Chambers, Ballmer, Hoffman praise passage of bill.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The U.S. tech industry has welcomed the passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill by the Senate Thursday. Among those who applauded the vote are CEOs of a number of top technology companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco.
Industry leaders have been arguing that the bill will stimulate economy and attract highly skilled employees to the United States.
“In passing this legislation on a strong bipartisan basis, the Senate broke the logjam on immigration and high-skilled worker reforms,” said John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco and co-chair of TechNet, a coalition of tech leaders, said.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also welcomed the Senate vote. “If enacted, these changes will strengthen our economic security, foster innovation and enable continued job growth in the US,” he said. “Microsoft applauds the Senate’s bipartisan collaboration and leadership in addressing this issue. As the House of Representatives moves forward, we will continue working on a bipartisan basis to enact much-needed reforms to immigration and education policies that will promote American competitiveness and opportunity.”
“Immigration is also fundamental to the U.S. national identity — as the Senate just acknowledged with passage of the most significant reform bill in decades,” Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn, wrote in an op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post.
“Now that the Senate has acted on reform, the country has an opportunity to build on this strength,” he wrote.