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Comment by umeshunni | Hacker News Reader

Even if a significant portion of GitHub's employees are non-US citizens, it's highly unlikely they're illegals.

So? Smart people can figure out that they can be made "illegal" by the stroke of a pen, even if they've complied with every rule they've encountered so far.

Not really. If government fiat takes away my US visa, and for some reason does so instantaneously with no grace period, then I'd still only be an illegal alien for the few days it takes to get my affairs in order and fly home. The kind of tech worker who's employed full time at github isn't in a remotely comparable situation to someone who's in the country illegally.

It's not actually that easy to revoke someone's citizenship. I know many people who came to the US legally that are vehemently opposed to illegal immigration precisely because they followed the rules and don't see why others shouldn't have to.

visas on the other hand are incredibly easy to revoke, or simply not renew. and you're employer has to support a greencard petition if you're e.g. on an h-1b. i know of at least one person's GC application that got torpedoed after his relationship with his manager soured. especially if they have families, employees on a visa simply aren't going to speak out.

> employees on a visa simply aren't going to speak out.

I know many people with visas that are against illegal immigration. Don't assume that everyone who's not from the US hates ICE and supports unfettered immigration.

As do I. It makes sense really, the queue for a green card for someone from India is 12 years now, while there are people 'cutting in line'.

This touches on my greatest frustration with the national debate about prosecution/tolerance of illegal immigration:

One of my main reasons for opposing illegal immigration is that it's contrary to the rule of law. It subverts the democratic process, and makes suckers of anybody who does try to follow these laws. I'm actually a big fan of legal immigration.

But I rarely (never?) hear this distinction made in public statements by advocates of illegal immigration. At least in public, they seem to assume that anybody who opposes illegal immigration opposes all immigration, and even worse, does so out of ignorance or bigotry.

Assuming I'm not the only person with my particular views, that conflation is infuriating. I can only hope it's done unwittingly.

As the war on drugs has also demonstrated, there is only but so much behavior-shaping you can achieve with people via the law.

If a law is consistently and chronicallhy broken (and especially if the harm for breaking said law is minimal), at some point one must ask if the law is too incompatible with human behavior to justify enforcement or existence.

I don't think anyone "soft on illegal immigration" is against legal immigration. But they may very well be against the laws as they currently stand, because the laws are demonstrably shaped by racist intent; the national quota system used to decide people per year from each country where very much structured out of fear of a "browning" of America.

For many of these people, the legal route isn't available, or in the case of people fleeing Syria, Guatemala or Honduras, they are seeking asylum, which is legally a different route.

Yeah, that certainly tempers my views. I'm sympathetic to breaking U.S. immigration law because it's the only option for keeping one's family safe from a war zone.

I'm much less sympathetic to people breaking U.S. immigration law because they want greater economic opportunity for themselves or their children.

That said, I can't argue back to first principles why my preferred balance of virtue maximization / vice minimization is objectively better than anyone else's. So if we're being completely honest, I can't advocate even my own position in good conscience.

That's absolutely not how it works. People either have valid immigration status and/or citizenship, or they don't. There's no trick to suddenly make people "illegal".

As another commenter mentioned, the most factual way of describing that group of people is "people residing or working in the country illegally". There aren't laws against people, there are laws against what people do.

No person is illegal.

I think it's fairly clear the commenter meant that they're "illegal immigrants," which approriately describes people that immigrated illegally. While the abbreviated colloquial form may not be strictly accurate on its own, it's quite reasonable to assume the full form given the context.

The words you use have an effect on how others feel and how they're perceived. The word "illegals" can have negative connotations, and it's a dehumanizing word.

The word has negative connotations because you're describing a very negative thing. If you suddenly decide to use a new word, it will also inevitably develop negative connotations.

Stephen Pinker explains it well:

https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyo...

Thanks for mentioning this, it was definitely worth a read. For a rather more legible version for anyone else interested: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-04-06-19940962...

It has negative connotations because it describes the act that is against the law. That's literally what "illegal" means. If you think it's OK to violate the law, then the connotations would be positive, if you do not, then the negative connotations are appropriate. You can't have it both ways.

It's not due to the definition, it's because of how the word has been used. There are terms which refer to undocumented immigrants which still represent their status, but are not dehumanizing.

If a person breaks the law, it is completely correct to say they broke the law. Going out of one's way to hide that fact because stating the facts is somehow "dehumanizing" is a political propaganda exercise, which tries to present (some) laws as something insignificant and barely worth mentioning, and people that consider following these laws important as somehow irrational, and more than once in this very topic - irrational, hateful and racist. I can see why you want to go through this political exercise, but I have absolutely no reason to follow you.

In the United States, literally everyone breaks the law. Calling someone “illegal” as if their identity is defined by something done by literally every single member of society is just a thin veil over the wish to dehumanize the vast and terrifying Other.

By your logic, you are also “an illegal”, because you, too, have broken the law. Everyone is.

But you don’t use it this way. You use it exclusively to define foreigners as bad, as if the law’s opinion about a person’s actions is relevant to their identity.

Actions are illegal. People are not.

These supposed "undocumented immigrants" are not generally undocumented. Nearly all of them have documents. Of course, those documents might use your social security number.

This being the case, the situation is generally one of fraud. Some states consider all cases of identity theft to be felonies, while other states can charge the crime either way.

It's usually considered better to refer to people by adjectives rather than noun forms. It just sounds politer to imply that it's an aspect of them rather than what they are. It's a minor thing in American speech, I think.

Colloquialism

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