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I'm curious what the root cause of this is. - Ongoing disagreement between SpaceX and DOJ regarding applicable law? - SpaceX HR misunderstanding, at the time,

I'm curious what the root cause of this is. - Ongoing disagreement between SpaceX and DOJ regarding applicable law? - SpaceX HR misunderstanding, at the time, the applicable law? (I can see how this category of applicants might be rare enough that HR people fail to account for them.) - SpaceX HR policy lining up with DOJ's view, but hiring managers choosing candidates with a suspicious statistical distribution?

solardev 3y ago
Could this be a political act, trying to make an example out of SpaceX to please immigrants and asylees who largely vote Democrat? Kinda like the labor people going after Starbucks with a vengeance after years of nothing under Trump.
- skc 3y ago
  Is this even true? That refugees and asylees largely vote democrat? I ask because a lot of these people come from countries that are highly conservative in nature and culture.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I think "immigrants" as a whole, yes: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/state/among/immigrant-status/immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu... Even the people who can't vote lean that way: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/22/are-unauthorized-immigrants-overwhelmingly-democrats/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/22/are-unaut... Even if they can't vote, some of their family members can, and their kids and their friends will be able to. There's a reason major cities are often blue (largely linked to their history of immigration), and across generations, these loyalties can build up. (Also, the Democrats largely gave up on the rural areas as a matter of political strategy, but that's a separate story). Asylees and refugees on the other hand... I can entirely believe that, but I guess we won't see the bigger picture of that (vs large-scale immigration from Central/South America) for a while.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      > major cities are often blue (largely linked to their history of immigration) Citation needed, this has not been true of most blue cities I have lived in
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - solardev 3y ago
        Which part, that they run blue or that they are blue partially because of immigration? Stats that they run blue: Voters... https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/metro-area/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu... Officials... https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_the_100_largest_cities https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t... Some analyses about the why: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-history-how-democrats-conquered-city/597955/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-hist... https://www.niskanencenter.org/explaining-the-urban-rural-political-divide/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/explaining-the-urban-rural-po... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/05/why-are-urban-rural-areas-so-politically-divided/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/05/why-are-u... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/what-is-it-exactly-that-makes-big-cities-vote-democratic https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/what-is-i... It goes back to early generation of European working-class industrial immigrants, then continued with techy Asians and Indians (who were often Democratic not for economics but because the Republicans got more and more nationalist). These days the Hispanic vote (which is a lot of the "immigrants" group) still leans blue, even though they don't necessarily swing culturally as left as the white young Democrats.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I meant the latter. Reading some of these articles, here is what I disagree about your characterization: For almost all of the east coast/midwest cities I have lived in, the Black "great northern migration" was a much larger factor in the Democratization of cities than foreign immigrant populations. I agree that, especially in the northeast, where democrats started to take hold were communities that were distinct from the traditional anglo-protestant axis (particularly Irish catholics), but by the time this really accelerated and became an urban trend in the early to mid to even late 20th century (urban = democrat emerged most strongly in the 80s and 90s as your articles identify), most of these populations were already multi-generational American households, not new immigrants. Sure they had not been there since the Mayflower, but plenty had been there since the 19th century. What united these disparate groups was an attraction to industrial policy, less so some immigrant axis. Your article #3 is not about the US but rather Europe, your articles #2 and #4 (especially #4) explicitly disagree with you about immigration being the driving factor, and your first article indicates that it has more to do with industrial policy than immigration.
  - PLenz 3y ago
    They're not citizens. They can't vote at all.
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      Yes, we need IDs to make sure they’re US citizens or green card holders in order to vote. How else would you know? We don’t check IDs to do the most basic thing that holds democracy together. The rest of the world requires ID to vote.
  - yamazakiwi 3y ago
    redacted
    - solardev 3y ago
      You're right. I should've distinguished between immigrants and refugees, and backed it up with data.
      - yamazakiwi 3y ago
        I've redacted my statement since it is no longer relevant, interesting data. I wonder how refugees would vote comparitively to immigrants, one would assume it would be close but I could be entirely wrong.
        solardev 3y ago
        I think it's a fascinating question though (how asylees and refugees would vote if they could, vs immigrants and migrants), one which I don't even have a gut feeling for. Most migrants from Central/South America will already be somewhat familiar with US culture due to geographic proximity, and often will have family and friends here who can help assimilate/absorb them into both local/municipal cultures and the broader US political landscape. Refugees and asylees don't necessarily have that, especially if they are coming from a non-democratic and non-Western culture. I would love to see data on this.
        yamazakiwi 3y ago
        The "need/want to fit in" would be high so based on that... the real question is... where do they live now?
- tullianus 3y ago
  The people the DOJ claims are discriminated against (asylees and refugees) can't vote. The issue is SpaceX claiming they can only hire citizens (who can vote) and permanent residents (who can't vote).
  - golemiprague 3y ago
    [dead]
  - solardev 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      Biden (and Trump) has marked a shift towards industrial policy, I think the neoliberal cosmopolitan globalism era may be coming to a close - or at least become as hotly contested an issue among the Dems as pro-war neoconservatism has among the Republicans. I mean "pro-union neoliberal globalists" is already a term with quite a lot of tension in it.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Yes, it's a fair point (and I hope you're right, as a mostly working-class person myself), but it's also not entirely incompatible. It doesn't cost major companies very much to treat their workers just a LITTLE better. And who earns all the big bucks these days... mostly tech and finance, which are already globalized and tend to treat their workers better than, say, Starbucks. Maybe in a decade or two unionized global capital will be just as much an invisible norm as, say, weekends. But hey, if that doesn't come to pass and both parties instead focus more domestically... great, I say! I'd love for us to clean up our house.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        Starbucks is already globalized, there is no Google in China but there is Starbucks. I don't think "global unions" are possible, but if they were the concessions would likely have to be more than "a little."
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Well yes but more likely it's Democrats acting on behalf of other companies who want to hamstring SpaceX by burying them under frivolous and vague lawsuits. And, pragmatically, this is how you want to do it. Get your favors in early enough in the election cycle that no one remembers when the actual election rolls around. Comply, but not enough to actually succeed.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Wouldn't be surprised, Elon's tweets have angered a lot of rich and powerful people. Surprised they've not found something to jail him for yet.
myko 3y ago
It looks like SpaceX HR fucked up something that's should be pretty obvious to HR departments. They've already corrected it and will likely be fined for the mistake. Nothing nefarious here either way, not intentionally as far as I can tell.
tenpies 3y ago
Tin-foil hat time, but with the current Biden Administration, you also have to consider the possibility that it's a shot across the bow to ensure Twitter censors "misinformation" going into the US elections. If this does not work, perhaps the IRS next up to bat? And it's a very thin tin-foil hat I'm wearing given that the Biden Administration was literally telling the tech companies who to censor, up until the courts ruled they could not do that: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2023/07/04/judge-blocks-biden-officials-louisiana-missouri-lawsuit/70381972007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2023/07/04/judge-bl...

solardev 3y ago

Could this be a political act, trying to make an example out of SpaceX to please immigrants and asylees who largely vote Democrat? Kinda like the labor people going after Starbucks with a vengeance after years of nothing under Trump.

skc 3y ago
Is this even true? That refugees and asylees largely vote democrat? I ask because a lot of these people come from countries that are highly conservative in nature and culture.
- solardev 3y ago
  I think "immigrants" as a whole, yes: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/state/among/immigrant-status/immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu... Even the people who can't vote lean that way: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/22/are-unauthorized-immigrants-overwhelmingly-democrats/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/22/are-unaut... Even if they can't vote, some of their family members can, and their kids and their friends will be able to. There's a reason major cities are often blue (largely linked to their history of immigration), and across generations, these loyalties can build up. (Also, the Democrats largely gave up on the rural areas as a matter of political strategy, but that's a separate story). Asylees and refugees on the other hand... I can entirely believe that, but I guess we won't see the bigger picture of that (vs large-scale immigration from Central/South America) for a while.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    > major cities are often blue (largely linked to their history of immigration) Citation needed, this has not been true of most blue cities I have lived in
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - solardev 3y ago
      Which part, that they run blue or that they are blue partially because of immigration? Stats that they run blue: Voters... https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/metro-area/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu... Officials... https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_the_100_largest_cities https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t... Some analyses about the why: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-history-how-democrats-conquered-city/597955/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-hist... https://www.niskanencenter.org/explaining-the-urban-rural-political-divide/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/explaining-the-urban-rural-po... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/05/why-are-urban-rural-areas-so-politically-divided/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/05/why-are-u... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/what-is-it-exactly-that-makes-big-cities-vote-democratic https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/what-is-i... It goes back to early generation of European working-class industrial immigrants, then continued with techy Asians and Indians (who were often Democratic not for economics but because the Republicans got more and more nationalist). These days the Hispanic vote (which is a lot of the "immigrants" group) still leans blue, even though they don't necessarily swing culturally as left as the white young Democrats.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        I meant the latter. Reading some of these articles, here is what I disagree about your characterization: For almost all of the east coast/midwest cities I have lived in, the Black "great northern migration" was a much larger factor in the Democratization of cities than foreign immigrant populations. I agree that, especially in the northeast, where democrats started to take hold were communities that were distinct from the traditional anglo-protestant axis (particularly Irish catholics), but by the time this really accelerated and became an urban trend in the early to mid to even late 20th century (urban = democrat emerged most strongly in the 80s and 90s as your articles identify), most of these populations were already multi-generational American households, not new immigrants. Sure they had not been there since the Mayflower, but plenty had been there since the 19th century. What united these disparate groups was an attraction to industrial policy, less so some immigrant axis. Your article #3 is not about the US but rather Europe, your articles #2 and #4 (especially #4) explicitly disagree with you about immigration being the driving factor, and your first article indicates that it has more to do with industrial policy than immigration.
- PLenz 3y ago
  They're not citizens. They can't vote at all.
  - systemvoltage 3y ago
    Yes, we need IDs to make sure they’re US citizens or green card holders in order to vote. How else would you know? We don’t check IDs to do the most basic thing that holds democracy together. The rest of the world requires ID to vote.
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  redacted
  - solardev 3y ago
    You're right. I should've distinguished between immigrants and refugees, and backed it up with data.
    - yamazakiwi 3y ago
      I've redacted my statement since it is no longer relevant, interesting data. I wonder how refugees would vote comparitively to immigrants, one would assume it would be close but I could be entirely wrong.
      - solardev 3y ago
        I think it's a fascinating question though (how asylees and refugees would vote if they could, vs immigrants and migrants), one which I don't even have a gut feeling for. Most migrants from Central/South America will already be somewhat familiar with US culture due to geographic proximity, and often will have family and friends here who can help assimilate/absorb them into both local/municipal cultures and the broader US political landscape. Refugees and asylees don't necessarily have that, especially if they are coming from a non-democratic and non-Western culture. I would love to see data on this.
        yamazakiwi 3y ago
        The "need/want to fit in" would be high so based on that... the real question is... where do they live now?
tullianus 3y ago
The people the DOJ claims are discriminated against (asylees and refugees) can't vote. The issue is SpaceX claiming they can only hire citizens (who can vote) and permanent residents (who can't vote).
- golemiprague 3y ago
  [dead]
- solardev 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Biden (and Trump) has marked a shift towards industrial policy, I think the neoliberal cosmopolitan globalism era may be coming to a close - or at least become as hotly contested an issue among the Dems as pro-war neoconservatism has among the Republicans. I mean "pro-union neoliberal globalists" is already a term with quite a lot of tension in it.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Yes, it's a fair point (and I hope you're right, as a mostly working-class person myself), but it's also not entirely incompatible. It doesn't cost major companies very much to treat their workers just a LITTLE better. And who earns all the big bucks these days... mostly tech and finance, which are already globalized and tend to treat their workers better than, say, Starbucks. Maybe in a decade or two unionized global capital will be just as much an invisible norm as, say, weekends. But hey, if that doesn't come to pass and both parties instead focus more domestically... great, I say! I'd love for us to clean up our house.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        Starbucks is already globalized, there is no Google in China but there is Starbucks. I don't think "global unions" are possible, but if they were the concessions would likely have to be more than "a little."
jimbob45 3y ago
Well yes but more likely it's Democrats acting on behalf of other companies who want to hamstring SpaceX by burying them under frivolous and vague lawsuits. And, pragmatically, this is how you want to do it. Get your favors in early enough in the election cycle that no one remembers when the actual election rolls around. Comply, but not enough to actually succeed.
bluescrn 3y ago
Wouldn't be surprised, Elon's tweets have angered a lot of rich and powerful people. Surprised they've not found something to jail him for yet.

myko 3y ago

It looks like SpaceX HR fucked up something that's should be pretty obvious to HR departments. They've already corrected it and will likely be fined for the mistake. Nothing nefarious here either way, not intentionally as far as I can tell.

tenpies 3y ago

Tin-foil hat time, but with the current Biden Administration, you also have to consider the possibility that it's a shot across the bow to ensure Twitter censors "misinformation" going into the US elections. If this does not work, perhaps the IRS next up to bat? And it's a very thin tin-foil hat I'm wearing given that the Biden Administration was literally telling the tech companies who to censor, up until the courts ruled they could not do that: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2023/07/04/judge-blocks-biden-officials-louisiana-missouri-lawsuit/70381972007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2023/07/04/judge-bl...