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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

... enforcing immigration law is immoral?

“Because it’s the law” is not a moral argument, it’s an excuse. All manner of immoral deeds can be justified by legal means. In the words of MLK: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”. You could argue that the law is just, but falling back to “It’s the law” is intellectual laziness.

GP wasn't falling back to "it's the law", but expressing skepticism that enforcement of immigration controls constitutes one of those unjust laws, which seems to be on firm ground, esp given that every country on earth does it.

Not every country is putting children into cages.

So further increasing tax burden on American citizens by allowing unlawful migration, when they already bring in 1 million plus lawfully and have been for the last decade, is morally just?

Their illegal immigration problem is literally an order of magnitude larger. Think about that for a second: 10 times more unlawful migration occurs in their country.

"It's immoral" is even more intellectually dishonest: you're just calling it bad.

I think a significant issue with this is how ICE has been enforcing the law. It has been argued that human rights offenses have been happening on a large scale, as committed by ICE.

That is to say: It's difficult to say that ICE is upholding the law by committing alleged crimes against humanity.

Unfortunately, ICE also has large-scale immunity to being investigate for these alleged crimes, leaving the public with no other avenues to uncover the truth besides the court of public opinion- their morals.

If they are enforcing harshly it might be difficult for them to find and remove people.

Ideally they need to work with the community. The problem is the community and certain safe cities make their jobs more difficult because they don't agree with the policy.

The smartest route would be to target businesses charging them additional taxes. Use that money to support the legal route by increasing limits and make that path more attractive.

Is it moral for citizens of this country to have their jobs taken away by people coming here illegally? I know several this has happened to, and who can no longer provide for their families. Where is your righteous indignation?

Is it moral for people who are working with the legal processes to immigrate to have others flout the law? Are you going to stand up and protect their rights?

Is it moral for people who are not citizens to come to our country and commit document fraud? To avail themselves of our safety net that we pay for? Our schools that we pay for? Why should citizens have to compete for these services against people who have not paid for them, who have jumped the line?

What moral right does someone have to make a claim on our jobs, our resources?

On the other hand, our government has a moral responsibility to protect the rights of the citizens of this country. To protect our jobs, our way of life.

This is really off-topic. He tought that ICE actions are immoral, therefore helping them is immoral, and decided to remove his FREE (as in freedom) software from his github account.

This has nothing to do with legal or illegal immigration.

Btw i'll stay off-topic with you: the waiting list for legal immigration is more than 20 year if you're from Mexico, up to 60 if its for familly reasons (so a son, a daughter, a wife or parents). This have some interesting effects (if the green card holder of the family die, what happen to those that remains, even if they lived in the US for 20 years?)

And what about the companies that hire illegal immigrants? Why are the fines so small. If you want to prevent illegal immigrant to "take away jobs", simple: higher fines for companies and incentives for illegal immigrants to denounce the company they are working for. This should do the job just fine.

I'm not completely informed of everything ICE does but I believe this is the agency that has been separating children from their parents, caging people for days (weeks?) on end in conditions where they can't even lie down, and even had small children die in their custody [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48375144

A fair criticism, but let's not forget these facilities and practices were opened during the Obama administration. People like to point to this as a point of criticism against Trump.

If that were true it would be even more terrible. I did find it a bit hard to believe so I checked, and your claim seems to be based on a misunderstanding, according to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/fact-check-fa....

Can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but unfortunately I've come to doubt anything the NYT reports against Trump as they tend to be less than honest about how they choose to report and represent things.

Those facilities and practices were started by Bill Clinton in the 90s.

And my understanding is that those facilities and practices were put into place to protect the children from assault by the predominantly adult population of the then-existing detainment facilities.

Those people are also free to self-deport at any time. They're locked in cages insofar as they choose to be there.

Actually are they allowed to leave an ICE facility once they've been put into the encampments? For example, when a citizen youth was put into an encampmet for suspicion of being in the country illegally, I don't believe they were ever provided the option to be released.

Only to be “released” through deportation.

We're talking about children, and no that's not true.

Selective enforcement of immigration law is immoral. Both in the sense that immigration law is more likely to be enforced against racial minorities, and in the sense that workers are targeted but the businesses who benefit from exploiting undocumented immigrant labor are not targeted.

> Both in the sense that immigration law is more likely to be enforced against racial minorities

Is that a "more likely to be enforced against people who do something else, such as crossing the border illegally, and those people happen to have racial makeups different than the US" or "more likely to be enforced due to a person's race"?

I really have to assume the former.

Yes. As individuals we only have authority to restrict access to property we directly own... and as the State is only the collective organization of our own innate individual rights, there is no basis for the State to claim the power to restrict access to property it does not own. Individuals should be free to move wherever and however they want, so long as they don't initiate force or use fraud to violate anyone else's rights in the process.

Morality is subjective, Seth Vargo thinks the way ICE enforces the law is not appropriate and choose not to help them.

Wether or not you share his moral beliefs does not seem important to me, you can recode chef-sugar if you think the way ICE works is fine and we should help them.

> you can recode chef-sugar if you think the way ICE works is fine and we should help them.

No need to re-code, it's open-source. It's already forked and under new control.

Really, Seth was only the "owner" of that code insofar as the mainline development was occurring on a project on his profile. The project now exists under Chef's control on their profile.

This move only generates some minimal pain for anyone using Chef-Sugar, and gains PR for Seth and his views. Presumably the latter was his goal all along.

"Presumably the latter was his goal all along."

I'm not sure if this is the case and I think this is a bad faith interpretation of the developer's goals.

if the law is immoral, yes.

Is it immoral when other countries do it, or only when the U.S. does it?

More specifically only when the current US administration does it.

But not if the law is moral. Good luck determining it.

This is how immoral laws get changed though and there’s great success. There also many failures.

I suppose we’ll see how many people think the law is moral vs immoral.

Legality != morality

Plenty of laws on the books are immoral and I can think of lots of organizations I'd rather not support with my code. However, the price you pay for putting your work on the open market (or OSS) is that you lose control of who can use it after that point.

Do you have an argument for its being moral?

First, a simple moral case: if someone can go to a market to trade for things that allow them to survive, help their families, or just live a better life... under what conditions is it morally acceptable to stop them?

Our answer? Not many!

https://smbc-comics.com/comic/open-borders

Maybe you think that's politics, but acting like the moral argument doesn't exist is pretty dumb.

There's an election in 13 months. All of this goes away after that, just like swift boat captains and ACORN. Edit: To clarify, back to business-as-usual without wedge issues dividing Americans.

Are you implying you expect Trump to not win the re-election?

No, my previous comment was a somewhat knee-jerk of my belief that the media divides people in the months leading to an election so that they will go to the polls. They blow-up non-stories and downplay real actions where necessary.

Re: Trump, I doubt anyone cares what I think, but I do wish the republicans had a more approachable figurehead. The hard-nose republicans who wanted to buck the previous 8 years come hell or high water put him in and might keep him there. I would prefer a return to Bush's idea of a "compassionate conservative."

This is a pretty blatant strawman. Enforcing law is neither inherently immoral, nor are laws inherently moral. Your implication is destructively reductionist.

I'm wondering where you got the idea that this developer dislikes ICE because it enforces immigration law. That, on its face, makes little sense. It is quite clear that OP dislikes ICE because of the tactics it uses to enforce immigration law, not the enforcement of it outright.

I believe this discussion would go a lot more smoothly without pedantic, black and white arguments being thrown around with the thought that your argument is the correct one, and just needs to be crammed a little harder into everyone else before they get it.

EDIT: If you don't like what I have to say, rebut it, don't downvote it. Silencing me does nothing but make you feel good.

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