Palantir Admits to Helping ICE Deport Immigrants
vice.com
vice.com
If you buy into the IPO, if you work at Palantir, or if you financially gain from this ecosystem you are profiting from the racist deportation of people who just want a better life.
I've never heard of a downside to having a large talent pool - how could there be?
Is it racist for a country to have and enforce borders at all?
I meant that seems like something you could argue, but it also seems very reductive and certainly not a given.
This is an impossible moral standard. Yours is just as impossible. The FBI and DHS do a lot more than just deport immigrants. Palantir does more than just aid in deporting immigrants. If everything were so black and white the above statement would likely describe what you do as well.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care or ‘object’ to them.
What it does mean is that finger pointing and trying to act like we aren’t part of the problem but ‘they’ i.e. Palantir etc, are, is simply a way of pretending we aren’t complicit.
If borders are a problem, we need to solve that problem by working out a path to eliminating them that actually minimizes harm.
We can’t do that if all our energy is spent on branding people ‘criminals’ and ‘objecting’ to them when we’re part of the same system ourselves.
I think the point here is that Palantir presents itself as not participating in deportations or other widely-considered-distasteful things, and yet they do, and that deserves particular outrage.
I think it's quite reasonable for a company to say we don't know exactly what our supply chain looks like and the only way anyone can build electronics is to use somewhat-questionable supply chains, but we'll do the best we can and and take action if we know of specific instances of harm (e.g., avoid known-bad suppliers), because that's the only way to do better. I think there's a number of food companies and clothing companies that do the same thing about working conditions in their supply chains, too. Palantir isn't doing that - they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth, saying "of course we aren't doing it" while directly being involved. If Palantir were to say, for instance, that they understand their product could be used in this way, they're not interested in providing services for deportations and will cut off customers who are using it for that or indirectly providing services for other organizations doing that, then the public reaction would be very different.
(They could also say "Palantir fully supports the mission of America's law enforcement including ICE and ERO, work here if you want to support law and order and make America great again," and then nobody would accuse them of hiding what they work on.)
No major semiconductor companies really does that that and definitely no tech company using the devices made by those semiconductor companies do that either. And even if they said they did it is still happening, so by the same standard this article is finding Palantir culpable of the deportations, I'd say its fair to find every tech company culpable of child slavery and exploitative mining practices as an example.
If it weren't Palantir it would just be another company. It seems pointless to focus on them specifically or ICE or any of the enforcement agencies for that matter when what seems to be the actual driver is the policies and laws that necessitates their existence. Seems like focusing on changing that is a much better target if you cared more than just assigning moral blame. Whether or not Palantir denies anything doesn't really change much if the outcomes are the same.
This seems like a oversimplistic take on undocumented immigrants. Yes, they just want a better life, but they're also violating immigration laws to do so. Not deporting them sends a signal that violating immigration laws okay and disincentives people from going through the proper channels.
There's room for lots of people and there's going to b a need for more people in this country as the boomers finally retire in their 80s.
On top of that, growing GDP is different from improving average quality of life. If GDP goes up 10% by growing the population 20% through mass immigration, it's plausible quality of life will go down in aggregate. Why is GDP growth the right metric?
You can't have it both ways, unfettered capitalism with continued growth and negative population growth.
GDP is not the right metric to show increase of quality of life, but it is a quick metric to show economic expansion and contraction.
There's a much broader conversation about how we want out system to work.
Yes, there is a downside of having a large “talent” pool of unskilled labor. If you’re a high school dropout, US citizen, you’re competing with this “talent” for handyman jobs, landscaping, house cleaning, etc.
Sure, it’s great to have cheap landscaping, but before you dismantle ICE, go speak with a US citizen who’s doing roofing, and ask if their income would be higher without the illegal immigrants.
Actually fine these businesses, threaten them with being shutdown and actually shut the worst offenders down. They're probably in violation of quite a few labor and tax laws as well, beyond just the issue of who they hire.
They'd also have more access to jobs that tend to effectively require work authorization. You can pay a fellow in cash to work on your roof without going through E-Verify; you can't quite easily pay a fellow in cash to work at a major fast food chain or drive a school bus or be an SRE at a thousand-person tech firm or whatever. So increasing legal immigration may have the effect of reducing the labor supply for house and farm work.
More generally, the economy is a complex thing, and each change you make has many effects. The wage for roofers is determined by both supply (number of potential roofers) and demand - if more people live here, there are quite literally more roofs. While I'm not saying this by itself is likely to save the roofing-labor market, I do think that there are likely broader effects from increasing our pool of legal immigrants besides the most obvious one of depressing wages, and we should look at more than just the extremely short term.
And in the long term, if population growth keeps up, the pool of unskilled labor with domestic work authorization is going to go up on its own. If our economy/society can't handle that, we should be figuring out how to address that anyway.
(This is all a bit orthogonal to dismantling ICE - I do agree that having an underclass of laborers without equal protection under the laws is bad for everyone. I just don't think that ICE is a morally justifiable solution to that problem. We should create more "proper pathways" for people to become documented residents and authorized workers, but until we do so, I don't think having ICE around makes things better.)
There are already laws in place for expanding the talent pool: student visas, work visas, seasonal worker visas, family visas, lottery visas
If more are needed can the allotment be increased instead of relying on black market sources?
Everyone wants an owned house, a nice car, a stable job, and a loving family next to them. You have to earn it. Get in line, haha. If we allow illegal immigration, we're destroying people's chances to stay professionally and legally competitive with each other, and working and integrating yourself in a new country is devalued.
You can't keep living under Damocles' sword of being thrown out at a moment's notice, serving as blackmail for your employer and nemeses. Why not earn the citizenship and the right to vote - to do something about Trump, Biden, and other such politicians? To make sure you can fund your children's college before someone from 4chan doxxes you to the authorities?
I'm sorry I'm surrounded by people who believe in impossible goals like world peace and lack of borders.
Have we thought critically about the positive aspects of border control? Or have we created drawn a moral line in the sand and refused to take up the rationales that may exist and address them? For example, have we put on our thinking caps and thought about how to preserve welfare states in the face of budgets and headcount?
Even if it ultimately becomes accepted as morally right, it certainly does not reflect the current views of all but a tiny minority of US citizens.
Vice is just profiting from creating moral panic here.
I guess the reason why they're involved in this is that the mechanics of deporting someone is a non-trivial data workflow through a bunch of crappy legacy systems, and given they've already got the ETL set up to get the data out, they can create a quick CRUD interface, or use data analysis to find suitable targets. That, plus the fact the company culturally agrees with the deportations, make it a reasonable business for them.
In many ways it's the same role as IBM played in the holocaust. These abhorrent operations are huge logistical undertakings, and that requires investment in tech that governments often aren't able to achieve.
Culture comes from the top, I don't think anyone at Palantir can be surprised that this is the result when Thiel is their leader.
Why? I don't know where you are coming from, but the world is a big place and there are lots of nice places to go. Granted, there are visa / immigration issues in plenty of countries apart from the US as well, but frankly for decades now the US has been on the decline in every measure of livability: health care, education, incomes, leisure time, commute time, etc, etc. About the only thing the US nominally leads in is a vague notion that you can make more money here than in other countries, but even that is subjective relative to the cost of living and quality of life.