There have been many stories recently about Silicon Valley’s new campaigns to influence immigration policy. Most recently, the New York Times ran a piece analyzing the campaign reminding me that this is an especially interesting topic for business journalists.

Here are excerpts from the Times story, which leads with pointing out that Republican Marco Rubio is the center of commercials sponsored by the technology industry arguing for reform.

But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate mostly to Democrats.

The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.

They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.

Silicon Valley is joining other business groups like the Chamber of Commerce in trying to get the law passed and venturing into new territory in their government relations, the Times said.

The profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is illustrated by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year.

The immigration fight, which has unified technology companies perhaps more than any other issue, has brought the lobbying effort to new heights. The industry sees it as a fix to a stubborn problem: job vacancies, particularly for engineers.

“We are not able to fill all the jobs that we are creating,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee late last month.

Chief executives met with President Obama to discuss immigration. Venture capitalists testified in Congress. Their lobbyists roamed the Senate corridors to make sure their appeals were considered in the closed-door negotiations among the Gang of Eight, which included Mr. Rubio and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who have been particularly receptive.

An Economist story (via Business Insider) points out that many foreign-born entrepreneurs create jobs for those born here, making their contributions even more important as the U.S. works to decrease unemployment:

SHAYAN ZADEH, the co-founder of Zoosk, a popular online-dating service based in San Francisco, is worried.

In the current debate on immigration, few realise that foreign-born entrepreneurs create jobs for locals.

“It’s a real public-relations problem,” bemoans Mr Zadeh, who came to the country as a student from Iran and worked at Microsoft before establishing his own firm, which now employs almost 150 people.

On May 2nd Innovate for America, the new brainchild of Scott Sandell, a venture capitalist, launched a plan to get American firms with at least one immigrant founder to publicise the number of people they have hired in America. Some 40 companies, including Zoosk, BloomReach, a start-up that analyses data to help firms maximise online revenues, and QBotix, a robot-maker, have already signed up.

Politico did an interesting piece outlining the different talking points of the debate and who is saying what. Read the full article here. One of the arguments is that immigration reform will create economic growth:

 This is the argument pro-immigration reform Republicans, like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, are using to make their case.

They insist that economic growth will do a lot to outweigh any costs of the bill, and they got a boost last week when the Congressional Budget Office said it will consider the economic impacts when it estimates the cost of the Gang of Eight bill.

They’ll have strong support from other conservative thinkers, especially Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, who says the economic benefits of immigration reform are the key to any chance of survival of the entitlement programs.

His group put out a paper that concluded immigration reform would speed the pace of economic growth and could reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion. The growth will come because immigrants will participate in the labor force at higher rates, according to the analysis, but also because they’re more likely to own small businesses.

While immigration reform is often written about as a partisan issue, there are conservatives and liberals on both sides of the debate. As the bill moves through the Senate and heads to the House of Representative, I hope we’ll see more business outlets covering the economic aspect of the debate. Many business leaders have been calling to relax visa requirements for years. Only now it’s not writing about a CEO speech, it’s covering spending by some of the largest companies in the U.S.

The outcome will have far reaching affects on policy and business.

There was an interesting story in the New York Times about the intersection of the business and political worlds. Several lawmakers are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to disclose political contributions, creating some transparency in the murky world of big donations.

Here are some of the details:

A loose coalition of Democratic elected officials, shareholder activists and pension funds has flooded the Securities and Exchange Commission with calls to require publicly traded corporations to disclose to shareholders all of their political donations, a move that could transform the growing world of secret campaign spending.

S.E.C. officials have indicated that they could propose a new disclosure rule by the end of April, setting up a major battle with business groups that oppose the proposal and are preparing for a fierce counterattack if the agency’s staff moves ahead. Two S.E.C. commissioners have taken the unusual step of weighing in already, with Daniel Gallagher, a Republican, saying in a speech that the commission had been “led astray” by “politically charged issues.”

A petition to the S.E.C. asking it to issue the rule has already garnered close to half a million comments, far more than any petition or rule in the agency’s history, with the vast majority in favor of it. While relatively few petitions result in action by the S.E.C., the commission staff filed a notice late last year indicating that it was considering recommending a rule.

In response to the growing pressure, House Republicans introduced legislation last Thursday that would make it illegal for the commission to issue any political disclosure regulations applying to companies under its jurisdiction. Earlier this month, the leaders of three of Washington’s most powerful trade associations — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable — issued a rare joint letter to the chief executives of Fortune 200 companies, encouraging them to stand against proxy resolutions and other proposals from shareholder activists demanding more disclosure of political spending.

Tax-exempt groups and trade associations spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political advertising during 2012 elections, but they are not required to disclose their donors. Evidence has mounted that a significant portion of the money came from companies seeking to intervene in campaigns without fear of offending their customers, their shareholders — or the lawmakers they target for defeat.

While the Times isn’t the first to report on the subject, it definitely helped gain attention for the issue with mentions in CNN Washington update and in a Fiscal Times blog.

But the real issue is what do shareholders want? From the USA Today story:

At the same time, companies holding annual meetings this spring face 126 shareholder resolutions encouraging them to reveal more about their campaign contributions and lobbying activity or calling on them to curb political spending, according to Heidi Welsh, executive director of Sustainable Investments Institute. She tracks shareholder proposals on social and environmental issues. Many come from investor activist groups and labor unions.

That’s up from 61 such resolutions in 2010 – the year the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling helped pave the way for unlimited corporate spending by corporations and unions.

The disclosure push is part of the continuing battle over corporate political spending in the post-Citizens United era. Trade associations and other tax-exempt groups that are not required to disclose their donors poured more than $300 million into the 2012 election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors money in elections.

Some institutional investors argue political spending poses financial risks for shareholders. Leading business groups say the disclosure is unnecessary and motivated by partisan politics.

From the Times:

While campaign finance regulations are usually the province of the Federal Election Commission, advocates for the new proposal have pressured the S.E.C. to issue its own disclosure rule. They argue that shareholders should be able to evaluate business executives’ oversight of company resources and that S.E.C. regulations already require disclosure of similar information, like executive compensation.

“Shareholders have been demanding this information for some time” said Robert J. Jackson Jr. a law professor at Columbia University who helped write the original petition to the S.E.C. “It’s a basic precept of American securities law that shareholders should be given the information they need to evaluate their companies.” The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Bill de Blasio, the New York City public advocate, and others have lobbied the S.E.C. in support of the petition.

Opponents argue that the agency does not have the authority or expertise to issue regulations about political spending, and that a disclosure rule would infringe on companies’ free speech rights — and damage shareholder value — by exposing them to criticism and attack from political opponents.

“The Chamber believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line,” said Blair Holmes, a spokeswoman for the business group, who added that the advocates’ “apparent goal is to silence the business community by creating an atmosphere of intimidation under the cover of investor protection.”

But according to a Huffington Post story on April 16 talking about how comments on the proposal had passed the half a million mark, companies are able to give money to alternate groups that don’t have disclosure rules:

Despite companies’ post-Citizens United freedom, few large corporate donations have been reported to the FEC, the agency in charge of enforcing campaign finance laws. Many campaign observers believe that corporations are giving to politically active groups that, unlike candidate campaigns or super PACs, are not required to name their donors — groups such as trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or social welfare nonprofits like Crossroads GPS, American Action Network or Citizens for Strength & Security. An inadvertent disclosure by the health insurer Aetna revealed that the company had donated $4.05 million to the Chamber of Commerce and $3 million to the conservative American Action Network in 2011.

While it is another layer of regulation and compliance for companies, as responsible shareholders, many investors likely want to know how their money is being spent. It’s an important check in the system that has opened the floodgates of corporate donations.

Susan Anderson, the new business editor of the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, writes about why business news coverage in the state is different than anywhere else.

Anderson writes, “If you try to describe living in Wyoming to someone from elsewhere, after you finish with our terrific outdoors and small cities or towns, you plunge right into what it’s like to work in the state with the least number of people spread over 98,000 square miles.

“Building a road in Wyoming has its unique issues. So does selling ice cream in a town of 10,000 that can balloon to 40,000 in travel seasons. It’s one of the delights of covering business in Wyoming to see the ways that people tackle their sometimes-exotic challenges.

“Give us a call

“People sometimes think we reporters know more than we do. In fact, we often don’t know about it if you don’t tell us.

“Writing about business in this Sunday section will be about much more than numbers and profit reports. The people who struggle and fail or succeed give us all insights that charts and numbers cannot.

“Expect to meet many of your neighbors in these pages. We want to know Wyoming people who are building their own businesses or struggling with universal challenges.”

Read more here.