Hootsuite CEO terminating contract with ICE

* Just show up and not be obviously sick.

Or am I supposed to tell my children they have to "go back" to countries that no longer exist, on a continent that never wanted them in the first place, six, seven, eight generations after their ancestors left? A continent which is also under pressure to accept whatever immigrants wish to move there, no matter the repercussions of conflicts of culture.

This kind of dismissive attitude towards European-descended Americans is the same racist attitude that underpins the hatred towards anyone who identifies ethnically as "American," which I do, because my family's heritage is long-severed from the Old World, and thank God my kids won't even be able to be accused of being White, that evil race, due to my own miscegenation, so they do not need to listen to this kind of racist drivel about Americans with light skin on sites like this one day after day after day

There is a difference between immigration and illegal immigration.

You can be in favor of immigration, and against illegal immigration.

I'm not sure that that has much relevance to the above poster's beliefs.

Even though ICE was created after 9/11, it's not like no one was doing immigration enforcement before them. ICE was just a re-org of existing agencies like the INS. In some circles, people don't even refer to ICE by its new name: Meet the new "la migra", same as the old one.

If you're someone like the GP poster who believes that people shouldn't be in the US illegally, it's logical to support immigration enforcement of people past the border. ~40% of people who are in the US illegally didn't enter illegally. They came legally and overstayed their visas. There's really nothing that the CBP can do about that, unless they take on the INS's responsibilities.

It's completely wrong.

The community is way, way more important than your opinion, and we have many established bodies to help us try to be objective about things, to protect minorities, to make sure we have a civic foundation.

Even at the international level, we have some semblance of rules we try to follow.

You don't get to pick and chose which laws to follow.

The best way to fix ICE is to vote, and support litigation if they are doing something which people feel is against the law.

They are a mainstream US government entity, there is otherwise no reason to ban them other than supporting internal political mobs.

Finally, I would double down on the excessive narrow mindedness of all of this. Take a moment to talk to migrants of countries with actually 'bad' regimes and you'll get an earful. There's real calamity in this world which makes a lot of consternation over otherwise relatively civic stuff seems really immature. I can't fathom how we must look to the immigrants we work with. At very least, if we're going to be serious about it we have to be consistent, and there are zero corporations that have the ability to do that, which is why we defer to established groups.

Why should the US only get the benefits of foreign labor only while that labor is outside of the country?

Crime is one reason. Immigrants from different backgrounds, countries, etc have different propensities to commit crimes.

Inequality of negative effects is another reason. If we allow in unlimited hair cutters - of course the wage for hair cutters in the US may decline.

We're not talking about criminals who are being removed, or the morality of immigration being a criminal act at all. People trying to enter the country under asylum claims have not committed any crimes. Furthermore, indefinite detention without a trial is clearly unconstitutional, even for non-residents. Companies weren't quitting government contracts during the Bush or Obama administrations, so we're clearly not talking about the normal actions taken by immigration authorities.

> A now ended policy that is the same as for people in jail for any other non-immigration crime. Of course immigration crimes are both non-violent and where economic harm is diffused (if it even exists), which is why people feel sympathy for these families.

Again, asylum seekers haven't committed any crime, appeared before a magistrate, been indicted, or been tried and convicted by a jury of their peers, yet their rights have been roundly violated by the Trump administration. They ended it only after being caught, investigated, and even then, only begrudgingly.

> Which would be improper. The recent case of the OBGYN doctor is both unproven and if proven would lead to imprisonment and universal condemnation. The truth is that thousands of immigrants come here illegally with nothing and get world class medical treatment for no charge. Any cases where that doesn't happen are news because they are exceptions, not the rule.

This is patently untrue. Beyond the recent case, there is also the ICE official who decided he was the emperor of who in ICE custody could receive an abortion. There are wide-spread reports of neglect, and a lack of medical care and unsanitary living conditions, in stark contrast to your claim of world class care being rendered. Even if you believe these people deserve this treatment (they don't.) — our jails and prisons experience all of these same issues, so to your earlier point - we should also be making our jails more humane places too.

> You seem to be saying 'hey, this is just about arbitrary detention, because that's what I feel is wrong' - but I would say it's a much broader issue.

I'm saying that we're violating the rights of the people we are detaining. I'm not strictly against the detention or removal if the law is sane and it's enforced accordingly.

> For the life of me I can't understand why the US government doesn't at least make sure there is fairy consistent law-fullness within ICE.

One party has a vested interested in the way things currently are. Maybe both of them do.

That might mean attempting to change a company from the inside, or that might mean leaving them and not supporting them. And then once you leave, you still have to look for places to exercise your privilege to make the world a better place.

But it is, and will always be, political to do anything. If you're accepting a contract with the government, you're saying that you agree that this government should exists, that governments are a good idea in general, and this one is the current rightful government for where you are, otherwise you wouldn't work with them.

It's a fruitless exercise in trying to remove politics from anything, because anything can and will be politicalized.

> Refusing to make business with the government if it's not your guys calling the shots is political activism though.

Only, ICE was deplorable under Obama too.

I really don't think that's what's happening here. It doesn't take long to read up on the activities ICE has been (very plausibly) accused of doing that would shock many people. Excusing that just because they're a government agency just seems strange to me.

Could you object if it was a private company doing it, but not object if it's a government agency? I don't get it.

There's probably an argument to be made that the profit motive has the ability to strip all other political motivations from a decision, but the result of the decision can still be deeply political.

Some governments and some agencies do enough evil that the decision to do business with them is a moral choice.

ICE may be one of those agencies. NSA likewise.

Arguably contacting with the US military falls in a similar bucket. I wouldn't call it evil, but it exists almost solely to enforce American interests abroad (vs a purely defensive force). I wouldn't fault somebody for seeing that business as immoral.

There's also a huge difference between selling a product to that agency, but is not specific to that agency (Word, Linux tech support) vs something that exists only to enable that organization to do bad (spying equipment, the cages used to imprison immigrants, etc).

It starts being murky when the $1 changes to $10 or $100, as now you're trying to balance two values, profits and overall helpfulness. If you're asking the company to take a stance, you and others might feel differently about what's important.

Some industries simply look the other way and make the simple statement that it's all about money, nothing else. Sometimes I dream of taking that stance, just because everything would be simpler.

If you want to dodge by claiming it should hinge on the legality of the org, I'd be happy to give you a menu of several that were perfectly legal at the time to choose from.