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To answer/satisfy your concern/question is impossible without inaction. The cases you mentioned already happened and are in the past. In essence you are proposing that YC does not act to help solve this current issue, because worse issues happened in the past, and YC did not act then, so it does not deserve to act now (at least, without being accused of hypocrisy and selective outrage). This mode of argumentation results in nothing happening to solve the current issue, just by virtue of there existing past worse issues. I don't think you are really in favor of this.

As for the marketing argument, sure, I can agree this playing a minor role in this decision. But not a major one. There is not much evidence I am aware of, or that you pointed out, signaling that YC does not act in good faith. Though absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence, this alone is not a solid basis for posing that any action that YC takes is purely profit/PR-driven.

Likely, this decision was not instigated out of marketing motives, but like any good decision for a for-profit company: it aligns with marketing motives.

Another angle to look at motives for problem solving: Is the crime of having a less than glamorous motive worse than the outcome of solving the problem? Donating to non-profits makes me feel good. Is this egocentrism worse enough to stop donating?

A bit of historical context: America was founded in white supremacy. [1] It did better after the Civil War in the Reconstruction [2], and then things got worse again, with Jim Crow [3] in the south and ethnic cleansing everywhere else [4]. The Civil Rights Act [5] marked an era of improvement (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction [6]), but things have recently gotten worse, to the extent that many see us as needing a third Reconstruction [7].

This does not happen mostly through planned racial injustice. It mainly happens through ignorance and a convenient blindness to uncomfortable facts. We help people familiar and dear to us, and ignore the ones who aren't.

I think it's great that Silicon Valley came out strongly in favor of immigrants. They're familiar to us, and we'd be monsters to ignore our neighbors, our co-workers, our ancestors. But muninn_'s right, we have been ignoring some other pretty big injustices. And the ones muninn_ mentioned are groups historically underrepresented in tech. It's no coincidence that we started here.

As we boldly support immigrants, it's a good time to ask, "Oh, who might we have forgotten?" Companies are communities, embedded in a society. This week, we are stepping up to that responsibility. There's nothing wrong with thinking a little about what that really means.

[1] e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reconstruction

[7] https://thinkprogress.org/rev-barber-moral-change-1ad2776df7...

Yes, lots of them did. In fact, it was liberals that organized around the information in the leaks, liberal groups that sponsors the lawsuits based on the leaks that got at least one program revealed by the leaks ruled to be illegal by the courts, liberals who kept calling for a pardon, and liberal media personalities that reached out to Snowden in Russia and broadcast his views to the positive reception from their liberal audiences.

Quite a lot of liberals criticized Obama throughout his Presidency on national security and civil liberties, and equal rights issues, including Guantanamo (even though the closure was blocked by Congress), surveillance, drone strikes, the treatment of Manning and Snowden, the initial feet dragging on DADT, the administration's failure to intervene as timely as critics on the left would have liked in various state and local law enforcement issues, issues surrounding the DAPL protests, etc.