Rubio Fundraises with Oracle’s Larry Ellison in Silicon Valley

Oracle’s billionaire guru Larry Ellison will be hosting a $2,700 per-person fundraiser for 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) on Tuesday at his mansion in Woodside, California.

The fundraiser will also include a host committee dinner for couples who have raised $27,000 for Rubio’s campaign, according to Politico.

Silicon Valley skews tremendously liberal and Ellison, though touted as a Republican, is far more of an Independent. Rubio’s youth, his rapid political rise and his outright support for comprehensive immigration reform has earned him the support of several billionaires, including Miami’s Norman Braman, who has pledged up to $10 million for his campaign.

Ellison, like fellow tech industry leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, supports comprehensive immigration reform, one of Rubio’s signature causes. Oracle has made extensive pushes for an increase to the H-1B visa program, which has been criticized for displacing American tech workers with cheaper foreign replacements

Oracle lobbied for Rubio’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, S. 744 (formally known as the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013) , and successfully pushed an amendment that would go on to expand H-1B visas. The CEOs of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco were also among those to laud and applaud the bill’s passage in the Senate.

Soon after, Rubio launched the I-Squared (Immigration Innovation Act of 2015) legislation with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). The I-Squared bill would triple the number of H1-B visas in the United States and remove the cap on hiring foreign students who are graduating from American universities. Oracle has also formally endorsed Rubio’s I-Squared bill.

Recently, the Disney Corporation–a major presence in Rubio’s home state–has reportedly followed Southern California Edison in using American workers to train their H-1B visa-holding replacements.

Rubio has been accused of flip-flopping on the issue of immigration reform.

Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz