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A Central American immigrant riding on top of a freight train en route to the Mexico-U.S. border in August 2013

FORTUNE -- Facing long odds, the U.S. technology industry is continuing to push Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform this year.

The effort, led by Joe Green, president of the bipartisan group FWD.us, got off to a rocky start. After it ran ads in support of the Keystone XL pipeline and in opposition to the Affordable Care Act to give cover to conservative Republicans who came out in support of immigration reform, FWD.us came under fire from many prominent Silicon Valley figures who support environmental causes. Some members even left the group.

Despite the setbacks, the well-funded FWD.us continues to press on. This week, it highlighted polls that suggest Republicans will not be hurt with their core voters for supporting immigration reform, and organized ThinkFWD events in San Francisco and New York to highlight issues like the role of the tech industry in strengthening the middle class.

Green spoke with Fortune's Miguel Helft about the organization's efforts. Below, an edited transcript of the conversation.

Fortune: It does not look like immigration reform will pass this year. What's the plan? This has been the defining issue for FWD.us. Green: We disagree with the premise of the question.

You think it can pass?

I do. When we started this, our basic analysis was that this issue was a fundamentally political challenge. There is a large amount of policy consensus among members of Congress. If you look at the undocumented, which is the politically most difficult part of this, all but a handful of people believe we are not going to deport 11 million people. So we should legalize them. There is some questions to how and if they should become citizens -- we believe that they should be able to earn citizenship.

The political fear on this is that Republicans in gerrymandered House districts could lose a primary [if they vote for comprehensive immigration reform]. All of our work has shown that's unfounded.

I do think most members of Congress believe it is the right thing to do economically, ethically for the country, and both parties have political reasons to do it.

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Despite setbacks, tech industry presses on immigration reform