After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract

Every country has borders and reasons to limit immigration in various ways (for example, to certain skillsets). There is no blanket allowance to walk into any country outside of a port. This is plainly illegal. When laws are broken, someone needs to enforce the law, apply consequences, and do so as efficiently as possible. ICE is that agency for the US. I feel like those who think ICE somehow shouldn't exist are simply not being level headed and ignoring the reality of the fact that we are a nation that exists first and foremost to serve its current citizens, just like all other nations.

Lastly, by taking political stances, these companies are discriminating against the silent cohorts in their employee base that do not align with those views. It is an especially big problem in tech companies, most of whom are headquartered in the SF Bay Area or Seattle, two progressive/far-left areas that have skewed politics. Other workers who don't have an issue with the company serving ICE don't have a voice. They have no psychological safety. It is irrational for companies to respond to employee pressure or social media outrage - they should take randomized anonymous polls of their employee base if they truly want a good signal on employee sentiment.

ICE (or any other company/org for that matter) actually has a choice in how it behaves.

Do you see the difference?

> Guess what? Politics are interwoven in every aspect of our lives. You cannot choose to “avoid” them;

But I do choose to avoid them in my personal life. A private company can do whatever the hell they want, whether I approve or not, it's their right. I also believe it is my right to not care about politics and continue moving forward with my own life. For me, politics just end up making me upset. I can't think of a single situation that becomes political that ends up making me happy in the long run. As an individual, _most_ politics doesn't affect me and spending my time on it just ends up making my life less enjoyable.

That said, there are some political issues we all care about more so, and we may pay attention to that more. But in a way, I do choose to avoid them (as an individual).

Again, I don't mean this as an attack on your comment, just my adjacent thoughts.

Edit: I do understand how fortunate I am to be in the situation I'm in. I didn't mean (but I see that it came off this way) that everyone should do this, and I didn't mean (again, I understand that I didn't explain myself above) that I'm applying those ideas to this situation (my mind immediately went to the previous flood of COVID stories).

From Significance, right at the top: "(...) Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men."

Most of the comments here seem to indicate that what was said, and proposed to be done, is political, and politics are bad. This seems to rest on the assumption that one, institutions like ICE are politically neutral, and/or two, simply doing business with a political organization is necessarily "apolitical." It also relies on the assumption that anything that can be identified as political is off limits to businesses, and that many businesses are capable of avoiding being "political" altogether.

Businesses can be largely nonpartisan, but they almost certainly cannot avoid "politics." It is very difficult to be consistently "neutral" on issues like racial justice and equal opportunities for LGBTQ folks. Is hiring a trans woman "political?" Is simply doing business with a political campaign entirely apolitical? When we look to issues of the past, is/was supporting the Civil Rights Movement political? It certainly seems like a totally different type of politics than the kind where you take a partisan stance on economic policy.

IBM rightfully faced backlash for doing business with government institutions in the 20th century that were clearly not neutral on the issue of racial justice. The IBM example isn't to compare that situation to the current, but to demonstrate that you cannot justify an apolitical position in all contexts, and that "apolitical" positions may not be quite as neutral as it appears on the surface (hopefully that avoids a Godwin's Law violation.) Similarly, while to a lesser degree, ICE as it exists today can clearly be identified as an agency carrying out a specific political agenda that has a negative effect on racial justice. If doing business with an institution furthers that organizations' goals, and those goals are not neutral on the issue of racial justice, it certainly can be argued that your continued business with that institution furthers that organizations' goals. To argue otherwise puts one into a position where it seems they'd have to defend IBM in the aforementioned example for logical consistency.