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Comment by siphon22 | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the app appears to be for helping illegal immigrants evade being captured.

From their homepage, it appears to be an app to notify others prior that you are about to be detained.

Out of interest, are apps that help you break the law against iOS App Store guidelines?

The app is to notify your family and legal counsel that you've been taken into custody, not to actively prevent you from being taken into custody (how would that even work?).

It's not any more "help you break the law" than an app that helps you find or communicate with defense lawyers, IMO. It's significantly less useful for breaking the law than Signal or even Safari.

How does this help anyone evade anything? It's for notifying contacts when you're about to be detained, not for avoiding being detained.

How's this any different than apps like waze that helps drivers (of the speeding, or running a red light variety) from being caught?

It's different in that the speeding drivers might kill someone by causing a car crash.

I don't like helping others drive extra fast. But I like the app and I hope the immigrants can stay.

Speeding or running a red light usually (although there are cases when you really have to hurry) is a voluntary choice which puts yourself and others in danger for no good reason and you just pay a fine or get jailed for some time in worst case if you get caught.

Having no residence permission usually is a circumstance you can hardly change, there is no choice, your mere existence is outlawed, you are destined to live on the run or get thrown back to hell for the rest of your life if you get caught.

How is illegal immigration not a voluntary choice?

Imagine you find yourself in a pool with boiling water. Provided you can manage to get out of there, how much voluntary choice is there in choosing between getting out of there or remaining there? Once you've got out and have been told you have no legal right to remain out of it and must dive back how much voluntary choice is in choosing between abiding and jumping back into the boiling pool and running away trying to hide? I don't see much choice here, do you? There is a thing called "withdrawal reflex" - try to touch a hot pan and not to withdraw your hand once you feel it burning and you'll know how much voluntary choice you have (free hint: if you manage you probably are a kwisatz haderach). Believe me there are many places in the world which feel like this for any normal person who is not a criminal by nature and doesn't have a ton of money (you probably can just buy yourself a comfortable impenetrable bunker anywhere if you do). When my legal status was at risk I thought I will probably commit suicide if my request for residence permit renewal gets declined. Not because I want to attract attention and make drama but because I just absolutely don't want to live where I have been born (because it's brutal: high crime rate, high corruption and brutality of police, bad medical service, cheap labor, expensive low quality goods, angry dangerous closed-minded people all around - if you're not the kind you just feel you don't belong there and can't live among them), I better don't live anywhere.

Yes, there are billions of people living in poor conditions around the world. I know first-hand what it's like. I also know the solution is not unfettered immigration. There isn't a single example where just shifting a bunch of people (and we wouldn't even approach 1% of the people in need) has ever solved any serious national issues with a country that is broken.

Either way, when it comes the law, illegal entry is still a voluntary action.

It seems you think on a way too high level of abstraction: bunches of people, broken countries (nobody can and will fix them anyway), percents of people in need. What I invite you to do is to imagine yourself in the role of a particular individual facing particular circumstances. There are many kinds of situations where there is just an illusion of choice. If they give you a choice to chop your head or your hand off you may end up being officially a person who has volunteered to chop his hand off but in fact this is going to be a kind of bullshit pretty easy to recognize and equally easy to ignore when it's not about you and you don't really care much.

You may disagree but I hope you understand why I refuse to equate an person who has not left the country after their residence license expiration to a violent criminal or a crazy person speeding around risking innocent people's safety for sake of their madness.

It's essentially no different, but some would argue the weight of the 'crime' is different. I haven't given my personal opinion on this btw, I was just saying who the likely target audience is, as legal residents aren't likely living worried about being deported any day now (I'm one).

Hell, I don't even know if actual illegals living on the low over here would even be able to find this and know what to do with it lol. Are there illegals browsing HN? Genuinely curious.

AIUI there are several forms of unauthorized presence in the US that are not crimes (and, like most traffic law violations, are just misdemeanors), e.g., overstaying a visa, losing an asylum claim, etc.

Also the moral culpability of people brought to the US illegally as a child is approximately the moral culpability of a passenger in a child seat in a speeding car IMO. Continued presence in the US without authorization is (again AIUI) not a crime. My understanding is there are quite a few "dreamers" in tech.

Thanks, I wasn't too conscious about those other examples of unauthorized presence. Makes sense now that I think of it.

You have 100% given your opinion: it's dehumanising to call people "illegals".

People who are in this situation speak to other people and share good resources - if this app is useful and trustworthy (which is unclear), then it will get used.

That's you projecting what I mean by "illegals", while I'm just using official terminology. I do not have an opinion one way or the other regarding the app's existence and motives.

Official terminology is "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants." As people, they are not illegal: their alien status / immigration status is.

(The law, I think, just uses the terms "illegal entry" / "unauthorized presence" / "inadmissible" / etc. and "illegal immigration" to describe the act in general. But USCIS, ICE, etc. do use the term "illegal alien.")

Sorry for not making sure to use the full term. My point was though, "illegal" is not a bad word and it's used officially.

It's not bad as an adjective. It's bad as a noun.

There is definitely a trend among US progressives to use "undocumented" instead of "illegal," even as an adjective, to avoid the connotation of illegal people. I tend to follow that personally (even though in many cases it's not technically accurate—"undocumented" folks often have regular checkins with ICE if there's no deportation order yet, while proceedings are in progress, and that process certainly generates a lot of documentation, and there's also programs like DACA) but I won't fault someone for using the official terminology in good faith.

…official terminology that is dehumanizing, then.

official in what sense, please?

Legal is an acceptable term right? No one bats an eye at "Legal Resident". What's the opposite of legal? Illegal. As far as I think, these are just states and do not imply anything about the person in question. They are terms I assume used pretty ubiquitously in most places of the world with a government in different forms.

Again, as far as I think, being somewhere illegally doesn't make you any lesser of a human than I am. But they are still here illegally. I could call them undocumented too, but they're still here illegally.

Besides any other point - How many times have you described yourself (or have others described you) as "a legal"?

I bet it's none, because you don't see that as a defining characteristic of yourself.

Nobody calls people “legals”.

"Illegal immigrant" is an accurate description. They are still humans and nobody is arguing that fact.

This fuss over the terminology is a trivial matter and completely inconsequential to the lives of these people.

Only, it's highly consequential.

Describing people in this way puts them into a category of 'other'. It defines people by their immigration status, diminishing their value as people.

This allows people to justify a belief that people perceived to be in this category do not require or deserve basic human rights.

Recognising that people are in a vulnerable situation is important, I agree. Happy to hear what positive action would be useful :)

Human rights are for humans, which means everyone.

The people who have trouble judging others over terminology are the same as the people who have think changing the terminology is important in anyway. It's the same group on different sides worried over frivolous matters that nobody in the subject group (illegal immigrants seeking asylum) even cares about. All this effort usually just cancels out into a big wasteful political battle that gets nothing done.

It would be much better to talk accurately and come up with a real solution, such as proper detainment procedures, making sure funds and aid are available, communicating with those that are seeking asylum about what can and will happen, and then investigating and solving the root causes (conflict and leadership) in the country they're coming from.

It sounds to me like it's just as much about notifying people that you need a lawyer...

But even for that purpose, flashing your lights on the highway to inform oncoming drivers of speedtraps has been found to be free speech (iirc), I don't see how this is different.

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