that his bill would not "significantly reduce" legal immigration, when in fact its cuts were the deepest in 70 years. "Once people learned what was actually in the bill, we were able to peel them off, one by one."
Other Swartz allies were doing some peeling of their own. From the Democratic side, Swartz's courting of Rahm Emanuel had apparently paid off, for the White House was now openly urging its party's representatives to go for split-the-bill. From the Republican side, the cavalry arrived courtesy of Grover Norquist, who had proved to be one of Swartz's most significant conduits to the activist right.
Almost from the start, Norquist (who was on Microsoft's payroll) had been trying to convince the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed that being pro family meant being against cuts in family immigration, and that Reed should therefore support split-the-bill. Reed had resisted, but shortly before the vote, at a dinner with Gingrich and Norquist, the Speaker had indicated that he was in favor of splitting the bill. Just days before the vote, Reed weighed in with a letter urging pro-family Republicans - read Christian conservatives - to side with Berman, Brownback, and Chrysler.
Had the vote been as close as everyone expected, Reed's letter might have proven to be the decisive factor, since all sides agree it probably pulled in 20 to 25 votes. Instead, it was one of a handful of factors that contributed to what turned out to be a 238-183 stomping of Smith's assault on legal immigration.
It was clear that the Senate Judiciary Committee victory had set the stage for the one on the House fioor. Now the House fioor vote carried back over to the Senate side of Capitol Hill, where, a month later, Alan Simpson decided to make a last-ditch effort to attach nasty cuts in family visas to his illegal-immigration bill. But the split-the-bill coalition was out in force, this time including high tech. Hours before the vote, Simpson found himself in the Senate cloakroom trying to convince Bob Dole to vote for his amendment. Abraham was there, too, along with DeWine, urging Dole to do the opposite, whispering the names of their electorally crucial, immigrant-heavy home states in the then-majority leader's ear.
Simpson was trounced, 80-20, and Dole was among those who administered the trouncing.
"When all this started, we were this weird alliance, and it seemed like the whole establishment, in both parties, was lined up against us," Sharry notes. "But by the time we got to the endgame, everyone seemed to be on our side, from Ralph Reed to Clinton to Dole, on top of all these groups from across the ideological spectrum. And who's over on the other side? Two crazy restrictionist interest groups: FAIR [the Federation for American Immigration Reform] and the Center for Immigration Studies. I don't mean to be glib, but what we were left with was 'We Are the World' versus 'We are the Whackos.'"
In truth, however, the split-the-bill coalition was always less We Are the World than When Worlds Collide. From the beginning of the immigration debate all the way until the end, the high-tech industry was several steps behind its allies when it came to grasping the big picture. Nobody could have guessed that splitting the bill was a route to killing legal immigration legislation altogether in 1996. But among the savvier, more ideologically oriented - more Washington - of the coalition's members, it was always understood that the reason you form a coalition in the first place is that there's strength in numbers. Politicians hate successful coalitions: they're constantly trying to break them up, pick them apart, strip away this faction or that faction, so that whichever ones are left are all the more vulnerable the next time around. In this case, high tech was a sitting duck, practically begging to be pumped full of lead. But through a combination of good luck, exceptional energy, and some help from a collection of friends that needed high tech at least as much as high tech needed them, the industry - and the immigration system - came out intact.
From the immigration debate, Washington learned an enormous amount about Silicon Valley - not so much about technology but about the internationalist character of the human capital that creates the technology. The question now is whether high tech learned anything equivalent about Washington, and whether it wants to.
"You don't mind if I change clothes, do you?"
Grover Norquist is doing a modified striptease for me in the offices of his interest group, Americans for Tax Reform, as he gets ready for a black-tie dinner on the other side of town. Looking at this bearded, gnomic little guy, pacing around the room half-dressed, clutching a tuxedo shirt with a big yellow stain on its chest, you'd never guess he's the founder and chief strategist of his very own ad hoc political coalition. He calls it the Leave Us Alone Coalition, and despite the fact that its most active members are gun fanatics, antitax zealots, and home schoolers - not exactly the profile of Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Santa Clara - he's explaining why his people and the high-tech industry have a glorious future together.
"I think it's just the first of many victories in which the high-tech industry is going to be part of the Leave Us Alone Coalition," he says of the immigration debate. "You'll see it again on encryption - same fight, all the same players on the right and many of the same players on the left, as with the immigration bills. And we'll win on encryption because we'll get all the Republicans who feel bad about having voted wrong on the Communications Decency Act. All the guys who knew better, but who couldn't vote for pornography - of course, it wasn't voting for pornography. They know it, you know it, I know it. But damned if you could explain that in a 30-second TV spot.
"Anyway," Norquist goes on, "there are all these issues where radical free-market conservatives and the radical civil-libertarian left both agree, and oppose increased government restrictions, sometimes for the same reason, sometimes for different reasons. NAFTA was another counterintuitive coalition, and GATT. High tech was there, too. And really, those companies fit right in. They don't want anything from government. They just want to be free to go about their business. And once you start thinking about it like that, you realize that the high-tech industry shouldn't just be cheerful members of the Leave Us Alone Coalition. They should be leaders of it."
Such theories aren't uncommon in Washington. Another of Gingrich's gurus, Jeff Eisenach, speaks of an emerging "information-age political coalition," organized around the idea of "freedom," in which Silicon Valley plays a central role. But you don't hear this kind of talk in Silicon Valley. In fact, even among the people paid by high-tech companies to take Washington seriously, phrases such as "information-age political coalition" are usually met with a bewildered stare, or a somewhat insincere declaration of naïveté. "This talk about coalition politics is probably the enlightened view," Microsoft's Ira Rubinstein says, "but I think, in practice, it's still a long way off for our industry."
What Silicon Valley's CEOs and government-affairs mavens do acknowledge is that like it or not, their involvement in high politics is bound to increase - if only as a defensive measure. "It's not a matter of the 'maturing' of our industry; it's a matter of the government doing more things that are profoundly harmful, forcing us into action," T. J. Rodgers says. The American Electronics Association's William Archey agrees. "The traditional passivity is changing, from Keep those bastards off our backs to If we don't get involved, those bastards will screw us."
Yet the story of high tech and the immigration debate is about more than the successful defensive maneuverings of an industry to protect its bottom line. In the years after the Second World War, big business played an awesomely infiuential role in American politics. The New York Washington axis was tight and strong, and as a result, a solid consensus developed around any number of policies that were a great benefit to the US and the rest of the world - most notably, free trade. With the relative decline of the manufacturing sector and the rise of the information one, and the shift of the economy's center of gravity from the East Coast to the West, the old bonds between business and government have frayed - and so, not surprisingly, has the old policy consensus. It's no coincidence that support for free trade has declined within the political class at the very moment when Silicon Valley, whose bosses for so long refused to speak with that class, has been in its ascendancy.
Six months ago, a consensus in favor of legal immigration looked even less secure than the one in favor of free trade. Today, levels of legal immigration remain intact, and with any luck, the issue has been taken off the table for the fall campaign. The win wasn't textbook, and it certainly wasn't pretty. In places, it was downright ugly. But its shadings are reminiscent of recent debates, from NAFTA and the Mexican financial rescue to the role of the UN, thrown up by a world that is becoming borderless and interdependent. The shadings are postpartisan, ideologically androgynous - and as such, they hint at the new political order being born in our midst. In this light, it's hard not to see the immigration battle of 1996 as a watershed for high tech - and for Washington, too.
