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.
Do you think a company in 1930s Germany should have ethically refused to provide software that was used in concentration camps? [In fact, there was a bit of "IT" then, used for such, but it was provided by IBM. But to make the analogy closer, let's imagine a hypothetically Germany company].
("Companies" don't do anything by themselves, so I guess the question is if the decision-makers in such a company should refuse to sell software to the German government for such purposes, and if the employees should try to pressure the decision-makers to).
If we agree that in that case the ethical choice is to refuse to supply the software, and that it would in fact be unethical to sell software for such a purpose...
Then we already agree that there is some case where a company should refuse to provide services for 'political' reasons, even to a government agency of the country it's located in.
So it's no longer a question of if a company should ever be "expected"to do this -- but if they should in this case, if this particular scenario is such an example. People can disagree on that, can think that obviously this is unlike the Nazi example, that this example does not rise to that level. I'm not trying to insist that this is definitely a "Nazi-like" example.
But once we agree there is at least one such case, it's not a categorical dispute about whether business decisions should be "politisized" ever -- it's a debate about the particular ethics of the specific situation we (or github) finds themselves in, if this example is one that requires us to ethically refuse cooperation or not. Very particularly. I think that is a fine debate to have. I think the debate about whether a company should ever do this sort of thing is not so much, because really we should all be able agree there are some lines that should not be crossed there, there are some cases where, yes, a company should be expected to refuse service to it's own government, once we examine the historical examples that are obviously beyond the lines.
I think its appropriate to refuse to work with nazi germany, apartheid south africa, khmer rouge, etc. But I don’t think ICE is anywhere near those regimes.
If GitHub staff equate them, then I question the logic of any organization that makes those comparisons. Mainly because it they aren’t operating rationally then perhaps next is DEA, NRA, non-GPL contributors, etc.
I don’t see any good where companies try to work or not work with specific organizations based on very niche boycott campaigns.
Or perhaps the checks are very common and don’t usually result in public letters and whatnot.
ICE hasn’t even been accelerating in their harm to people. If anything they’ve plateaued or declined. I’m not sure how to best measure fascism in ICE, but long term internment, death, and mistreatment is probably a start. The death rate has dropped, despite many more detentions [0]. I tried to figure out some metric around number detained, but I think that may also be influenced by number of crossings and not straightforward to risk of becoming Nazi Germany.
How do you think we can better measure this risk within ICE?
[0] https://www.cato.org/blog/8-people-died-immigration-detentio...