Tell Microsoft and GitHub to Drop ICE as a Client | Hacker News Reader

Tell Microsoft and GitHub to Drop ICE as a Client

github.com

11 pointskalia3518 comments

There was a time when people came freely across the seas, and there were no passports or citizenship documents. In many places it wasn't even that long ago, 100 years or less. You just had to speak the language to make it, or find your community. If you didn't, you'd often become a slave (or were brought in as one).

But we live in a different world today, and there needs to be reasonable means to control immigration in the way modern countries have evolved to operate. I got a visa in New Zealand once and need to get my FBI fingerprints, a chest x-ray and blood tests.

You might disagree with certain policies, and there should be a legal means for more migrant labor for certain farm and factory fields to come in to meet the demand, but blanket "ICE bad" is just a weird stance to take. As the son of a legal immigrant, and someone who has gone through another county's immigration process, I think it's a little bonkers.

There are also plenty of legal refugee status programs (although some are difficult to find and yes, border security may deter people from the right locations/checkpoints to apply -- different problem really). Many undocumented workers come across the borders with their passports and just overstay (and we should have a way to give them actual work visas if they have passports, no criminal record and there is demand).

Well what about the war and crime and people escaping, you ask? Here's a better solution. The United States should stop buying ALL THE COCAINE and also put in actual gun registration so the big gun companies can't make as much money with their massive smuggling programs:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/america-and-the-mexican-d...

Blame 4th generation information warfare for it. Each country has its own narrative about what goes around both within and outside her borders, and they want to adamantly stick to that narrative.

If their narrative loses to another country's, they simply cannot survive, either politically or morally. Even people are becoming part of this narrative wars these days, which is why each country is zealously guarding its borders from outsiders.

I think a country should have the absolute best tools at their disposal to be able to handle processing and serving the millions of immigrants and billions of dollars of goods which cross their borders.

If an influx of unaccompanied minors cross a border, a country needs to have the systems, processes, facilities, and supply lines setup and ready to activate to support that population.

Whether it is trying to confirm identification of someone crossing at a border station or illegally, locating and vetting relatives (or someone claiming to be a relative) in country, or finding a foster family or allocating space at a shelter, there is a very significant amount of work that DHS and ICE needs to be doing to both protect this vulnerable population as well as identify criminals who may be trying to cross the border for nefarious purposes.

We need a best-in-world multi-layered system which includes everything from search and rescue, drug interdiction, temporary shelters, family housing, background checks and asylum claims processing, work permitting, and on and on.

Border crossings on the southern border are actually at a historical low, but the demographics of the people who are crossing has changed dramatically. Instead of predominantly single males, we have had a massive increase in unaccompanied minors and families. Instead of Mexicans, there has been a large flow from Central America coming through Mexico and into the US. These new demographics present extreme challenges to the existing facilities on the border which were not built to accommodate that type of population.

IMO what we need to be doing is properly funding border enforcement and processing, hiring a large number of new immigration judges to process claims in days not months, and build facilities that can keep illegal entrants reasonably comfortable for the few days it should take to process their arrival, whether that means admittance into the interior with a future court date or refusal of entry and deportation.

I wonder, for example, what tools and services the USDS may be building for ICE and DHS, and if the engineers on those products feel like they are positively contributing to the safety and welfare of, for example, families with qualified asylum claims, or helping identify children being trafficked across the border.

>Or, we will simply take our projects elsewhere.

I want to see how many actually do. If that's what it takes to break Github's monopoly then so be it.

Pay attention to the record and intentions of your legislative candidates, and go vote if you don't like what the government buys, or what kinds of institutions your politicians have asked the Federal government to take over.

ICE will have Git hosting, this is not where your perceived injustice is occurring.

If they don't, the people who forced Chef to drop their contract owe them a BIG apology. It's completely unfair to harass the little guys while the Microsoft's and Oracle's of the world continue, unaffected.

No. They can do business with whoever they want as long as doing so doesn't break any law.

The world will never fully conform to anyone's vision, get over it.

The U.S. government is a big spender on tech. Tech CEOs have an obligation to shareholders not to turn away big clients.

A sovereign country makes an effort to police its borders. It should do so humanely, and not expect 100% success in stopping illegal immigration, but immigration enforcement is a proper function. I get the impression that critics of tech companies doing business with ICE are against all enforcement.

...Or maybe refusing to work with an inhumane administration is the ethical thing to do because it raises awareness of the public which is the only way to modify an administration's bad behavior ?

Enforcement is supposed to serve the public and the public has the right to tell the enforcement when the job is badly done. It is very different than to be against enforcement.

Lastly, I hope that sone shareholders may want to associate themselves with humanistics valors because they are human being too.

If a big client hurts your reputation, goodwill and mindshare and makes hiring more difficult there comes a point where you would have to argue that executives have the obligation to shareholders to turn those harmful clients away.

> makes hiring more difficult

I wouldn't want to work at a company that would so readily bend over for this hysterical mob, it kinda cuts both ways.

Its quite funny that America was once heavily criticized for meddling in other country's affairs and inviting their hatred in return (pre 9/11 days). And now, they are criticized for exactly the opposite thing: Just minding their own business and securing it from outsiders!

Securing a border != imprisonning children and separate them from their family

> ...separating them from their families.

When given the opportunity, the Democratic representatives refused to support a bill that simply reversed that one Clinton-era decision that leads to the separation of children from the people who claim to be their guardians at the border (who are, as it turns out, often not).

Much noise has been made about using these children as bargaining chips, by both sides, but neither seems to be totally above it.

I think that's plainly wrong.

1. There is no need for a bill to modify ICE misconducts 2. The bill was for financing ICE and help it amplify it's bad behaviors 3. When the democrats would not pay for inhumane ICE, the reps told everyone the dems were against every changement.

The United States is likely the main cause of this immigration flow. We regularly meddle in the elections and politics of South American countries. [1]

Many of the immigrants coming to the US currently are fleeing Honduras, where we seemed to have supported a coup in 2011. [2]

Besides coups, our drug war has been exported to the area and has had a negative effect as well.

So yeah, the same people criticizing the US for meddling in other countries are criticizing it's immigration policy because the immigration problem is caused by the meddling. They think the United States should take responsibility for the problem it created.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-us-role-in-the-honduras-c...

I am not sure about your impression. Maybe there are some people against all enforcement, but most people think there should be some balance between locking a person up for crimes, and treating a person humanely, like you said.

Society is us, and some of us have opinions about what we should look like. The critics are just that. They probably understand that in our society, there's an obligation to make the most money. But they also feel other moral obligations.

The critics and the not-critics generate this tension, and that can help us collectively figure out what we should look like.

The point being, shareholder obligation, and the belief in sovereignty and geo-political borders are only some pieces of what is ultimately a very deep question of who we, as a society, want to be. And I hope you appreciate that some critics, even the most extreme ones, are trying to answer that question.

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