Whether you agree with it or not, it is /absolutely appropriate/ to pressure corporations to not do business with other companies or organizations or governments you find morally reprehensible.
If it was Boeing providing bombers to the PRC to use against civilian populations, many people inside and outside of Boeing would be pressuring that contract to be cancelled.
What exactly is the problem with applying pressure to get a corporation to stop taking money from an organization/corporation/government/person that you find immoral?
The company doesn't have to /care/. The company can go after their almighty dollars for their shareholder if they want. And people can then choose to target that company in different ways, or target other companies that do business with that company, etc.
Boycotts, strikes, sabotage, sit-ins, work slowdowns, etc has all been used to pressure companies to take actions because of political reasons.
This is more like CAT refusing to sell road construction equipment to the highway department in the PRC.
The only thing the cancelation of this contract will do is make those within GitHub who are dissatisfied feel better that they have "done something". It actually accomplishes very little, and I would argue nothing at all.
> It actually accomplishes very little, and I would argue nothing at all.
Yes, I am not from US so I have very little understanding of ICE other than a few policy problems on the surface.
Since it would achieve very little, but wouldn't it be better to actually have the contract and has all its profits funded to an organisation against ICE?
After all it is not that ICE in itself that is wrong, it is the policy maker or the government. ( Forgive me if this is not correct )
Funding a political side that abolish ICE, wouldn't that be better?
The people who are going to use this software likely had their jobs before this administration and will likely have them after.
ICE was less of an issue under the previous administration.
All this energy and effort would be better spent on getting the current admin out. It is how things work in our top down democracy. The problem is that the votes of most Bay Area companies are going toward people who already align with these goals.
TO that end the effort could be better spent on contributing TO organizations that will help advocate for the changes they want. That might be money or time or technical talent...
All this energy and effort would be better spent on getting the current admin out.
For what it's worth, getting the Republicans out is almost certainly what this stunt is about. Maybe not consciously, but the groundwork of propaganda that led to villainization of ICE is certainly oriented around combating Trump and his policies, not actually disbanding ICE. Something like this is a way to help supporters feel engaged, passionate, and committed to the left's immigration policies (or at least attacking the right's), so that they will be more likely to vote and vote favorably in the next election.
Breaking up a contract like this won't directly accomplish any other realistic political goals.
Depends on how you want to split hairs. If your organization (in this case, ICE) is at the point where people are arguing technicalities about whether what you’re doing technically qualifies as a concentration camp, I’d argue you are far from where you should be ethically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment points out that internment "is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges, and thus no trial. ... Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps, also known as concentration camps."
It then quotes The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."
Ergo, prisons which only contain people who have been convicted in a trial or agreed to a plea bargain cannot be regarded as concentration camps.
By comparison, the US held Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, and held Filipino civilians in concentration camps ("reconcentrados") during the Philippine–American War. These can be distinguished from prisons as there was no trial for those held.
As I understand it, if the people being held at ICE are asylum seekers, then entry into the US is not illegal (even if they are not granted asylum). The US instead argues that they can be detained until that process is finished, even if that is indefinite.
This certainly sounds a lot closer to the definition of a concentration camp than US prisons containing prisoners who have be convicted in a court process.
In any case, we're talking about people in an organization which argued that the requirement for "safe and sanitary" conditions was so vague that it was okay to refuse toothbrushes, soap or adequate bedding to children.
Are all US juvenile prisons the same way? No. The 'typically under harsh conditions' is yet another distinction between "concentration camp" and "prison".
That said, many US jails and prisons are horrid, inhumane places.
"No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones." - Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom.
By those definitions, detention facilities where people await their asylum hearings are also not concentration camps. And the people in detention are free to leave if they wish, they're just not free to remain in the US without a hearing.
As for the harsh conditions, I completely agree they should be improved. But that would require funding that the Democrats refuse to provide, and services from other companies that Democrats like these activists are trying to block.
You earlier wrote "If ICE facilities qualify as concentration camps, then so does every prison."
How many prisons are there where the people in detention are free to leave?
That is, isn't your current statement at odds with your previous statement?
Were the Japanese-Americans in the American West during WWII free to leave, and if so, what would happen if they were found in the exclusion zone? That is, do you think those were internment camps?
> isn't your current statement at odds with your previous statement?
Not at all. As you've correctly shown, prisons are closer to being concentration camps than ICE detention facilities are. Therefore, if you move the definition far enough to include ICE facilities, you also include prisons.
At most you can infer that I said that some prisons are closer to being concentration camps. However, you wrote "every prison", which is a much stronger statement and one that has no basis in fact.
Again I ask, were Japanese-Americans in the American West held in concentration camps during WWII, or not?
Many of the Japanese-Americans who were there have long fought to have those facilities (correctly, IMO) recognized as concentration camps, and high-level officials at the time, including Roosevelt, referred to them as concentration camps. Do you disagree with them?
Were the Japanese-Americans in the American West during WWII free to leave those facilities, and if so, what would happen if they were found in the exclusion zone?
You wrote "If ICE facilities qualify as concentration camps, then so does every prison. At that point it's no longer a useful term."
I pointed out that your own statements contradict your own conclusion, in that at least some prisons in the US 1) contain only people who have gone through the court system are the result of a crime, and not merely waiting for a hearing, 2) are not in harsh conditions.
I also pointed out that to many Japanese-Americans held in concentration camps in the American West during WWII, that to them "concentration camp" is a very important term.
Do you agree that those Japanese-Americans were in concentration camps?
If you agree, then why are the ICE detention facilities not concentration camps?
If you disagree, then why weren't they concentration camps, and why did high-level US officials at the time regard them as concentration camps in internal use, while officially avoided that term?
I looked into it. It seems that crossing the border not at a port of entry is a misdemeanor offense and typically results in "only" a few days in jail.
I was confusing that with the US law which says that the asylum process does not require entry at a designated port of arrival.
> Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title. - https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prel...
Since the people are being held for more than a few days, and not as a result of a judgement or plea bargain done over a misdemeanor offense, then "illegal" in the context seems more like a red herring. It's like saying that most people are illegal drivers, because few have never exceeded the speed limit.
The only abuse of terms is by people who have difficulty or confronting the political and moral reality of what's happening. Holocaust scholars have already said that drawing these parallels in these specific circumstances is needed to prevent a reprisal of violence and genocide:
You've really gone off the rails if you think enforcing immigration law, as all countries do and the US has done for decades, is going to lead to genocide.
There is no 'splitting hairs'; to compare migrants in detention seeking to come into the country as 'concentration camps' is not only wrong, it's deeply insulting.
ICE detention is just plainly that, and that's all. Some conditions are poor because facilities are overflowing, not because they are designed that way. Most migrants are economic in nature, there's no pressing need for them to try to cross, and they know it's illegal - moreover - all of those economic migrants clog up the system to the detriment of actual refugees.
Of course, the migrants can leave any time - there's a policy in place such that they can chose to return home without having any mark on their record with respect to future ability to migrate to the US, and it's processed generally quickly, within several days.
There is really no comparison at all between those detained trying to enter a country, and 'concentration camps' - in terms of motivations, lawfulness, conditions, effects, legal recourse, fallout, etc. - they are in every way different.
The PRC camps in China could be referred to as 'concentration camps' because people are arbitrary detained on the basis of their culture, for any duration, they don't have legal recourse, they cannot leave, there is no judicial oversight, there is no freedom of information or freedom of press, they are not allowed any contact with the outside world, and they are put through some very aggressive 'thought control' programs that in many ways is worse than physical torture or confinement. To boot, the system itself is corrupt and prisoners organs are being sold through irregular channels.
I disagree. while ICE has been a thing throughout numerous administrations, their conduct has explicitly become more degenerate and reprehensible during this prior two administrations. While they may not be the PRC, they certainly share several predilections, specifically a lack of any real oversight.
- The Intercept published a report by the DHS Office of Inspector General revealing that 1,224 sexual abuse complaints while in immigration custody were filed between January 2010 and June 2017.
-As part of the 2018 Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, nearly 3,000 minors were separated from their parents, or the adults accompanying them
- From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.
As for protests "doing something" they absolutely do in this case,as github is only valuable for Microsoft so long as they acquire and grow a base of developers to use it. The brand already excludes several foreign nations, likely as part of a policy by Redmond to court the present administration. Their failure to maintain an ICE contract without an exodus of developers would slowly turn their newly acquired developer website into a 21st century hotmail.
Github isnt the only player in this field, no matter how badly theyd like developers to think this. Gogs, Gitea, and gitlab especially are all equally suited to quickly and effectively fill any gap Github might present. Most have auto-migration features to quickly ferry code away from Github.
> - The Intercept published a report by the DHS Office of Inspector General revealing that 1,224 sexual abuse complaints while in immigration custody were filed between January 2010 and June 2017.
Any data on what the rate post-Trump has been? Or during the Bush years? Because it's hard to reason from this alone.
(Not to mention that the rate of complaints is influenced by a whole bunch of factors other than the rate of incidents - for instance taking complaints seriously might make the number of complaints go up relative to ignoring them or retaliating against the complainants, and rewarding people for making complaints would likely increase the false complaint rate. What we care about is the number of actual incidents, but that's really hard to determine with any level of validity)
> If it was Boeing providing bombers to the PRC to use against civilian populations
Of course, it's not...
> Boycotts, strikes, sabotage, sit-ins, work slowdowns, etc has all been used to pressure companies to take actions because of political reasons.
As long as I'm getting downvotes, I might as well add:
These actions are usually done to achieve a realistic goal, not simply to punish a company for doing business with your own government because it's currently controlled by the opposition party.
At what point is it appropriate for employees to start sabotaging GitHub b/c they dislike the ICE contract?
When they have good enough reason to believe that breaking up the contract will achieve a positive end that is worth the violation of freedom of association and precedence for using coercive, destructive and potentially illegal methods.
In this case, I don't think any of the activists can really articulate the goal they think would be reasonably achieved, beyond having a vague personal feeling of satisfaction for making ICE's job harder and punishing their employer for doing something they didn't like. In fact, it seems to me as if temporarily crippling ICE's software development workflow is not likely to improve the situation on the ground for migrants at all.
That's a good point. If everything we do gets politicized, then that'll pretty much grind productivity to a halt, and our society will devolve into a bunch of warring factions. There's probably good grounds for keeping most domains apolitical.
Fair enough. So the goalpost is moved back a bit as to whether or not the U.S. government is morally reprehensible in enforcing border security just as all other governments do.
I take issue with this, as the manner in which other state actors enforce their border security do not all involve similar cruelty to the particular manner in which ICE enforces border security.
Quite a few other countries simply ship people back as soon as they are found to have violated their visas, or if they lacked a visa. These are normal democratic countries with advanced economies. I’ve seen people given hours to days to settle their stuff (sell or give away property) and leave. That’s an alternative.
I assume you're referring to the conditions in ICE facilities. I agree, they're in bad shape.
But they're in bad shape because Democrats refuse to fund them. What share of the blame do you allocate to the Democrats for that?
Edit: Downvote away, if you want to bury the truth, but this is a fact. Democrats are limiting the number of beds in ICE facilities, causing overcrowding, in a misguided attempt to stop immigration enforcement.
I absolutely assign lots of blame to Democrats and I was one of the few who were protesting Obama in support of the DREAM Act and against his high rate of deportation.
That sounds like you blame Democrats who don't entirely agree with you.
But how much do you blame the far-left Democrats, who want exactly the same open borders policy you want, for the predicable consequences of their policy of defunding ICE?
And if these activists succeed in blocking ICE's contract with GitHub, and that causes even worse conditions, will you also blame these activists for that?
I reject the premise that ICE must incarcerate these people. Instead of continuing to hold people in camps with inadequate facilities, ICE could have changed their detention policies when faced with reduced funding. After all, that is clearly the intent of Congress, whose duty it is to set policy priorities via budgetary allocations.
> I reject the premise that ICE must incarcerate these people.
When your boss tells you "do X" and you don't agree with it you have choices. Do it, or don't do it and face the consequences.
There are very few people in ICE who can actually make this sort of decision and not risk consequences. Most of the people who COULD set this sort of policy are politically appointed, they aren't the (more or less) apolitical staffers who simply do as they are told (assuming it is respectful of the law).
> After all, that is clearly the intent of Congress
The intent of congress and the president interpreted by the courts, NOT individual ice agents, or for that matter you or I.
> whose duty it is to set policy priorities via budgetary allocations.
Again, that isn't how it works. Budget can be guiding but it is not always absolute, and sometimes it is (earmarks, pork) but in this case the "cut" isn't a "removal of the underlying law that is to be enforced".
People have been getting arrested dismantling US war machinery for decades, etc.
I'm not saying it's legal, I'm not even commenting on whether I agree, I'm just saying the "it's not appropriate to pressure a company for political views, companies should be off limits from politics" doesn't hold water.
> I'm just saying the "it's not appropriate to pressure a company for political views, companies should be off limits from politics"
You haven't actually presented a supporting argument for it, though.
What exactly is the problem with applying pressure to get a corporation to stop taking money from an organization/corporation/government/person that you find immoral?
You are interfering with their freedom of association. You must weigh the morality of that violation vs what you hope to gain. It's not an obvious answer and is why the example of Boeing selling bombers actively being used to bomb civilians is misleading and why I objected to it.
> You are interfering with their freedom of association.
A corporation has no inherent "freedom of association." A corporation has exactly what rights we choose to give it, because it is fundamentally a legal fiction - the concept of a "corporate person" is useful for legal reasons, so we create such a thing in our laws. But it only has the rights we ascribe to it, because it isn't an actual being.
With that in mind: we've given corporations no "freedom of association." But even if we accepted your claim here - how does "pressuring a company to drop a contract" violate its supposed "freedom of association?"
"Freedom of association" is not freedom from consequences. "Freedom of association" means "you may associate with whomever you please and the government may not interfere". It does not mean "you may associate with whomever you please and no one may protest."
The only question that matters in this argument is whether a corporation's freedom to do business is worth more than stopping the action you consider immoral.
Your attempts at refutation are all general and fail to address the critical equation.
If you will, describe what exactly you think a "corporation's freedom to do business" entails? Where do you find such a definition? Is it in the same place you found a corporation's "freedom of association"?
It makes sense that you don't think my refutations are valid: I fundamentally disagree with your underlying premise that a corporation has any rights beyond the limited ones explicitly assigned in various bodies of law. And I specifically disagree that a corporation has a "freedom of association" or a "freedom to do business."
So of course I'm not engaging with your question of "is whether a corporation's freedom to do business is worth more than stopping the action you consider immoral". Why would I? I disagree with the whole, underlying, fundamental premise of your question. A company has no freedom of association! It has no freedom to do business! These things do not exist, so refuting your question is impossible!
(And, setting aside the whole absurdity of the central question: even if companies had these rights as you claim, how on earth would a letter from concerned developers infringe upon those rights? It's patently absurd to think that a group of customers sending a letter to a company somehow infringes upon its rights, unless you think that these "rights" entail freedom to do business without any criticism or bad press whatsoever)
> The only question that matters in this argument is whether a corporation's freedom to do business is worth more than stopping the action you consider immoral.
Can you explain to me how does people pressuring them to stop a contract affect their freedom to do business? This is a free market, Github can still do business with ICE, they just know that people won't share that same view and that theses peoples may move their business elsewhere.
Let say there's 2 business that sell chocolate, you want to buy chocolate. One is 1$ cheaper, but they kill a kittens for each purchase. Is it wrong to go buy the one that doesn't kill kittens because for you it infringe on their freedom to do business?
yes, it's not an obvious answer and reasonable people may disagree on what lines to draw, but I don't think there's any inherent line that says "interfering with corporate profits is off-limits" - I'd actually argue that pressure on corporations and indeed the entire supply chain of many businesses is an under-utilized and effective method of political pressure.
I would, for example, expect climate change activists to start actively interfering with shipping logistics (the ILWU has long used pressure at ports for political goals) causing the possibilities of large amounts of economic costs across entire industries if there isn't significant movement towards addressing their goals.
Did you also support boycotting all US companies funding US government (by paying taxes) who was literally bombing civilian populations (and providing rockets to Saudi Arabia for more bombing of civilian populations) during the previous administration, or are you just a hypocrite rationalizing your hate for Trump? At least Trump hasn't started any new wars (yet). Best president of the past 30 years IMO (so far).
Yeah, the Obama administration was not on the left by any reasonable, world historical political accounting. His hallmark legislation was a Republican think tank healthcare bill from the 90s.
I'm sure they'll also be disheartened to know that their OS and other softwares like SQL Server are being used by various militaries around the world to kill people. And terrorists. How many terrorists are in MS databases? How can they sleep at night by creating these nefarious tools?
How many other open source projects are used in ways the authors didn't intend? Lots of military hardware running mysql and the like. "MySQL Cluster is used by the US Navy to power the flight deck and operations management system on US Navy aircraft carriers.[1] I wonder how many men, women and children were killed by aircraft launched from those carriers powered by mysql.
"The Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) alone hosts 665 SQL Server databases and, of course, NCMI is just part of the DOD ecosystem. As a public affairs spokesperson for the Defense Information Systems Agency said, “[SQL Server] supports hundreds of applications, including email, content management, document management, enterprise search, business intelligence and workflow management.”"[2]
Grow up, kids. You can't control what others do with your tech. In fact, you helped to create this world. Your works are being used for evil. And "this" is the battle you choose to fight? You're SJW hypocrites.
You have a good point but you've ruined it at the end with "Grow up kids" and "SJW hypocrites". Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here? They explicitly ask you not to do things like that.
What, exactly, is hypocritical about these developers' actions? If a person wants their organization / community / country to change then they should encourage that change through non-violent means. It seems to me that by calling for their employer to discontinue business with an entity that they find unacceptable the Github employees in question are doing just that. In fact, their actions come across as quite sincere, and certainly appear to be far more productive and well-reasoned than your insult-laden criticism of them would imply.
What I find super interesting is that software development activism is not a new phenomenon (Eg. FOSS, letsencrypt, dragonfly) but that the activism has spread as the scope of technology has spread. Who you work for and where you work is itself a political act, which reminds me of being a “scab” (aiding anti-union efforts by accepting employment from a company who is trying to continue functioning during an ongoing labor strike, thereby weakening the union effort) which must’ve also been highly controversial at the time!
I don’t really know what will come from this but I’m super interested in seeing what will happen.
It's not that the activism has spread, it's that the activism has become externally imposed on developers based on the politics of agitators, as opposed to internal industry politics and competition, and the tactics used have become much more hostile and aggressive.
Richard Stallman, for example, is extremely political. But any implied call for boycots and other sorts of direct action has always been with clear and specific reason that usually has to do with active moral violations by the company itself and not guilt by association. He clearly articulates what he considers to be moral violations on the part of companies such as Netflix and LinkedIn, and none of those violations involve merely doing business with an unpopular (among some) government agency. They almost entirely involve abuses of the provider/consumer relationship.
Meanwhile, he loudly advocates engaging in positive support of causes he cares about and rarely (if ever) advocates canceling an organization for mere association.
The change is not scope. The change is in how easy it has become to quickly organize a mob of people to lash out at a perceived enemy with the most convenient economic sanctions available.
The politics are external. The US-Mexico border situation is a controversial, hot-button political issue that has nothing to do with software except insofar as software is a generic essential element of operations at any businesses and government agency
Lets say that the developers were calling for Github to stop any associations with hospitals providing abortions, would you still say that it is fine for companies to join in on politics? This is an extremely slippery slope, if you want your democracy to function then you don't want this kind of activism to exist.
It is warranted when the democracy is failing, but as far as I know USA is still holding fair elections at regular intervals.
> Who you work for and where you work is itself a political act
This is correct, however, it does not follow that developers have the right to join an organization and force their political demands on management and ownership. Don't like working for a company that collaborates with your government? You're in luck! You're free to leave your job at any time and won't be penalized for it.
Your own link proves you wrong. Starting with the following quote and proceeding from there, explaining exactly how what githubbers are doing would be protected:
>As interpreted by the NLRB, employee communications are "concerted" not only when he or she acts with or on the authority of other employees but also when the employee seeks to initiate, induce or prepare for group action or brings truly group complaints to management.
To anyone dissatisfied with the ethical lapses of GitHub and GitLab, check out sourcehut [1]. It's an independent Git/Mercurial host (plus builds, issue tracking and a bunch of other features) made by Drew DeVault (creator of sway). Their business model is "customers first, investors never" [2]
(I have no affiliation — I was just impressed by it when I moved a couple repos over after getting frustrated with GitHub and GitLab.)
Wow, some open source developers trying to flex on GH for not appealing to their woke politics that get amplified by their own media bubbles. This kind of behavior really is becoming incredibly tiresome. I look forward to GH not caring, and seeing these devs continue to use their platform despite the hollow threats of possibly pulling their repos, which they clearly won't go through the trouble of doing. Even if they follow through with it nothing of value is lost.
The LA Times has a (pay)-wall that keeps me from illegally reading their content, so I don't know what this article says.
But I personally think that uncontrolled migration flows lead to horrific human trafficking problems. The rapes and murders that get committed along this flow because we don't control our border as well as we did 20 years ago are unconscionable.
Yes, the next generation will vote Democrat, due to America's birthright citizen situation. But is that really worth the cost?
Github should help ICE do the best job that it can.
If ICE simply did their job in a humane but effective fashion, I think conversation around the agency would be far different.
However, the agency has - in the course of their duties - committed horrible acts that fly in the face of what Americans claim to value. They continue to do so, and the "Dear Github" letter linked in the article outlines them: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0/
The problem isn't simply that they're enforcing immigration law. It's _how_ they're doing it.
This biggest one for me is this: https://www.aclu.org/cases/damus-v-mcaleenan . ICE's position is that they should be able to detain all people who are legally petitioning for asylum without any bail hearings.
So if you don't detain them you do what then? Let them roam free? Considering the amount of fraud related to asylum claims, with entire legal entities dedicated to coaching aliens to provide fake testimony, letting them roam free is a definite risk for citizens. Especially as they are coming from one of the most violent warlord-controlled warzones in the hemisphere.
This whole problem could be precluded by doing a few simple steps:
1. Build a wall to control flow.
2. Allow anyone to come to the border and seek asylum.
3. Have enough humane beds/housing to store them at the border while their application is processed.
4. Hire enough officials and judges to process all claims timeously.
5. Fingerprint, photograph and document anyone that applies.
6. Turn away all individuals that re-apply without new evidence and attempt to clog the system by creating too much load.
Oh and 7: If they come as a family, let them stay together under monitoring.
And corollary to 7 would be 8: Do DNA tests on all family groups to affirm family status to prevent trafficking
At this point, if no hiccups arise, the wall is only necessary for those that wish to bypass a well-functioning system designed to treat people humanely and allow them to get refuge if they are being persecuted.
Thank you for the link. If this is the most horrible act, I guess I remain unconvinced that there's any fire here. I'm not sure I even understand why detaining is inappropriate.
Just because someone petitions for asylum doesn't mean they have a valid claim to it. If your position is that anyone claiming asylum should not be detained, how do you propose to differentiate between valid and invalid claims such as to sort out who should and shouldn't be detained?
With bail hearings, the exact same way we've always done it, including for asylum cases. It's only under this administration that we stopped having bail hearings for asylum seekers.
Source for this claim? [Edit: I seem some references in links on that ACLU page referring to "parole" being denied. Is this what you are referring to?]
That asylum seekers used to be released prior to their hearing, and are no longer? It's official policy https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/16/doj-bonds-asylum-s... . If you don't trust politico, they link to AG Barr's memo, which states: "The question presented is whether aliens who are originally placed in expedited proceedings and then transferred to full proceedings after establishing a credible fear become eligible for bond upon transfer. I conclude that such aliens remain ineligible for bond, whether they are arriving at the border or are apprehended in the United States"
There's also the issue of parole: releasing asylum seekers if they were initially approved for asylum by the court but the government is appealing the decision. In Damus v. McAleenan. In the recent decision (https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/as... ) the Judge notes that, while parole was granted in over 90% of these cases in 2016, parole hasn't been granted for a single such case in all of 2019.
> If ICE simply did their job in a humane but effective fashion, I think conversation around the agency would be far different.
Somehow I doubt that. There was that whole "being made to drink out of toilets" fiasco, in which the activist (I forget who it was) was the best kind of correct: technically [0].
Drinking out of toilets was not accurate. There was a pipe that went to a drinking fountain and the drain of the drinking fountain went into the input pipe of the toilet. The toilet had drinking water. The drinking water was not toilet water.
And remember that the numbers in the above graph aren't even population adjusted. This doesn't cover the Trump years, but deportations are even lower under Trump than Obama.
Your graph says little about border control and a lot about enforcement inside the US, which ironically can be partially explained by harsher border control. In southern states it used to be the case that Mexican workers would come over for day labor, or for the harvest season, and then leave to lead their lives in Mexico. Once border control got a bit more serious people started coming to stay.
That's not a great description of immigration history to the US. See for example the Eisenhower administration efforts in this regard as far back as the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
Controlling the border doesn't stop the flow. Only dealing with the crises in places like Guatemala and Honduras will do that. Sending people back significantly increases the likelihood that they will be murdered. But ICE aren't even doing that; they're putting people in indefinite detention in vast numbers.
Surprisingly, stopping the flow really does stop the flow. Plenty of countries control their borders, we have in the past, and we could even do so again if there was the political will.
Nobody cared before WW1. Borders and passports became more widespread and things to enforce as we marched to war. Passports that go back furthest were for the elite, when a 16th or 17th century printed (or written) passport promise were between the elites, and actually stood for something, but the border? Didn't matter.
Stopping the flow doesn't stop it, it just pushes to less visible but far harder to control channels. Frequently more dangerous channels like inside containers, refrigerated trucks, boats in the middle of the night.
You will never stop the flow as long as there are third world nations who are being sold "a better life" via people traffickers, or don't have political or economic forces effectively demanding they migrate.
> Stopping the flow doesn't stop it, it just pushes to less visible but far harder to control channels. Frequently more dangerous channels like inside containers, refrigerated trucks, boats in the middle of the night.
These dangerous channels tend to be more and more used when internal enforcement mechanisms are abandoned. The dangerous and often fatal migrant flows across the Mediterranean in recent years exploded when countries on the other side stopped turning boats and migrants back. Paradoxically, it's the immigration enthusiasts that lead to the massive flows that then lead to the human tragedies.
This is not true, it's mostly a result of the collapse of Libya and Syria.
The context for the container issue is a container of 31 dead Vietnamese found in the UK recently. The person responsible for that is in effect one of the worst mass murderers in the UK.
I'm aware of the UK container issue. But the one man is not the only monster. Look to your politicians as well for allowing such smuggling to have become popular. Similar issues have been a frequent occurrence in the US over the years in southern border states. Lack of internal enforcement is one of the biggest drivers. E-verify and crackdowns on employers of illegal immigrants could make the such smuggling pointless, causing it to dry up quickly.
I wish - and I bet most politicians who have played the immigration card - wish that such a simplistic view held the slightest validity.
Except it's not a "UK container issue", it's a route that's been used and is being used throughout the EU. In the week of the deaths in the UK, there were reports of similar seizures in Germany and IIRC Greece and Holland. It's been commonly reported for years - EU wide. It is not the politicians (of any colour), unless you wish to blame the lack of detailed inspection of every individual lorry and container, i.e. remove all contents, inspect every package, measure for hidden compartments etc. Which given the level of imports and global trade we all indulge in would push severe delays to every product and import. Probably enough to start killing migrants often, and ruling out import/export of perishables as even vaguely viable.
We'd probably have to go back to pre-war open cargo to have even the slightest chance of retaining an import/export economy for perishables.
The migrant camps getting into the EU, and relocating from one EU country to another (e.g. Calais) have gone from strength to strength through clearances, crackdowns and multiple administrations. The issue has been there decades.
> E-verify and crackdowns on employers of illegal immigrants
...is already there, particularly harsh, and applied in more than just one EU nation. Yet has not had the blind bit of effect on immigrants. The problem stems from a Vietnamese paying $20-50k to someone in their country for their "opportunity" for a better life in Paris, London, Berlin - and presumably NYC, Washington and San Diego too...
Many of whom they have paid for a lifelong debt, threats to family and have bought themselves into modern slavery and perhaps a life in something outright illegal or the sex trade. If you're shipped into the underground economy a crackdown on employers and e-verify is targeting exactly the wrong thing, only ever destined to find collateral.
It remains a growth industry in all of the developed nations. Walls and internment camps barely register to discourage while much of the pressure is external profiteering... A complete redesign of import-export capitalism might. No more coffee, tea, bananas and other "exotica" for US and Europe then.
Not to mention the increase in wars and climate impacts forcing people who otherwise wouldn't to consider migration. Those external pressures just keep on rising...
> A complete redesign of import-export capitalism might. No more coffee, tea, bananas and other "exotica" for US and Europe then.
So instead of using the existing systems that we have in place to make sure that everyone is paying their income tax, etc., you'd like to remake all of capitalism?
Your picture of illegal immigrants being quickly caught and deported in the UK and Germany (the nations in the EU where this problem is biggest) is fantastical. The investments in information and enforcement have not been made. As Scandinavian countries go cashless -- making it very hard to cheat on taxes and pay people under the table -- you really have to wonder why Europe as a whole can't do better on immigration.
The US has always taken particular issue with those that look different, whether black or oriental. It passed that act whilst essentially retaining open borders for the rest, and famously continuing to encourage net immigration...
There were not "open borders for the rest". Illegal immigration across the southern border was prosecuted aggressively by the FDR administration, for one example.
FDR was after WW1, coming back to my original point. Policy and extent of caring about borders and passports globally in the developed world, came with WW1.
Furthermore, the subset of illegal migrants who cross the border away from ports of entry is the subset that contains almost all the criminal deportees, new criminal migrants, and other people who wouldn't qualify to enter as tourists because they've already worn out their welcome.
It seems that preventing and/or detecting illegal entry over the border is the most effective way to reduce the number of known criminal aliens entering the country.
> Yes, the next generation will vote Democrat, due to America's birthright citizen situation
The next generation will vote Democrat if the opposition continues to make absolutely no effort to appeal to the next generation. Don't blame birthright citizenship for bad politics.
Birthright citizenship is an incredibly foundational American principle. Acting like it's some oddity that exists for political gain is just plain wrong.
The next generation of most developed nations will lean more left, and in the US vote Democrat for reasons entirely unrelated to birthright.
Simply put the boomers are currently the retirement generation, as they age out of the system, the system will skew less unfairly to the right. (Older voters naturally lean a little right despite most parties of the right having abandoned small c conservatism).
I have trouble understanding from this article what the problem is with ICE (I'm from outside the US). The developpers disagree with the whole purpose of ICE, because they trakc refugees, so they don't want github to have anything to do with them, is that correct?
"Track" is a bit of an oversimplification: they also imprison US citizens who they suspect might be foreign, along with the actual foreigners, of course.
ICE releases teen US citizen wrongfully detained for over 3 weeks:
"Track refugees" is an extremely charitable summary. I'd recommend reading the open letter [1] on GitHub and following some of the links. A short excerpt (with lots of links in the letter):
> ICE conducts random violent raids throughout the United States, invades communities and workplaces with military equipment, detains busses and trains, and arrests people solely on the basis of their perceived nationality, skin color, or native language. Their agents lurk outside of schools in order to abduct the children of immigrants and force their families to surrender themselves into custody. ICE imprisons people in deplorable and unsanitary conditions and denies them medical care.
I’m also non-American, but my ex is an American who campaigns against ICE. Her memes state that the problems with ICE are the conditions that refugees are held in, and that they separate children from their families. She also states that ICE target people based on skin colour even when their targets are e.g. citizens of the USA.
She is also of the opinion that the cause of the refugees seeking refuge is the bad behaviour of the Americans government, and she fundamentally opposes borders.
As I’m neither American nor a resident of America, I cannot vouch for how accurate her beliefs are, only that those are her beliefs.
Edit:
Just remembered, she went to one of the child detention facilities as part of her campaign support efforts in… I think it was the most recent California governor’s election? So she’s probably quite justified in her beliefs.
In reality ICE has a tough job of having to enforce borders when the extreme liberals have a belief of "no borders".
Unfortunately countries can't operate without borders.
All the other "evil" things listed in this thread can be torn apart one by one, it's a thin spin and morally it all falls apart when you realize that the main atrocities are the girls being raped (33% according to doctors w/o borders) that are dragged across the desert.
Blame the people dragging kids over, not the people giving them shelter.
To the "lock" comment below:
Child-locks on car doors are locks on the outside. It's for protection.
And they aren't dragging their kids, it's usually "a" kid.
They're doing it because they have incentive. Yes everyone wants a better life, but we can't support the world's population.
Every country has quotas, if you say otherwise you're living in a fairy tale.
Ever wonder why people drag themselves — never mind their kids — over a desert?
And “shelter” is what people like my ex want to provide. Shelters have the locks on the inside, though, and the detention centres have the locks on the outside.
Why doesn't she spend her time & money to build housing in Mexico? Surely it (the housing and the cost of living there) would be way cheaper than in the US...
It’s often not actually their kids. Using kids to take advantage of the system was and is a well known cartel tactic for getting across the border, and addressing this was the genesis of the child separation policy that began under the Obama administration. It is indeed terrible, but so is leaving kids with so-obviously-not their parents - especially girls, who have to endure a horrific rate of sexual abuse on the way to the US.
The people who are overly compassionate here are contributing to a human trafficking apparatus that is truly ghastly in its scale.
No, she doesn't want to provide them shelter. She wants to make them citizens, by the millions, with no plan for how our economy and society will integrate them.
If she's really being honest, she'll admit that she's looking to import individuals who will be dependent on the state for support, thus securing a large new voting block for her political party.
Regarding “can’t support the world’s population” — neither can Rhode Island support the entirely of the USA’s population.
I’ve never understood the attitude that a USA-internal-state border is really more important than an international border. I get the benefit of stopping smuggling and dealing with different sales taxes, but that applies to both.
The disparity in quality of life, economy, freedom, etc, between the 50 states is not nearly as great as it is between the United States and many Central and South American countries. There is no material reason, economic incentive, or political driver for an unsustainable mass of people to stream into Rhode Island. There are many such reasons for folks to try to enter the United States.
Essentially. Although illegal immigration is but one of the many responsibilities of ICE they are heavily criticized and often demonized for their... interesting way of handling certain situations (such as the detention camps on our southern border)
The dislike of ICE appears much more prominent in more left-leaning areas such as the coastal cities. As with any topic there are many moderates on either side with their own opinions and also more vocal, radical, opinions as well.
I think it has to with the human rights issues that are supposedly being violated by ICE at the moment. Human rights issue such as: Separating families, criminalizing asylum seeking, concentrating people of certain ethnicity in camps, etc.
The issues are that people are put into ICE detention centers until their legal status can be determined. There have been multiple policies in regards to kids. Either keep them with the parents or separate them.
Ah, the ancient and exhausted "if you don't like it then leave" argument has finally made its appearance. How could none of us have realized that the obvious solution to disagreeing with a policy in our organization / community / government is to just silently give up and leave? Obviously a peaceful letter of dissent would be completely outside the bounds of rational behavior!
And besides, if a concerned group REALLY wanted to change things and not just whine they would simply raise billions of dollars to accrue a significant block of voting shares in one of the world's largest corporations to change policy via board action!
> [GitHub] plays an increasingly indispensable role in projects that require collaborating around code.
This is just not true and I warn everyone from believing this is the case. GitHub is based on git which can be hosted anywhere and by anyone. The features which GitHub provide above and beyond git can be replicated with some work (either by switching to Gitlab, which you can host yourself, or using one of the other alternatives like Gitea) if you want to.
I can't help but find this kind of thing horribly undemocratic, The tyranny of a loud few, Take your arguments to the people and contact your representative. This is just using the media to short circuit the democratic process and i think it hurts business and the economy.
We live in a system of laws and it has created a lot of certainty for actors within the system.
Interpreting the GP comment charitably: let's say every single GitHub employee opposed ICE (which isn't true, but just pretend) and decided to drop the contract. I have no idea how much this would impact ICE but in our hypothetical scenario let's say a lot. This means an incredibly small percentage of the total population gets to decide whether a legal govt agency functions correctly for the next few months or so, even if the entire rest of the country relies on and supported the agency.
I personally believe that GitHub can do whatever they feel is right because they're a private company, but if this were the case, isn't that pretty undemocratic?
Your hypothetical situation implies that software produced by GitHub is vital to the operating of this agency, and that there is no other way to do it. If you accept that, your argument looks somewhat compelling.
But I don't think that's a claim we should accept - frankly, there are plenty of alternatives to GitHub. Moreover, there are plenty of alternatives to git itself. They are viable and in-use today - git has not always existed and will not always be the tool of choice. And continuing further down the stack... people wrote software even before version control existed as we know it today. You do not need version control to write software (although, I'm sure we both agree it's a good idea).
Even if we accept that ICE needs software to do its job - which I don't personally think is true, but neither of us can really claim to know - it's categorically untrue that they need GitHub specifically. They have a myriad of ways they could accomplish their goals without GitHub.
But there's another element of your argument we should discuss, and it's one I've heard from CEOs recently - that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny software to the government, because it privileges the voices of a minority of people.
That argument makes very little sense to me. It first conflates "democracy" with a company declining to do business with the government. Democracy is a form of government - the actions of businesses are not and cannot be "undemocratic" - they aren't the government.
Setting aside rhetorical annoyances, though - the claim you're making is that a company's actions are depriving the majority electorate of what they voted for, and that they voted for ICE in its current form. I don't think the majority of the country voted on it, and even if we assume they did indirectly via the presidential election ... it's not a contested fact that the current president lost the popular vote. We can't even say a "majority" of people support this without contorting ourselves, or without redefining "majority" to mean "the majority of electoral college votes"... and we get into seriously absurd territory there.
Yet we can even dig deeper: if we accept that it's somehow "undemocratic" for a company to deny services to the government - we must also accept the counter-claim that all companies must provide services to the government upon request. They're two sides of the same coin - if you cannot refuse, then you must. That's a scary thing, in my mind - and I do not want to live in a country where a company cannot legally refuse to do business with the government. Current legal theory in the US doesn't support that, and I hope it doesn't change.
And finally - even if we accept all of the claims you make (the few explicit ones made, and the many implicit ones that must be made to support the explicit claims): why on earth couldn't the government write the software itself? The federal government employs hundreds of software developers. More than GitHub! If GitHub's software is required, and the agency cannot function without it, and there is no alternative available to the government in the market - what stops them from writing the software themselves?
Expecting a company to discontinue supporting another entity because you disagree with their policies is not a good mindset.
You have to consider the repercussions of bowing down to this way of thinking. Think about how many people would say Planned Parenthood is doing things worse than ICE. Would you want companies that support Planned Parenthood to stop because they offer a politically controversial service?
Or an SJW stance to not want the government creating fake universities with the purpose of entrapping people legally in the US in order to deport them.
Actually - according to the article, prosecutors allege that they were aware of this fact.
However, from the reporting done by the Detroit Free Press (which is the paper of record in metro Detroit), a defense attorney who represented some of the students involved said that ICE even arrested students who realized it was a fraud and tried to transfer out:
> Reddy said, though, that in some cases, students who transferred out from the University of Farmington after realizing they didn't have classes on-site, were still arrested.
This story is far more complex than you're summing it up to be.
> The eight recruiters allegedly helped create fraudulent records, including transcripts, that students could give to immigration authorities. Authorities said in the original charging documents that they collectively accepted more than $250,000 in kickbacks for their work, not realizing that the payments were actually coming from undercover agents who worked for Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE.
According to the article, seven of the eight have already plead guilty.
By your logic, we should also oppose companies that deliver food to ICE. If the children starve, who cares, at least we have the "moral high ground" since the company isn't working with ICE!
Straw man. It's not ICE policy to sexually abuse anyone. Sexual abusers are hidden everywhere. We might as well ban every large organization from GitHub by that reasoning. Yes the children are temporarily separated from their (alleged) parents. That is arguably the right thing to do, as it deters illegal immigration, and protects those children who are being trafficked as sex slaves.
Note that pretty much everything terrible (e.g. family separations, warrantless searches) is done by DHS and its other constituents like CBP, not ICE specifically.
A nuance here to tease out is that there are alternatives to github with low barriers of entry, unlike data analytic capabilities like google or FB.
At worst, ICE can mail around zip archives as source control like the old days. It doesn’t give them new capabilities like some signal processing service.
Basically, the devs here don’t have a compelling case - quit and start their own scm hub and pick their own customers. If they can achieve a business as such, then props.
If GitHub was the exclusive provider of some important service - like a utility - I would feel strongly that they should continue to offer the service despite political differences (even if not strictly classified as a utility).
On the other hand, since there are plenty of alternatives, there's no huge & lasting damage that could result from Github choosing not to have a particular customer - and as such they should have more freedom to deny any particular customer. As such, I think it's should be fine, ethically speaking, to discontinue a professional relationship with ICE should Github management decide that continuing a relationship with ICE is counter to their values or something, in which case the devs do have a case they can try to make (that ICE is counter to their values).
You could say the same for every criminal arrested in US... if someone ends up arrested they are separated from their families. How they gonna be reunited after sentence served, is not the State problem. I don`t see the point in your comment.
Github provides software lifecycle management services. It is apolitical. I do not believe we should be trying to police the providers of apolitical software.
GitHub cannot let that happen. It opens a Pandora’s box.
If they are successful here, the activists will not declare “mission accomplished”. Nope. They will then search for other contracts to be cancelled. And then there will be infighting as to why one should remain and another cancelled as disagreements mount.
Don’t get into politics when you’re providing enterprise services. Stay away from it as far as you can.
Yes, god forbid that corporate power ever be checked by anything besides the politicians they pay to write the rules for them. How dare these activists suggests that morality exists separate from whatever corporate executives says is right? Where will society go if CEOs aren’t allowed to be the sovereign rulers of their employees?
” If they are successful here, the activists will not declare “mission accomplished”. Nope. They will then search for other contracts to be cancelled. And then there will be infighting as to why one should remain and another cancelled as disagreements mount.”
I am totally for the argument that enterprise services servicing specific entities is apolitical, and discussing the merits thereof. But I believe this is a slippery slope fallacy that weakens your argument and is hyperbolic.
We have been sliding rapidly down a lot of slippery slopes in the last few years. It's pretty lazy to say "oh that's a slippery slope argument" and dismiss it.
Rarely is a popular slippery slope argument (whether an accurate prediction or not) an actual logical fallacy: Most of the time when people accuse something of "The Slippery Slope Fallacy", they're mistaken as to what an actual logical fallacy actually is.
A legitimate logical fallacy of the "slippery slope" variety is when one observes a transition from state S_0 to state S_1 via some step/action X taken, and without evidence or justification (!) assumes/claims that the step/action X will therefore be repeated indefinitely until the system evolves to state S_2, S_3, S_4, ... S_n (where S_n is presumably a state we all consider to be undesirable). The "without evidence or justification" part here is EXTREMELY important. If you actually have evidence or justification of a slippery slope, it is not a fallacy; it becomes a valid argument.
Tip: When you see what looks like a slippery slope fallacy at first glance, it's probably best to give the opposing argument the benefit of the doubt by asking for evidence/justification for the induction (S_0 -> S_1) -> S_N. In most cases, some evidence will be provided to justify. If you disagree with the justification, the debate continues in that direction (which is good, because this is productive).
>I believe this is a slippery slope fallacy that weakens your argument
Is it a slippery slope fallacy?
If we do A then B must happen and I think if we do A then B will happen are two different claims. The latter does not explain the reasoning and is thus not a slippery slope.
To give an example.
If we legalize same sex marriage, polygamy will become legal because of it.
This is a slippery slope slope because it is directly saying one will cause the other just because the first one will happen.
I think if we legalize same sex marriage, polygamy will eventually become legal. (Unsaid reasoning behind the opinion: Upon re-evaluating the existing laws in our push to legalize same sex marriage, combined with an existing acceptance of polyamory, we will see that there is no justifiable reason to keep 3+ adults who wish to form a family from doing so, and though the laws will be a bit more difficult to accommodate them, we will lose any sense of 'wrongness' that is used to justify the ban.)
This is not a slippery slope. The original claim is just not displaying their logic behind their opinion, but that does not mean their logic is a slippery slope.
The difficulty is that in the English language, the two can be written the same way and one won't know the intent without asking the author.
Logical fallacies aren’t always wrong. I believe experience tells us that if you give in, more will be asked. Whether in haggling, contract negotiation, litigation, etc. Try negotiating with a kid.
A legitimate logical fallacy should always "be wrong". The problem is that many people often mistakenly over-accuse arguments as being logical fallacies: the ironic fallacy of false fallacy accusations :)
There is no objective standard for a public company to rely on in instances like this (at least not one we can all agree on). So the only metric they have is to go off of public opinion which has network and mob-like effects. Such effects are only amplified by the current media landscape that reports on the fact that outrage occurred instead of plain facts, further making it a "non-objective" problem.
It's the same on some level as freedom of speech. We "kinda" used to have a general standard about what we disallowed. But that's being challenged in recent years, and from my perspective, is only being driven by outrage rather than actual discussions to figure out a good and clearly defined common ground that acts in the best interests of our entire society.
Like so many libertarian-esque arguments, this sounds reasonably good on the surface, but I think real life is a bit more complex, and nuance matters.
Just to use an absurd example, let's imagine an alternate universe where Hitler and the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019. Would it be acceptable, then, for Github to cancel their contracts? Or would that be playing politics too?
Please note: I'm not suggesting ICE is equivalent to Nazis. I'm simply suggesting there is a limit to your assertion that enterprise services should always avoid politics. It's easy to bucket politics as this thing that doesn't really matter. We're privileged as hell in the U.S. in 2019 that that is mostly true. But for the majority of world history, politics has dire consequences for major segments of the population.
With respect to ICE, they absolutely are violating some pretty fundamental human rights. I don't think it's beyond the pale for technology companies (often heavily reliant on immigrant labor) to take a stand here.
It’s not that politics kinda don’t matter, it’s that they are so important, no one can be trusted to have the best, most clear, unbiased view of things.
Most everyone nowadays seem to wander around thinking their views are obviously correct, and the people who disagree with them are either ignorant, immoral, or arguing in bad faith.
Rationally that doesn’t make sense. No one knows everything, and everyone has blind spots. Most people are doing their best to have decent opinions.
So we have this kind of genius political and economic system that assumes everyone is going to be biased and small minded, and mostly just act in their own interests as they perceive them, and yet things mostly come out pretty ok.
With that in mind, it follows that corporations should mostly just pursue profits, even though that doesn’t sound right. But certainly they should not take stances on the “issues of the day” ... especially if they are publicly held companies.
Your scenario doesn’t make sense because our system is designed so that voting and legislating and regulating and so forth address the hypothetical Hitler problem. The corporation has a different role to play.
I don't think your "with that in mind" follows. Corporations are emergent features of groups of humans, and there are things that they just don't do because none of the humans involved even consider them okay for long enough to think of how to do them.
If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire.
Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals.
Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.
Corporations act on the behalf of shareholders. They might employ people to do so, and those people in some sense might “make up” the corporation, but it is literally their job to pursue the interests of whomever owns stake in the corporation.
I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context.
The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government.
It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible.
Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.
You don’t have to provide hypotheticals. China has some good examples of companies engaging in and supporting activities against people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang (I guess Tibet is forgotten).
The thing is while we disagree with those companies and their government, there isn’t a mechanism to address those issues. Just like there wasn’t a way to address the Gulags.
That has to be addressed by the people internally in that jurisdiction. It has to be addressed by the laws available. Fortunately the US is better at following our own system of laws that say China where on paper people might be better off than us, but sadly their constitution is simply a formality.
So your question is not answered very simply and does not have a simple solution. For example, we were not about to invade the USSR over the Gulags, we were not about to invade China over its multiple purges, despite the horrendous atrocities. I can think of Vietnam as the only country invading another to stop mass systemic purges when they went into Cambodia.
This is complete absurd, nihilistic, and disempowering. People all over the world have joined together in protest and support for the treatment of each other, in the context of local conditions separate from their own, and driven change and progress. This is happening now between the US and Hong Kong and in solidarity struggles across a Latin and America.
By your line of reasoning, no one in the west should’ve have supported divestment from South Africa during apartheid, even though that was a wildly effective strategy.
You don’t wait for power to grow a conscience, you force it into a corner with your own and the solidarity you build with others.
Yes countries have the option to blockade, sanction, tariff, ostracize and so on. National governments can do that.
We do some of those things with DPRK, Iran and Russia, among others. Still, some countries are more resilient than others of more stubborn than others and will press on. Iran is a decent example. We sanction and apply other pressures, they go in killing and persevere despite all that.
You’re wrongly conflating state power with that of bottom-up mass organization rooted in empathy and mutual solidarity. What’s happening at Github is more akin to the latter than the former, unless your also arguing that states should quash all internal rebellions and challenges to their power.
The problem is there are only a few different solutions:
1. Release parents and children into the US regardless of legal status.
2. Keep children in jail with their parents.
3. Separate children by sending them back to their country.
4. Separate children by placing them somewhere in the US (either with family or social services).
5. Send the entire family back to their country they came from.
Keeping innocent kids in jail is not right. Separating kids is not right. Having open borders is not practical. Sending back people to their own country is not right.
There is no solution. Many people who make the same argument as you would say just let them into the US but it is not practical when you have a welfare system. Many who criticize the current system even Bernie Sanders [0] says you can't have open borders since it would cause too much strain with our welfare system.
The whole imagination of "the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019" is invalid. What Nazis did in the history (bombing and assassination) will make them declared as a domestic terrorist group by FBI before they gaining power in the U.S. At that point GitHub will certainly not provide service to them.
The Nazis mostly gained power through democratic process. That's beyond the point, anyway. The Nazis were "just" a political party in power. It was "just" politics, just like terrorism.
> If they are successful here, the activists will not declare “mission accomplished”. Nope. They will then search for other contracts to be cancelled. And then there will be infighting as to why one should remain and another cancelled as disagreements mount.
That's good. Someone in Github will have to calculate the cost of doing business with such entities.
Up to this point, doing business with socially despicable entities had no cost--now it does. It's time for business to have to evaluate that cost.
Fine, so the voters of California should start voiding the corporate charters of companies that engage with ICE, PRC, etc. I'm cool with that, too, but I suspect that simply putting pressure monetarily is a much more accurate and flexible banhammer to swing.
Corporations ARE political entities--at the state level, to boot. It's only recently that "corporations solely exist to make profit for shareholders" has perniciously taken root. Corporations used to have to at least acknowledge "the public good" in order to get a charter. People have forgotten this.
Are there not people that will prefer to do business with companies that don't engage with such despicable entities? Are there not companies that specifically want to do business with those who engage such despicable entities? (Hint: there are several funds and private equity groups that do just that.)
However, Github's current actions certainly give me pause as to whether I should continue doing business with them--especially for $50,000. Really. $50,000. That's a price to be celebrated with an entity that kills children?
Yeah, I think I avoiding github just jumped up my priority list--a lot.
This is bullshit, nothing is apolitical. To pretend otherwise is the height of dishonesty.
Claiming that there are no political consequences for your actions is simply burying your head in the sand. You have a measurable effect on the world around you. If you do something, you are responsible for the effect it has on the world around you. You don't get to just dump toxic waste into the environment and claim it's an externality so it's not your problem. Your political effect on the world is just as real as any other effect you have on the environment, you are responsible.
There are political consequences for everything we do. I never said there weren't any. All I said was that I don't think we should be concerned with the politics of selling apolitical software.
Right? Imagine the horror of companies having to take strong ethical stances on the use of their software and how their company influences the world around them. If companies had to care about ensuring that the fruits of their labor had impacts that were in accordance with the moral beliefs of their employees, that might even cut into shareholder profits. The terror!
This is also a contract renewal. I can't find any information on there being any publicly announced discontent before. Developer activism is very fashionable to report on though I guess.
It seems like the only difference is who the president is. Very few people seemed to care when Obama and Clinton did the exact same thing. Suddenly Trump is now in power and ICE is compared to Nazis.
"In a fact sheet circulating within GitHub, employees opposing the ICE contract wrote that the GitHub sales team actively pursued the contract renewal with ICE. The Times reviewed screenshots of an internal Slack channel after the contract was renewed on Sept. 4 that appear to show sales employees celebrating a $56,000 upgrade of the contract with ICE. The message, which congratulated four employees for the sale and was accompanied by emojis of a siren, bald eagle and American flag, read “stay out of their way. $56k upgrade at DHS ICE.” Five people responded with an American flag emoji."
There is not a universal right to come to the United States. At some point your argument degrades into “everyone gets to come here and if you enforce or what enforced the existing law you’re [insert -ist here]”. It’s an effective rhetorical payload, I’ll give you that, but it is completely divorced from any kind of system of state sovereignty and integrity.
In a way I agree with you, because “enforcing the law” really is “normalized violence” - philosophically speaking, since it’s the State that has the guns (or most of them).
Nor is there some universal standard or determination about who is allowed in. That’s entirely determined by who has power and how they choose to interpret the law or even adhere to it and what degree of violence they use in doing do. In the case of the current administration, that’s stripping children from their parents, keeping people in dangerous, overcrowded, disease-ridden conditions, allowing people to profit off this incarceration, and just generally deploying racist and genocidal rhetoric in doing so.
People aren’t objecting to some abstract notion of enforcing laws, they’re objecting to how power is operating to do demonstrably vile and unnecessary to things migrants with the framework of “enforcement” as an excuse. Rule of law doesn’t exist outside of how it is materially made manifest.
You’re right about that, since they generally didn’t object to the same or similar levels of enforcement from the previous administration. It’s not completely clear why they didn’t, but it probably had to do with olive branch policies like DACA and a mostly compliant media apparatus.
But what’s been the general theme here is that people actually don’t want these laws enforced at all. They have a fundamentally different view about state sovereignty and want that view made real in policy. As I said before, you have a useful rhetorical payload you get to deploy (“everyone who disagrees with me is a racist”) against those who think we should perhaps not just open the borders. Those who don’t want that have to make longer, more complex arguments about things that make states and societies function - which is only “abstract” until it isn’t.
I don’t think that everyone who disagrees with me is racist. I’m actually quite open to (but not entirely in agreement with) a left, labor-focused critique that mass immigration under the current circumstances of American Capitalism (widespread wage theft, union busting, lack of enforcement of labor laws) would be used by Capital owners to further undermine the existing working class. I personally believe that increased immigration should be done in tandem with mass protections for workers, including things like easier unionization, the abolishment of sector-wide bargaining bans, increased enforcement of wage and labor laws etc.
What I don’t believe is that the current administration’s practices are anything other than a cynical, racist diversion of tensions and alienation created by Capitalism away from the wealthy and into the scapegoating of immigrants. Broader issues of statehood and sovereignty are not even in question because they’re not meaningful considerations to the people doing these things. They have no allegiance to anything other than what invests them with further wealth, power, and opportunity for cruelty.
The Obama administration absolutely set this all in motion through their feckless, naive, and equally cynical use of immigration enforcement as some bargaining chip for a broader deal. And liberals who fail to acknowledge this should be hung out to dry with him for their hypocrisy.
Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.
This whole thread is a wretched tire fire filled with people torching the site guidelines on both sides of the war, and reading it makes me wonder why we even bother. Still, crossing the 'primarily' line is an important distinction and your account stands out as doing that. That means you're continually undermining this site for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The two can't coexist, and the second completely overwhelms the first.
This isn't an ideological call, and if anyone knows of other accounts that are using HN primarily for political battle, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can ask them not to.
>...created by Capitalism away from the wealthy and into the scapegoating of immigrants.
Which is of course why Big Capital is against this ramped up enforcement. To attempt to steel-man your argument for a sec you seem to believe that, because you think this administration is racist, what they're doing is nothing more than a scapegoating of immigrants based on tensions created by global capital movement - they're just taking advantage of existing problems in the economy to push their preferred policy in another different-but-related domain. The larger picture is that Big Capital and the Social Justice inclined left are actually on the same page but don't know it: they both want more immigration, and a depleted or hamstrung level of state sovereignty (the latter leads to the former) and are in a sort of blind-truce right now.
It's not at all clear how mass immigration suddenly stops undermining the existing working class if we just have "more protections" for workers. You clearly understand that the laws of supply and demand are real and brutal. We can do everything you want - increased protections, unionization etc etc - and that will just increase the lumens on the lamp drawing everyone in. A large positive supply shock for cheap, low skilled labor is bad no matter how "worker friendly" your government is - unless of course you want it to go full USSR, where everyone is poor and miserable but they have a job they can count on.
If Blizzard can be panned for its enterprise-style move to strip winnings from pro-HK messaging tournament winner in order to better ameliorate itself to a large potential consumer base, why isn’t GitHub allowed to be panned for its enterprise moves in pursuing sales with an organization that is embroiled in political scandal?
There is a vast difference between selling software to your own government for their use and directly, actively, and punitively screwing with an individual a foreign government doesn't like.
It was done in order to continue friendly relations with a potential client base. Wasn’t Amazons Ring panned for giving data to the police? Don’t we have a thread on the front page right now about Google giving personal data to the DoJ?
> It was done in order to continue friendly relations with a potential client base
The analogous action for GitHub to Blizzard’s would be booting a user ICE doesn't like to maintain friendly ties with the latter. That hasn't happened.
...while Chef's CEO openly said that they will not renew their contract with ICE and CBP, as well as to donate the equivalent revenue of their current contracts to charities that help people impacted: https://blog.chef.io/an-important-update-from-chef/
> After deep introspection and dialog within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire over the next year. Chef will fulfill our full obligations under the current contracts.
I’m fairly certain the actions themselves of the entity being protested are what’s driving the discontent here. People are upset about Hong Kong protestors being tortured and disappeared by police just like they are about migrants being treated the same way by ICE.
It’s not it being your own government vs. a foreign government that’s at issue. It’s what they’re doing to people.
The human rights violations that ICE commits should not be considered a political matter regardless of whether one party endorses them. Supporting those that enable atrocities is not politics, it's publicly announcing that you are a defect of evolution.
However, ICE will do what they are told and allowed to do and I don't see how this makes any difference. If they're forced off GitHub, they'll just take more taxpayer money to migrate to another platform because those above them in the hierarchy support what they're doing. The anger toward ICE is valid, but just like in medicine, treating a symptom does nothing toward treating the root cause.
>treating a symptom does nothing toward treating the root cause
imagine if someone told you that it won't make a difference to give you a painkiller for your broken leg because it won't cure the broken leg.
the root cause is not easily accessible. but that doesn't mean all other approaches to lightening the burden are useless. it means that a plurality of approaches will be necessary to solve the problem.
Ok imagine that you have a broken leg and the only painkillers we've invented are local, and when you take those another limb breaks just to spite you. That's where we are with this. It doesn't get to be nice and painless while it heals and I can't see anything making any difference unless enough of us under no circumstances vote for anyone that supports this stuff.
No matter how attractive it may be to pretend that business decisions exist in some sort of apolitical moral vacuum the simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of them do not. Making money is not an excuse for improving the surveillance efficiency of autocratic regimes, building gas chambers, or supporting an organization that engages in mass-scale detention of child refugees.
I fully support the rights of employees to peacefully encourage their organizations to weigh the moral components of business decisions. It is obvious that, left to their own devices, large businesses will support slavery, genocide, and any number of horrors in the pursuit of profit - something has to restrain their behavior and it certainly isn't going to come from the C-level without serious pressure being applied.
>Github provides software lifecycle management services. It is apolitical.
It is immeditately political the moment you sell your product to people working along politically charged lines, for political ends. It is no different (speaking of being political or apolitical, that is) to US companies selling software to the Chinese state. You have posited that technology is neutral without anything to back that up, and in opposition to the current scholarship on the intersection beween technology and politics[0].
It only seems to be "not up for debate" because you say so. The product does not have any particular political goal, of course. But the choice of who it is sold to, for what purpose, and what price, absolutely is. My argument is that Github should use its right to "vote with its wallet" - since this is the only way to control outcomes in the economic sphere without the state - because in this case, the state is the objectionable party.
All the ICE workers wear pants, we should organize and boycott all manufacturers of pants. Where does it end under your rules? Seriously, how about food? Farmers need to unite!
Everyone knows there are lines, and you just coincidentally made a Nazi analogy. Discussions about immigration (and the rhetoric of progressives in the US in general) is constantly plagued by inflammatory and inappropriate Nazi references. Maybe it was an honest mistake, but it's still a mistake.
Dow Chemical / Agent Orange. But like all things, it's complicated. We didn't know quite the fallout. Human life was simply valued less back in the day - this was a time when many cars still didn't even have seat belts.
They made a fake university[1] to lure in foreigners on student visas, then arrested everyone who enrolled for not attending a real university, including some who had already transferred out after realizing it was fake. It's not the Holocaust, but it's not ethical.
That fake university was Obama's program[1]. Are you now going to advocate deplatforming Barrack Obama?
The fake university was a magnet for people who didn't want to show up to the classes - the gist of the program was to find student visa users who did not care at all to study; they just wanted to get in the USA.
Why does it matter if it's Obama's program? I don't think it's ethical. From your article:
"Reddy said, though, that in some cases, students who transferred from the University of Farmington after realizing they didn't have classes on-site, were still arrested."
It sounds like they realized they wouldn't get to attend classes at that university and switched and still got deported.
> That fake university was Obama's program[1]. Are you now going to advocate deplatforming Barrack Obama?
As a citizen who caucused for Obama, I'm deeply disappointed in his policies surrounding immigration, cowardice on marijuana, broken promises around transparency and whistleblowers, and the exploitation of protected lands for oil and gas the world can't afford to burn. He's not a damned saint and whataboutism is intellectual laziness.
Do you actually believe that the punishment for illegal immigration is death? Are you suggesting that being forced to return to Mexico is equivalent to being sent to a gas chamber? Sounds racist. What an insult to Mexico!
It is an argument ad absurdum, which isn't an invalid argument though it can be emotionally charged.
The idea that "It is okay for a business to do business with someone one disagrees with because it is just business." is equally applicable to the annoying person down the road, to a politically charged group like ICE, or to the embodiment of evil. Using the last is thus a quick way to challenge the notion and potentially refine it to "It is okay for a business to do business with someone one disagrees with because it is just business, as long as they don't cross a certain line."
Then the discussion becomes where that line is and if it is being crossed.
So a claim that there isn't a line at all can easily be dismissed by using an outrageous example because it is still a valid counter example.
Think of it like math. If I state x/x = 1, I'm wrong. Even though there is an infinite amount of examples where I'm right and only 1 example where I'm wrong, the statement is still wrong. Even though the is an uncountable infinite number of examples of where I'm write, I still have to consider every case, and thus the case of x=0 means I'm wrong (at least until I update the statement with with 'except when x=0').
It is an argument ad absurdum, which isn't an invalid argument though it can be emotionally charged
It is not argument ad absurdum. It's true that sometimes, it helps to use an exaggerated example to illustrate a nuanced point. But in this case it isn't that people don't understand there are lines. The point is superfluous, and you get to bring up Nazis yet again in comparison to border control. It's rhetorical tactic, not an argument.
For reference, argument ad absurdum is actually the opposite. That's when you take a logical premise to its extreme to show how it's a foolish proposition. In this case, the extreme example was in support of the proposition.
It can be both, and it is hard to determine what the intent is. Was it a propaganda tactic to link two unrelated groups for political goals or was it an extreme counter example?
>In this case, the extreme example was in support of the proposition.
Could you go into this further? As far as I can tell, the original idea was that it was okay to do business since it is just business, and the argument ad absurdum was to bring up Nazis.
> Do you actually believe that the punishment for illegal immigration is death? Are you suggesting that being forced to return to Mexico is equivalent to being sent to a gas chamber? Sounds racist. What an insult to Mexico!
Except that this is a thing that has actually happened.
This random death is not comparable to a guaranteed death sentence in a holocaust gas chamber. That was a lame disingenuous cherry picked example, out of millions of deportees. Obviously, people will eventually die somewhere, one way or another, no matter what. Given his history of criminal activity he could just as well have been randomly murdered in the US.
Providing a service to a any political entity is considered taking a stance? What stance is Verizon taking when they provide cell service for leaders of both the NRA and Planned Parenthood?
There is a big difference between supporting a country like North Korea and a domestic government organization.
Imagine if companies started bowing down to this kind of behavior and stopped supporting politically contentious entities. There is a large portion of the country who would agree that Planned Parenthood is doing things just as bad as ICE. Should companies stop supporting Planned Parenthood because large groups of people are offended by their services?
” There is a big difference between supporting a country like North Korea and a domestic government organization.”
The domestic government organization is highly controversial along political lines.
” There is a large portion of the country who would agree that Planned Parenthood is doing things just as bad as ICE. Should companies stop supporting Planned Parenthood because large groups of people are offended by their services?”
I mean, yes, thats exactly what happens. Planned Parenthood was dropped from the government medical service program as a provider. Several organizations are often criticized for working with the police- we have a thread on the front page right now about the DoJ being given personal info via Google.
Let's say GitHub was working with domestic intelligence agencies to add backdoors to various repos for the sake of increasing US security. Would you say that is apolitical?
Or does it only become political when you disagree with it?
Individuals don’t typically enter into enterprise contracts ran by a dedicated sales rep, while I’d imagine government contracts and big enterprise spend are usually handles directly by the company.
You know there’s a clear distinction between directly serving an organization and serving an individual that happens to work for an organization. Don’t be disingenuous now.
It's a stance that says they respect those organizations right to cell phone service. You may agree or disagree that their stance is good, even if you hate one of those orgs, but it's still a political stance.
ISPs aren't political for allowing you to visit Trump's website.
They would become political the minute they make a choice of who can visit which site. Providing services to an organization is not political at all. The NRA or Chineese government using Windows does not make Microsoft political (for that reason).
No, this is the fallacy of the status quo. The stance you’re espousing is a political one, but since it’s the way things are it’s not recognizing as such. Which is, of course, the nature of the status quo.
The stance that you’ll sell to anyone regardless of politics is a political choice. It has, past and present, been used to absolve oneself for one’s choices and provide cover for terrible things
People react negatively to this (by downvoting my comments, for instance) because acknowledging one’s responsibility is frightening.
What's the alternative? You sell software to entities who you like, and not to the ones you don't?
I'm the ISP on your area, and whoops- I won't let my internet be used by LGBT activists. I'm Tesla and won't sell cars to people who get Coal powered electricity. I'm Google and I won't let Republicans search on my site. I'm the electric company and won't let my power be used for abortion clinics. I'm Microsoft and I won't tell software to Gay people. I'm Apple not selling their phones to people who hunt.
I assume you would support those above scenarios? There are two options. Be a-political in your business dealings, or be political. There is no middle ground.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a world where companies act a-politically then ones that don't.
>What's the alternative? You sell software to entities who you like, and not to the ones you don't?
Well yes, that's generally how moral choices work.
Not to Godwin, but it is the perfect example here: was it okay for companies to provide goods and services to the Nazi regime, which facilitated the atrocities they committed? We don't need to conjure up scenarios, we have plenty of real-world current historical ones that illustrate the point. Boycotts of South Africa in the 80s, for instance, played a part in bringing down the apartheid system. Would it have been better for the companies involved to instead declare their "apolitical" stance and make sales to that regime?
Why is "just following orders" not an acceptable defense for personal wrongs, but "just doing business" okay?
>I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a world where companies act a-politically then ones that don't.
But again, there's no such thing as " a-politically". That's a political choice to support the status quo.
For example, the 80s and 90s the gay rights movement came to prominence, and fought against both legal and social discrimination against homosexuals. If a company said, "Look, we're not taking a position either way, we just want to do business and not get into politics, so we're not going to address this", that's a facially "apolitical" stance. But that stance, then, is then one that supports the then-current reality that legal and social discrimination against homosexuals still existed.
Companies make choices of who they partner with based on PR all of the time. GitHub isn't immune to this. I don't want to support companies partnering with organizations I don't like, whether it's ICE or e.g. Nazis or ISIS.
> I don't want to support companies partnering with organizations I don't like
How is this not the mother of all slippery slopes?
Should all political parties - apart from the one you currently support - ought to be denied service from, well, any and every possible service provider?
Denied service? We're not talking about legislation preventing GitHub from working with ICE, we're talking about public opinion. My (and these developers) opinion of GitHub is tarnished by this. If they partner with a far-left organization, it will be a different situation. Companies find a balance.
Companies make or break partnerships based on how they affect public opinion (see the recent Chick-fil-A situation)
> We're not talking about legislation preventing GitHub from working with ICE, we're talking about public opinion
Which particular fragment of "public opinion"?
Allowing public opinion to directly and immediately govern whether something is allowed to happen risks handing power to tiny but vocal - or simply well-funded - groups.
My (and these developers) opinion of GitHub is tarnished by this.
Have you considered the extent to which your opinion is influenced by the long-running political propaganda campaigns designed to villainize ICE as much as possible and discourage hard realistic discussion about solving problems? I'm not saying you have to agree with ICE'd methods or what they are doing, but the border situation is not as simple as political opportunists would have you believe.
I try not to be the one who says "cite your sources" - but what sources do you have for claiming that there's "long-running political propaganda [...] to villainize ICE"?
I ask largely because from what I have read (from multiple sources that I trust), the claims made about ICE are largely true - in that they are engaging in inhumane actions against people at the border. To me, from what I have read, it seems well-documented and supported with a lot of testimony, first-hand accounts, video, and images. Satellite photos, even.
That's why I'm curious why you're asserting that it's propaganda. I don't see evidence of that.
> in that they are engaging in inhumane actions against people at the border
ICE doesn't conduct border operations, that's the domain of Border Patrol. Considering you don't even know this basic fact, what else might you be completely wrong about?
I might be wrong about plenty; which is why I asked for some more information (which I’ll note you did not provide).
I’ll also note that you are yourself not accurate in stating that “ICE doesn’t conduct border operations” - in fact, ice.gov/about says specifically:
> The ERO directorate upholds U.S. immigration law at, within, and beyond our borders.
Thus it is not accurate to say that “ICE doesn’t conduct border operations” - they themselves say they do.
I think what you’re trying to do is set up then knock down a straw man: I never said anything about patrolling borders, and I’m well aware that CBP is the agency literally patrolling the border. You picked a specific interpretation of a broad statement in a blatant attempt to make me look dumb, which goes against what HN ostensibly stands for.
> Thus it is not accurate to say that “ICE doesn’t conduct border operations” - they themselves say they do.
OK, I'll bite. You originally stated: "...in that they are engaging in inhumane actions against people at the border. To me, from what I have read, it seems well-documented and supported with a lot of testimony, first-hand accounts, video, and images. Satellite photos, even."
What, exactly, are you referring to? What ICE operations have occurred at the border involving any of the above claims?
> I think what you’re trying to do is set up then knock down a straw man: I never said anything about patrolling borders, and I’m well aware that CBP is the agency literally patrolling the border.
No, I assumed that your reference to "satellite photos" at the border involving ICE is probably wrong considering the border itself isn't really their domain. Whatever the ERO directorate "upholding U.S. immigration law at" the border may mean, it probably doesn't involve any spectacular incidents captured on satellite photos or video. But maybe I'm wrong and you have a source to show me otherwise.
> You picked a specific interpretation of a broad statement in a blatant attempt to make me look dumb, which goes against what HN ostensibly stands for.
Not knowing the exact specificity of what government agency performs what functions in a particular area doesn't imply stupidity; so no, I wasn't attempting to make you look dumb. I was, however, attempting to get you to consider that you could be wrong. [Edit: reading my original comment again, I will concede it was a bit of a smug snipe. Clearly too smug, considering what you found on the ICE about page.]
[I have dinner guests and will be busy the remainder of the evening; but I will respond to this tomorrow and compile a list of the things I’m talking about. Don’t want to be a bad host. ]
> I might be wrong about plenty; which is why I asked for some more information (which I’ll note you did not provide).
As to the original request for information, while not unreasonable at all, it would take some time to competently source and present. But I will note that to me it seems obvious that the rhetoric surrounding ICE really only started in earnest after Donald Trump took office. I never observed this level of frothing criticism of that agency under the Obama administration, even though Obama's ICE, by and large, operated exactly the same way.
Criticism certainly increased after Trump became president; and I think that had to do with two things:
1- His administration took a bad situation and made it objectively worse, and people (rightfully) got upset about that. Across all border-related agencies, things seemed to take a nosedive: Obama’s DHS(? ICE? I forget which one specifically) wasn’t in court arguing that they had no legal obligation to provide soap to detainees, for example.
2- People absolutely overlooked a lot of what Obama’s administration did wrong. That’s a fair criticism: I know I personally should have paid more attention.
I think what bothers me about your question is that it seems to imply that one shouldn’t be upset about things because “the other guy did it.” But that doesn’t excuse this administration. And I’m furious that Obama’s administration did similar things, now that I know! And if Obama’s administration were still somehow in charge... I would loudly protest them as well.
It’s wrong, no matter which administration is doing it.
What criteria does GitHub use to decide who gets discounted rates? Do companies over X emplopyees get a discount? Do Government agencies get a discount by default?
I don't think it is fair to make a judgement that this is a politically charged action rather than just business as usual.
” What criteria does GitHub use to decide who gets discounted rates?”
The decision to continue to service specific entities is a political move, same as selling weapons to Saudi Arabia or Iran, or the stance the NBA has taken with China regarding its pro-HK player. It’s why finance institutions have some amount of checking that they’re not being used to help wire funds to terrorist groups.
In my opinion, an American company selling to an American government agency is wildly different than an American company selling to a foreign government.
Discounts are used to get a foot in the door for possible expanded role and future business calling it "Political" does not make sense.
Now government discounts are common way if you are expanding to Federal or State government clientele. For Enterprise the discounts will have a different name or flavor thats about it.
If some one prove a case that a rabid anti-immigration activist salesman or executive gave this service pennies on dollar to ICE, you can argue for walking back on this contract, otherwise its Enterprise Sales doing what it is supposed to do.. make it rain and improve top-line.
Right, but at the same time selling arms to Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized for example, even though that’s supposed to be just sales doing its own thing.
That's just how sales work though, isn't it? Many other clients get "discounted rates" as well because the contract itself matters more than the amount most of the time.
While I see your point, and have some very mixed feelings on this whole subject, I'm not sure that enterprise sales and negotiation should be seen as a political move rather than just part of how this sort of business works.
What is the difference between actively pursuing sales with ICE and companies selling arms to Saudi Arabia or investing in Saudi oil, or actively pursuing sales with China such that the NBA apologizes for pro HK messaging from a player and Overwatch stripped all winnings from a winner of a tournament for pro HK messaging?
As I said, I am not expressing an opinion on how right or wrong it is to sell to ICE, simply that the _discount_ is probably not a political move, just regular enterprise software sales where a bulk discount is common.
Renewals often come with a discount during negotiations. There's no way to known what the motives were. A large media company I worked for had a large discount, it was business not them supporting the liberal left media.
I'd argue that refusing to provide services to your own democratically elected government is undemocratic, you are then trying to have bigger influence on the country than your one vote allows.
Only time that would be reasonable is if your democracy is failing. Would you say that USA's democracy is failing currently?
> Would you say that USA's democracy is failing currently?
Well that's quite the pigeonhole, and I will not duck my head to enter.
I refute your premise as fundamentally un-American. As a business, you are under no obligation to compete for government contracts. That notion, IMO, would be a sure sign of a broken democracy. I'd describe such a policy as authoritarian. It's happened before, under martial law; a constitutional mechanism to temporarily suspend democracy. It's happened elsewhere, under communist regimes.
Of all things, the third amendment informs how the founders might address this. Don't see that one every day.
Pretending you have nothing to do with the consequences of your actions doesn't make it so. Saying you're "apolitical" only means that you bury your head in the sand regarding the very real political consequences of your operations.
"Politically neutral" is a nonsense concept. You can make a politically flexible organization, you can make an organization that tries to operate orthogonally to the existing political powers in the world, but if you do something that has a real effect on the world, some component of that effect is by nature political. You can try to balance yourself in the overton window, but even that is a decisively centrist position.
And claiming that something is apolitical doesn't make it so. Are you going to present an actual argument?
The reality of the world is that no company operates in a vacuum. If a political organization gains power it wouldn't have had because you willingly entered into a contract with it, you are absolutely responsible for that. Pretending otherwise is just trying to absolve yourself of the real harm that you have done.
"Look, I don't explode the atomic bombs I just make and sell them"?
If people were more cognizant of the effects the things they made put out into the world, we'd be living in a better one. Claiming you have no responsibility doesn't absolve you of anything.
While I agree, because I can look at a tree and say the tree is apolitical, who you do business with is not apolitical. At the very core is the question of 'do I agree with this person enough to do business with them'. That is a politically charged question and has to be answered with a yes to do business with someone.
When I buy coffee (or chocolate), I make the choice that even though I am not sure the coffee doesn't involve slave labor, I am okay with buying it. Perhaps if I'm completely unaware of the slavery involved or the ineffectiveness of no-slavery certification I can claim ignorance, but that lasts only until someone informs me.
So while I disagree with what they were literally saying (because of that tree), I think the more limited message they were (at least in my opinion) meaning has far more truth to it.
Please follow HN guidelines and refrain from calling names:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Personally, I don't find the view that "nothing is apolitical" to be silly.
Plenty of things are apolitical, but when your customers are polticians, political parties, governments, and government contactors then nothing is apolitical.
any organization or person with a capacity to be aware of politics and the consequences of their actions is political.
This isn't difficult. You claimed that "nothing is apolitical." That's an entirely different statement than grandstanding on this particular issue by invoking "concentration camps."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Clarifying that "all" should be "most" is a good contribution. Writing off the comment with an insult is not. Especially if you don't even offer an example of one of the "plenty of things" to justify your claim.
In a casual forum, people use casual language, like using "all" for "most". Context matters, as when the comment is in response to saying something isn't political by an overly-narrow definition of "political"
> Especially if you don't even offer an example of one of the "plenty of things" to justify your claim.
I would posit that common sense obviated the need to justify this particular claim. As in, performing your morning dump rituals, for example, isn't a "political" act. Does that really have to be spelled out?
Whether or not something is political goes to intent. A person’s self-serving lack of objectivity does not define the motive behind external circumstances.
Ice needs to find a new tool and the people at Github who didn't like it can pat themselves on the back and say "we did something"
The problem is that all the energy and effort they are putting into this, doesn't fix the fundamental underlying issue that caused this problem in the first place.
It is a "feel good" move by the people at GitHub, if they don't like what is going on they should quit their jobs and write software for an activist group, or many activist groups... There are plenty of ways their talents could be put to use making actual change!
It's an extremely accurate term, and using it in this context serves the purpose of not minimizing the importance of their being the sites of atrocities and internationally-decried human rights violations.
actually, it serves the purpose of riling people to action perfectly because it captures the scale and nature of the detainment centers at a time when information coming out of those centers is extremely limited and the state of a hearty share of the public rhetoric is that the people contained within the camps are subhuman.
the camps serve no productive purpose, yet here we are with a bunch of them in the country anyway.
If these people attempting to enter were simply turned around and immediately deported, the same people claiming that these are “actual in real life holocaust-2.0-about-to-happen concentration camps” would be upset about the “barbarism” of this stance instead of holding them while they wait for hearings.
I don't think using a loaded word like "concentration camps" is going to improve the quality or clarity of discussion in this thread. Perhaps use a different term (e.g., "holding facility") or clarify that you mean "concentration camp" in some strictly technical sense that doesn't meaningfully resemble the usual imagery associated with the term.
More than 400 Holocaust and genocide experts have asked the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to reverse its stance that comparisons of ICE "concentration camps" to those of the Holocaust are unwarranted[0].
This letter does not appear, at all, to endorse the silly use of the term "concentration camp" in reference to U.S. immigration detention facilities. Rather, they seem to have taken issue with one particular broadly written sentence fragment in the museum's statement:
“...unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary...”
The letter was written in the context of AOC using the term "concentration camps"; this is what caused the Museum to release the statement in the first place[0][1][2].
It doesn't really matter what context the letter was written in. It very clearly only takes issue with a particularized sentence fragment used in the museum's initial statement. Nowhere does the letter endorse or promote the idea that U.S. immigration detention facilities should be compared to "concentration camps."
You are claiming that this letter says something that it, quite literally, does not.
How else would you handle masses of criminal aliens? Would diffuse holding facilities of small size be smarter? Of course not. Facilities to concentrate the population of criminals until they can be processed are going to be necessary, that is the inevitable result of porous borders.
You seem to be confusing concentration camp - you know, any holding facility whatsoever - with death camps. They are not synonymous.
If somebody breaks a law they are sent to jail. If somebody breaks the law in regards to the border they are sent to detention camps. There is no difference except who is running the jail. If that is the only issue then there probably would already be a compromise to have the illegal immigrants sent to regular prisons.
Almost! It's like the Holocaust, where Jewish people kept trying to sneak into Poland (and got sent to concentration camps), because they were trying to escape Germany.
That's pretty offensive statement. They aren't concentration camps, they are holding facilities. These people traveled there willingly. Those that were dragged are children, and they were brought by adults who may not even be their parents.
The conditions and provisions those children are getting in those buildings are better than what they would be getting in the desert and with the adults they came with.
1/3 girls dragged across the border are raped.
You can't be mad at the building but be complacent with the root of the problem.
It pretty much follows the definition of a concentration camp. The vast majority of these individuals have not committed a crime (crossing the border to claim asylum is explicitly legal) and yet they are held indefinitely without bond, in poor conditions
> You can't be mad at the building but be complacent with the root of the problem.
I am mad at the root of the problem, which is why I'm disappointed that this administration continues to undercut foreign aid efforts to improve the conditions in central American countries.
> crossing the border to claim asylum is explicitly legal
No, it isn't. You can file the application no matter how you entered or what your current status is, but that doesn't post-facto make an illegal entry suddenly legal.
Title 8 Section 1158, in the first sentence: "Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title."
Asylum seekers may be excused for illegal entry into the US. An asylum seeker can even use a fake passport to get through customs to apply for asylum: see Akinmade v. INS as an example.
> Asylum seekers may be excused for illegal entry into the US. An asylum seeker can even use a fake passport to get through customs to apply for asylum: see Akinmade v. INS as an example.
This doesn't make the border crossing "explicitly legal," as you claimed, it just means that if you are granted asylum (which, I venture, most applicants are not, since the scope of asylum law is quite narrow), then your illegal entry will be disregarded.
Yes. If you use a fake passport to get past customs and request asylum, and your request is denied, you are simply deported and you do not serve jail time and are not barred from future entry into the united states.
Jail time doesn't determine whether or not an act is legal (consider running a red light or underage drinking). In particular, the law you cited above is pretty clear that entering the US to seek asylum is illegal but may be forgiven if asylum is granted. To be clear, these detainees are held under the pretense that they are going to be deported (however they must first be processed). The valid criticism of ICE is that they are apparently detaining US citizens and the detention conditions are unsatisfactory, but it's not a question that it's illegal to enter the US to seek asylum.
I mean, there's a particular act that the government can't prosecute you for, can't punish you for, and can't take into consideration when making decisions about you, in what sense is that act illegal? That's getting into "if a tree falls in the forest..." territory.
Illegal immigration is a prosecutable offense replete with fines and prison sentences. As I understand it, a judge hears the cases and can sentence an individual to deportation, fines, or prison time depending on the defendant's circumstances. IANAL.
I recommend reading up on Turcios v. INS and Akinmade v. INS. Both cases of refugees who lied to Customs and used false documents, and the court determined that is valid if fleeing persecution to seek asylum.
It would indeed be really interesting to understand how the court was able to rationalize that; INA is pretty explicit. In any case, I doubt typical "illegal immigration" can be meaningfully described as "fleeing persecution", and I say that with an abundance of sympathy for those garden variety illegal immigrants.
This is completely wrong. The court determined no such thing in either one of those cases. Both of these are cases in which the Ninth Circuit disagreed with findings made by the Board of Immigration Appeals in denying asylum relief and reversed said decisions. Insofar as passports/documents are referenced, it is in relation to testimonial credibility. Those decisions do not endorse or in any way legalize the use of false documents or the commission of illegal entry.
(Also, ninth circuit court holdings are only applicable in the ninth circuit.)
Okay, if they're asylum seekers and have valid reasons for claiming asylum, why are they trying to "hide" after crossing such that we're here discussing ICE, border camps, etc?
Most of the crossers aren't "technically" asylum seekers and more like economic migrants trying to look for a better life. They probably know this and so hide from border officials.
So one side of this debate wants to "include" economic migrants, and the other doesn't. If we can resolve this particular point, we can cut through all the hyperbole and emotion regarding the topic.
"[...] a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.[..]"
First of all, border crossers are neither a political class nor a persecuted minority (again, another abused nebulous term that means different things to different people). E.g. I'm a white male, and I happen to be a minority where I live. This place even has laws specifically designed to target us, yet here we're supposedly a "ruling minority" or something. Definitely not the same meaning geographically, but even more so politically.
Second. They're not forced to provide manual labor. Best I can tell is that it's voluntary, comparable to existing detention centers for citizens and they get some token pay in return.
Third. They're not there to await mass execution. At this point, using "concentration camp" in the normal "this is a bad thing to do to people" sense is quite hyperbolic. They're there waiting for court and/or deportation. I mean, what else do you want ICE to do if that is their current legal obligation to do? Must they say "screw it, the humane beds/cells are full, let's let those guys run right past us."
I think the above is from the Oxford dictionary according to Google.
Here is the definition from Merriam Webster, too:
"a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners"
> It pretty much follows the definition of a concentration camp.
No, it doesn't, and even to the partial extent it does, is HIGHLY disingenuous. Here is the definition of concentration camp:
a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–4
By calling it a concentration camp you are implying that migrants engaged in border crossings are political prisoners or persecuted minorities, which is flatly false. Furthermore you are loading the comment with obvious semantic baggage of the Nazi concentration camps and their horrors in order to massively exaggerate the blame and moral culpability of anyone associated with them.
But imprisoning people for extended periods of time in unsanitary conditions, without a fair trial[1] and entrapping legally-resident students into violating their visa conditions by setting up a fake university[2] is not a legitimate nor ethical method of immigration enforcement. Being against ICE and their actions is not the same as being against the concept of immigration enforcement.
[1]: The tribunal hearings are effectively a kangaroo court -- there are cases of pre-teen children being asked to make a legal defense without an attorney or their parents.
Entrapment is usually a horrible thing to do, but it is unfortunately standard practice with local police as well as the FBI. Would you agree that those agencies should not have technical services provided to them?
Entrapment as defined by the law is illegal. However, what a lot of these agencies do is not strictly entrapment as defined by the law, and as such is very legal (unfortunately). I'm betting the majority of terrorism cases in the US since 9/11 involved what looks like entrapment, and I believe pretty much all of them have held up in court.
So my question remains. When all of these agencies are practising legal entrapment, would you agree never to provide services to them?
>But imprisoning people for extended periods of time in unsanitary conditions
Trump has asked for additional funding for supplies including beds and toothbrushes. Trump as the head of the executive branch is in charge of ICE. So ICE has effectively asked for additional supplies. Congress hasn't done anything about that. It is not ICE's fault.
>entrapping legally-resident students into violating their visa conditions by setting up a fake university
This was started under Obama. Surely if this was a big issue then Github shouldn't have gotten into the contract in the first place.
> Trump has asked for additional funding for supplies including beds and toothbrushes. Trump as the head of the executive branch is in charge of ICE.
Was that before or after the public outcry over it? Also, there's the separation of parents and children which he definitely hasn't done anything about.
>Was that before or after the public outcry over it?
Trump advocated additional funding for ICE while he was still a candidate. As far as I know he did not specifically mention beds, toothbrushes, soap, etc until he was in office. Since practically nobody cared about the poor conditions of ICE detention centers while Obama was in office Trump may not have even know that they did not have enough supplies. I am unsure if Trump would have advocated for additional supplies if he had known.
>Also, there's the separation of parents and children which he definitely hasn't done anything about.
What is he supposed to do? There are 5 different things he can do and none of them are good.
1. Release parents and children into the US regardless of legal status.
2. Keep children in jail with their parents.
3. Separate children by sending them back to their country.
4. Separate children by placing them somewhere in the US (either with family or social services).
5. Send the entire family back to their country they came from.
A lot of the who make your point say to release them into the US. The problem is it would put a large strain on the welfare system. Even Bernie Sanders and others like him have explicitly said that it is not practical with the current system.
So what would you do with the children?
>How is that a defense? It's still unethical.
I am saying if setting up fake universities and entrapping people was a big deal then the deal between Github and ICE never should have been entered into. Github did not start the deal under Trump. They started it under Obama. Almost nobody seemed to care when Obama did the same thing Trump is doing. The media wasn't talking about it multiple times a day. People were not making speeches while crying about how awful it was. It feels like people only care now that Trump is in power. It was well known what was happening with ICE (and INS before them). It feels so political. That is all I was trying to convey.
> This government agency is actively committing numerous crimes and human rights violations, in contravention of both US and international law. ICE conducts random violent raids throughout the United States, invades communities and workplaces with military equipment, detains busses and trains, and arrests people solely on the basis of their perceived nationality, skin color, or native language. Their agents lurk outside of schools in order to abduct the children of immigrants and force their families to surrender themselves into custody. ICE imprisons people in deplorable and unsanitary conditions and denies them medical care. They separate the children they imprison from their families and offer them for adoption by others via agencies with shady histories. ICE agents subject both the adults and children they imprison to horrific physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. They continue to commit these heinous acts in defiance of multiple judgments issued by US courts and condemnations by humanitarian organizations. Many people, including children, have now died in their custody.
I understand some people just don't like immigrants for many reasons outside of racism/bigotry/xenophobia. Economics and culture being two of many reasonable reasons to dislike immigration.
But having a wing of government acting like the taliban does nothing but empower actual racist/xenophobic/bigoted individuals to enact their deepest sadistic fantasies on these people. This is clearly not simply immigration enforcement.
I support immigration enforcement. I do not support ICE. Supporting ICE is supporting and empowering racism and xenophobia full stop.
Can you state what immigration enforcement you support? The level of hyperbole in your response indicates that you see all immigration enforcement as cruel and unusual.
The most obvious one and one which I believe would systematically kill illegal immigration is simply penalizing businesses which employ illegal immigrants. Either with harsh fines or even possibly jail time.
ICE is simply trying to pull weeds when what you need to do is kill the root. Illegal immigrants come because of many reasons, but primary is to cheat the system that legal immigrants use to find a better life.
If you make the job opportunities sparse, you kill the desire at the root. Open borders is a problem, especially in today's climate change world but it exists because people are willing to employ illegals for below market rates. It's the worst of all worlds for all, except the employer who gets off with cheap labour.
If we do this, we'll finally see if the xenophobes put their money where their mouth is and take back the jobs illegal immigrants have "stolen" from them.
If you took time to read the summary in that README, you'd get all the citations you could want.
In the face of all the horrific reports coming from those jail cells, tell me how actively supporting ICE is not. Hell, name even one government facility where numerous children have died because of neglect and abuse at the hands of government officials.
And again, I can guarantee that illegal immigration will not stop because of ICE's shock tactics. It's just another hoop to jump through. Some of these people escaped the clutches of cartels, for chrissake. You underestimate the resolve of people who find no hope in their current situations.
I said in another comment the way to stop illegal immigration is via jailing business owners that hire illegal immigrants. This is just the war on drugs all over again. You're jailing the users, not the pushers.
Once that is accomplished you'd be living in a land of warlord fiefdoms. No women or children would ever be safe unless protected by strongmen. Society would stagnate into a dark age. You might as well move to Afghanistan.
It would put more of a dent in Github's reputation.
Why would you go with a company that may pull your contract when you haven't changed what you do in 20 years? Github signed the contact knowing what ICE does and didn't care years ago. Now its suddenly an issue.
I was not talking about specific cases / abuses. I was talking about policy.
ICE patrolled the border. ICE stopped people illegally crossing the border. ICE jailed people suspected of crossing the border. ICE separated children. Nothing has changed in that regards.
The other issue is that the posts don't say if things are actually getting better. For example the first claim is "The Intercept published a report by the DHS Office of Inspector General revealing that 1,224 sexual abuse complaints while in immigration custody were filed between January 2010 and June 2017." We need to see the rates before 2010 or we need to see the rate for each year. Based on what that person posted we cannot draw any conclusions if things are actually improving or not. If things are improving then people shouldn't really be boycotting.
Is it the immigration policy, the immigration court system? individual agents/employees?
Doesn't every country have a counterpart to ICE that handles immigration rules?
Are there any countries that allow people to come and go without identifying themselves and having permission?
How is requiring identification and a visa (authorization) human rights abuse? If that's the standard for human rights abuse, then how can we own/lease/operate a car, have a bank account, rent an apartment, have an email account, access the internet, and so on?
Isn't identification and permission justified merely for the sake of bureaucracy? How else would you be able to keep an email inbox and go back to it without someone saying its you, and/or the mail being lost?
Maybe immigration policies could be improved, what specifically is it that could be done better?
I don't can't answer your question about "the actual complaint" because I am not one of the developers/protesters, but I'd just like to note you're building a lot of arguments against potential straw men. Perhaps you should more actively seek out the opposing opinion before you build arguments against them.
If it was Boeing providing bombers to the PRC to use against civilian populations, many people inside and outside of Boeing would be pressuring that contract to be cancelled.
What exactly is the problem with applying pressure to get a corporation to stop taking money from an organization/corporation/government/person that you find immoral?
The company doesn't have to /care/. The company can go after their almighty dollars for their shareholder if they want. And people can then choose to target that company in different ways, or target other companies that do business with that company, etc.
Boycotts, strikes, sabotage, sit-ins, work slowdowns, etc has all been used to pressure companies to take actions because of political reasons.