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This article is fairly silly. > “We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target in

This article is fairly silly. > “We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.” National origin - don't you have to declare what country you were born in to visit/emigrate to the United States? This is trying to legislate intent, which fails miserably. One thing we've seen is that if the database/tool exists, it'll be used in ways that nobody had ever thought of before. > I’m not one of the people who seriously believes that the cost of deporting millions of people will deter the Trump administration from doing it (one easy way to reduce costs: don’t deport people humanely). But history tells us that, whether you do it humanely or not, this kind of large-scale human rights abuse I like how she goes straight from deportation to large-scale human rights abuse. If you deport illegal immigrants (regardless of national origin or faith), you're enforcing the law. Period, point blank. To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best.

pcwalton 10y ago
> I like how she goes straight from deportation to large-scale human rights abuse. If you deport illegal immigrants (regardless of national origin or faith), you're enforcing the law. Period, point black. To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best. So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation? Tell that to the Japanese people we interned in World War II.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation? I said it was far fetched. Many legal things can be considered morally wrong but without a consensus of what's morally right or wrong, the law is what we fall back on. What are you proposing, doing whatever feels good at the moment while ignoring the law?
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    Thankfully morals don't depend on what is currently popular. Of course, mass deportations are also unpopular. I'm proposing that we don't tear families apart for no benefit.
morgante 10y ago
> National origin - don't you have to declare what country you were born in to visit/emigrate to the United States? Yes, but once you're a citizen you certainly shouldn't have your original national origin tracked. Or that of your parents. > To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best. No it is really not. Genocides almost invariable start with deportation. Nothing in this article is about illegal immigration. For one thing, it's a wholly separate issue than the proposed Muslim database—the vast majority of Muslim-Americans are here legally.
idlewords 10y ago
Mass migrations of people are a huge risk factor for human rights catastrophe. The Armenian genocide started as a mass deportation. Once you're seriously talking about uprooting millions of people, including breaking up families that have lived in the United States for decades, you create a destabilizing set of conditions you may not be able to control. Those people need to be housed, fed, moved, put on planes or ships to wherever they're being sent. The potential for abuse and tragedy is there at every step in this process.
scarmig 10y ago
Three questions: 1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. Do you recognize the truth of this statement? 2) Is it bad and oppressive to target a stigmatized minority religious group for government surveillance and policing? 3) Are software engineers morally obligated to not implement oppressive policies? Or is whatever they do justified, so long as it came as an order from above?
- brighteyes 10y ago
  > 1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. The problem is that all that information already exists. Google and Facebook know everyone's religion (and ethnicity and so forth). And as Snowden revealed, the government can get access to those databases. And you can be sure they already do so specifically for Muslim people, for terrorism intel purposes. If the author of the piece were serious, we would need to start by getting Google and Facebook to remove that information. Or stop working with the government. Or stop working at those companies until they do. But the author realizes that is something people wouldn't accept, I guess, and suggests we "not help create a new database" which just a meaningless distraction.
  - scarmig 10y ago
    There's still a world of difference between the government actively maintaining a database of Enemies of the State, and the government having to extract that information from at best neutral, and often hostile third parties. That said, it certainly behooves Facebook and Google to be thoughtful about what data they keep in a form easily accessible to the government.
    - brighteyes 10y ago
      I don't see a world of difference. The government gets that information either way. Once Google and Facebook has it, it can be retrieved by the government through both legal and non-legal mechanisms. Again, we know this happens, Snowden showed us. The only option is for Google and Facebook to not have that information in the first place. That's just not going to happen - there is tons of financial value in knowing people's religion, ethnicity, etc. etc.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany. Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. Did you know that if you are taken into custody for an immigration violation, you may not be entitled to any sort of hearing for as long as 6 months? Did you know that there have been many cases involving illegal abuses of people in immigration detention? Did you know that American citizens have been wrongly reported? Also, the process of determining who is deportable is nowhere near as simple as you suggest. Not everyone who comes here illegally is deportable even under a narrow reading of the law. It is precisely your sort of poorly-informed complacency that enables human-rights abuses to occur in the first place. Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated, in which case further conversation is pointless.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany. How odd, a Nazi/Hitler reference. Who'd had thought that was coming? > Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. It's the implementation that needs work. The law is the law. You said yourself "illegal abuses" and "wrongly reported". > Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. You're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. You probably shouldn't be in a country that doesn't want you.
  - scarmig 10y ago
    > If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. Sigh. For the umpteenth time, the US Constitution does not stipulate that non-citizens are subhuman. The right of due process, as described in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Note that illegal immigrants are still people. The US Constitution does not define them ipso facto as subhuman.
tptacek 10y ago
I am so far batting .750 with my conservative friends trying to convince them that mass deportation is an issue they should be concerned with. Every one of them begins by pointing out that "illegal immigration is illegal, full stop". Here are the issues they're not immediately considering: * For many Latino immigrants, the wait list for permanent residency is over 20 years long. The wait isn't that long because we want to restrict immigration; we broadly agree that if we drastically reduced the immigrant population in the US, the economy would suffer, because those people are staffing the meat packing plants, cleaning the hotels, working the line at practically every high-end restaurant, harvesting crops, laying bricks, and putting up tile. Rather: the 20 year wait list is simple bureaucratic cruelty: there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class. * That's bad enough, but not dispositive. The real problem is that we've created the expectation that people can work here for years and years without obtaining permanent residency, and so people put down roots and then have children here. Children born in America are American citizens, full stop. We are idiosyncratic in having a Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship, but we do, and we are a nation of laws. To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly. We owe our fellow citizens better. * A huge number (pretty much everyone agrees it's a plurality) of undocumented workers are undocumented not because they've done something wrong, but because they've somehow fallen off their visa track --- which the law makes incredibly easy to do! We put them on an untenable 20 year legal obstacle course that really requires professional representation to complete. They spend that time working and raising children. Then we punish their children for technicalities, while quietly replacing them with other Latino immigrants. * The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming. More than 70% of deportation cases in which the subject is represented by an immigration attorney fail --- the immigrant isn't deported. But the overwhelming majority of deportees aren't represented, because we don't guarantee counsel to people in immigration court. All we give them is a translator. If I sued you on some bogus libel charge for pissing me off on HN, how well do you think you'd do if you were denied a lawyer? I am ultimately ambivalent about immigration enforcement. I recognize that we are in many ways more lenient than much of Europe. My objection to the big dumb wall isn't moral, it's just that it's a big dumb waste of money. I am not ambivalent about pointlessly tearing up, or, worse, forcibly relocating families that include American citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of those. I would absolutely quit a job, refuse investment from a firm that supported, or sever ties with a client that participated in a mass deportation program that forced children to choose between their parents and their country.

pcwalton 10y ago

> I like how she goes straight from deportation to large-scale human rights abuse. If you deport illegal immigrants (regardless of national origin or faith), you're enforcing the law. Period, point black. To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best. So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation? Tell that to the Japanese people we interned in World War II.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation? I said it was far fetched. Many legal things can be considered morally wrong but without a consensus of what's morally right or wrong, the law is what we fall back on. What are you proposing, doing whatever feels good at the moment while ignoring the law?
- pcwalton 10y ago
  Thankfully morals don't depend on what is currently popular. Of course, mass deportations are also unpopular. I'm proposing that we don't tear families apart for no benefit.

morgante 10y ago

> National origin - don't you have to declare what country you were born in to visit/emigrate to the United States? Yes, but once you're a citizen you certainly shouldn't have your original national origin tracked. Or that of your parents. > To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best. No it is really not. Genocides almost invariable start with deportation. Nothing in this article is about illegal immigration. For one thing, it's a wholly separate issue than the proposed Muslim database—the vast majority of Muslim-Americans are here legally.

idlewords 10y ago

Mass migrations of people are a huge risk factor for human rights catastrophe. The Armenian genocide started as a mass deportation. Once you're seriously talking about uprooting millions of people, including breaking up families that have lived in the United States for decades, you create a destabilizing set of conditions you may not be able to control. Those people need to be housed, fed, moved, put on planes or ships to wherever they're being sent. The potential for abuse and tragedy is there at every step in this process.

scarmig 10y ago

Three questions: 1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. Do you recognize the truth of this statement? 2) Is it bad and oppressive to target a stigmatized minority religious group for government surveillance and policing? 3) Are software engineers morally obligated to not implement oppressive policies? Or is whatever they do justified, so long as it came as an order from above?

brighteyes 10y ago
> 1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. The problem is that all that information already exists. Google and Facebook know everyone's religion (and ethnicity and so forth). And as Snowden revealed, the government can get access to those databases. And you can be sure they already do so specifically for Muslim people, for terrorism intel purposes. If the author of the piece were serious, we would need to start by getting Google and Facebook to remove that information. Or stop working with the government. Or stop working at those companies until they do. But the author realizes that is something people wouldn't accept, I guess, and suggests we "not help create a new database" which just a meaningless distraction.
- scarmig 10y ago
  There's still a world of difference between the government actively maintaining a database of Enemies of the State, and the government having to extract that information from at best neutral, and often hostile third parties. That said, it certainly behooves Facebook and Google to be thoughtful about what data they keep in a form easily accessible to the government.
  - brighteyes 10y ago
    I don't see a world of difference. The government gets that information either way. Once Google and Facebook has it, it can be retrieved by the government through both legal and non-legal mechanisms. Again, we know this happens, Snowden showed us. The only option is for Google and Facebook to not have that information in the first place. That's just not going to happen - there is tons of financial value in knowing people's religion, ethnicity, etc. etc.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany. Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. Did you know that if you are taken into custody for an immigration violation, you may not be entitled to any sort of hearing for as long as 6 months? Did you know that there have been many cases involving illegal abuses of people in immigration detention? Did you know that American citizens have been wrongly reported? Also, the process of determining who is deportable is nowhere near as simple as you suggest. Not everyone who comes here illegally is deportable even under a narrow reading of the law. It is precisely your sort of poorly-informed complacency that enables human-rights abuses to occur in the first place. Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated, in which case further conversation is pointless.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany. How odd, a Nazi/Hitler reference. Who'd had thought that was coming? > Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. It's the implementation that needs work. The law is the law. You said yourself "illegal abuses" and "wrongly reported". > Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. You're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. You probably shouldn't be in a country that doesn't want you.
- scarmig 10y ago
  > If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. Sigh. For the umpteenth time, the US Constitution does not stipulate that non-citizens are subhuman. The right of due process, as described in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Note that illegal immigrants are still people. The US Constitution does not define them ipso facto as subhuman.

tptacek 10y ago

I am so far batting .750 with my conservative friends trying to convince them that mass deportation is an issue they should be concerned with. Every one of them begins by pointing out that "illegal immigration is illegal, full stop". Here are the issues they're not immediately considering: * For many Latino immigrants, the wait list for permanent residency is over 20 years long. The wait isn't that long because we want to restrict immigration; we broadly agree that if we drastically reduced the immigrant population in the US, the economy would suffer, because those people are staffing the meat packing plants, cleaning the hotels, working the line at practically every high-end restaurant, harvesting crops, laying bricks, and putting up tile. Rather: the 20 year wait list is simple bureaucratic cruelty: there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class. * That's bad enough, but not dispositive. The real problem is that we've created the expectation that people can work here for years and years without obtaining permanent residency, and so people put down roots and then have children here. Children born in America are American citizens, full stop. We are idiosyncratic in having a Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship, but we do, and we are a nation of laws. To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly. We owe our fellow citizens better. * A huge number (pretty much everyone agrees it's a plurality) of undocumented workers are undocumented not because they've done something wrong, but because they've somehow fallen off their visa track --- which the law makes incredibly easy to do! We put them on an untenable 20 year legal obstacle course that really requires professional representation to complete. They spend that time working and raising children. Then we punish their children for technicalities, while quietly replacing them with other Latino immigrants. * The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming. More than 70% of deportation cases in which the subject is represented by an immigration attorney fail --- the immigrant isn't deported. But the overwhelming majority of deportees aren't represented, because we don't guarantee counsel to people in immigration court. All we give them is a translator. If I sued you on some bogus libel charge for pissing me off on HN, how well do you think you'd do if you were denied a lawyer? I am ultimately ambivalent about immigration enforcement. I recognize that we are in many ways more lenient than much of Europe. My objection to the big dumb wall isn't moral, it's just that it's a big dumb waste of money. I am not ambivalent about pointlessly tearing up, or, worse, forcibly relocating families that include American citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of those. I would absolutely quit a job, refuse investment from a firm that supported, or sever ties with a client that participated in a mass deportation program that forced children to choose between their parents and their country.