zlacker

>>Xordev+(OP)
What a bummer that workers are publicly demanding this, and (presumably) seeking press attention on it.

I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).

But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.

We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.

But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.

EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.

>>rattra+Rh
There is also a contradiction in calling for more economic equality for minorities in the US and picking on ICE. Illegal immigration applies a downward pressure on wages of low skill workers, which is precisely where minorities are over-represented in the US.

>>cm2187+Rl
Your own contradiction is much more substantial!

Immigration enforcement is literally the use of force to maintain a larger economic inequality than the downward pressure you referred to.

Not in some subtle way. Enforcing politically decided inequality is literally the purpose of ICE.

It makes people uncomfortable to talk of it in those terms, but when you get down to it, a lot of people want to see enforced inequality, and vote for it.

They couch in terms like "downward pressure" to abstract things away from the people's lived experience, to make it palatable to make one group of people worse off so that another group of people can be better off.

The economics abstraction has the added bonus that we avoid mentionining the lived reality: the perpetual fear, lack of humanity and so forth that come with, say, splitting up families, and preventing them from having any reasonable avenue for leaving an ordinary life. (I've known too many immigrants who cannot find a way to solve the bureaucracy problem, and cannot even determine their legal status, or in some cases if they did try to find out they risk being split from their own immediate family, so perpetual fear and avoidance of authority is their only realistic option for living.)

>>jlokie+SA
The charitable interpretation of immigration enforcement is that it ensures a nation does not get overwhelmed by people entering the nation -- in terms of its economy, bureaucracy, etc. I can see that argument that enforcing immigration maintains the economic inequality between individuals in the US and, for example, individuals in Guatemala, but controlled immigration ensures that a nation is capable of growing and supporting the immigrants that come in in the first place. After-all, immigrants are coming to a given country because of perceived advantages of that country, if too many immigrants come at a single time, those advantages may disappear.