FWD.us, the organization formed to push Silicon Valley’s priorities in Washington, will advocate for a new immigration law through a subsidiary group created specifically to court conservatives. Americans for a Conservative Direction will spend seven figures to run ads in more than half a dozen states, according to strategists who sketched out the organization’s plans.

The sales pitch leans heavily on clips of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to make its case to skeptical Republican-leaning voters. The ad campaign is the first wave of advocacy advertising from FWD.us, and an early test of the group’s ability to move the political debate.

( PHOTOS: 20 quotes on immigration reform)

The conservative-oriented FWD.us affiliate running the ads has assembled its own blue-chip board of advisers, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour; Sally Bradshaw, the former chief of staff to Jeb Bush; Dan Senor and Joel Kaplan, the former George W. Bush advisers; and Rob Jesmer, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee who serves as the campaign manager for FWD.us.

Brian Walsh, the former NRSC communications director, is working closely with the group on communications and strategy.

In a statement, Jesmer said the TV offensive was aimed at giving air support to Republicans in Washington who have gone out on a limb to forge an immigration deal.

“Conservative leaders in Congress have put forward a bold plan with the toughest enforcement measures to secure our broken borders and hold those who have broken our laws accountable. Americans for a Conservative Direction is committed to supporting this effort as Congress gets to work on the real solutions that will fix our broken immigration system, secure our borders and help grow our economy,” the GOP strategist said.

FWD.us, a registered not-for-profit, will also have an arm focused on reaching out to progressive and independent voters, dubbed the Council for American Job Growth. Both affiliate groups are incorporated as LLCs.

And while both entities will be funded through the FWD.us umbrella organization, strategists said they will have independent boards to shape their political activity.

In six states – Texas, Florida, Utah, North Carolina, Iowa and Kentucky – the Americans for a Conservative Direction commercials will feature clips of Rubio extolling the virtues of a tough-but-fair immigration compromise. Voters in a seventh state, South Carolina, will see 60-second ads praising the conservative credentials of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top Republican advocate for immigration reform.

Immigration reform, Rubio says in one of the two ads, “puts in place the toughest enforcement measures in the history of the United States, potentially in the world, and it once and for all deals with the issue of those that are here illegally.”

A narrator urges viewers to “stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty [and] support conservative immigration reform.”

The Graham-boosting ad, in contrast, doesn’t specifically tackle immigration. Instead, it says Graham “stands up for South Carolina values” – giving the deal-making senator valuable cover on the right as he heads into a 2014 reelection.

In that spot, Graham is shown attacking Democratic priorities such as the Affordable Care Act and the stimulus, and denouncing President Barack Obama for “seedy, Chicago-style politics.”

The ads come at a critical moment in the national debate over immigration reform. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a lengthy hearing Monday on the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal, which calls for a lengthy pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a new temporary worker program and new border-security funding.

The White House has endorsed the plan as a workable compromise, but it remains to be seen how much support it will gain among Republican legislators and red-state Democrats.

Opponents of the legislation have called for slowing down consideration of the proposal in the aftermath of last week’s bombings in Boston, which were carried out by two immigrants from Chechnya, one of whom was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Should the “Gang of Eight” plan clear the Senate, it faces an uncertain fate in the GOP-held House of Representatives. For many Republicans – and the few remaining Democrats in predominantly white, Republican-leaning congressional districts – voting for immigration reform would open them up to the toxic charge that they supported “amnesty” for people who entered the country illegally.

Yet the FWD.us blitz, and the heavy-duty group of GOP advisers who have signed on to support it, illustrate the fierce intensity of elite pressure on Republicans to pass a bill.

After getting trounced among Hispanic voters in the 2012 election, national Republican leaders are determined to take the issue off the table for future election cycles by passing some form of comprehensive reform legislation.

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, a key conservative leader in the House, loaned his voice to the reform cause on Monday, giving a speech in Chicago that predicted a well-crafted immigration bill would have a broadly positive impact on the economy.

“Right now, all of us acknowledge that we have an immigration system that’s broken,” Ryan said. “It is not serving our interests as a nation. Our broken immigration system does not serve our national security interests. Our broken immigration system does not serve our economic security interests. And our broken immigration system does not serve our family interests. And so when Republicans and Democrats look at this situation and see something that’s broken, we need to fix it.”

The FWD.us campaign is not the first large-scale effort to bolster immigration reform from the outside. The GOP-aligned Hispanic Leadership Network also ran television ads starting in February, featuring former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez talking up a reform bill that “grows the economy and respects the rule of law.”

That group has its own gold-plated set of advisers from the upper echelons of the Republican establishment, including former Jeb Bush and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval.