I am reminded of Eisenhower's Chance for Peace Speech: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Yeah, people aren't cartoon super heroes or super villains. People are messy. People are nuanced. You can't summarize them in a 1,000 word article much less a 10 word title.
If I'm reading that correctly the US wanted the labour, and the Mexican Government wanted the US to enforce stricter control:
Pressure from Mexican agribusiness owners to return laborers from the United States to Mexico prompted increased action by the Mexican government.
The labor problems caused crops to rot in Mexican fields because so many laborers had crossed into the U.S. Meanwhile, American agriculture, which was also transitioning to large-scale farms and agribusinesses, continued to recruit illegal Mexican laborers to fulfill its expanding labor requirements.
It would seem that Eisenhower wanted cheap Mexican labour and the Dual US/Mexico programs that provided it - the enforcement to cap the numbers was a condition imposed by Mexico to keep the agricultural labour agreements in place.
Too often on this site you see the opinion "keep politics out of it" expressed.
But there are going to be software engineers working at these surveillance and tracking firms, probably some on this site.
Just like there are people here getting paid to work on Facebook or Instagram despite knowing deep down (even if they're in denial) that those products are profoundly harmful to society at large and young people in particular.
Technology is only becoming more intertwined with daily life, not less. When does the software industry develop scruples?
I think the issue is less the politics but "their politics" it's absolutely sickening what is going on in that country. On par with the most horrible countries of the world. Nobody wants to hear and read about North Korea all the day.
Only semi-professional. There's no legal barrier to entry or licensing, no guild structure— no bar association, no medical board, no engineer licensing board, etc. It's privileged, high-wage work, but it's not a profession in the strict sense.
Professions have some kind of organization that tries to impose standards of discipline and ethics.
Anyone talking a job at Meta knows the entire point of their job is to make young men angry, and young women depressed. And they do it anyway, because they expressly agree with those outcomes as long as it pays them an exorbitant salary. Blaming it all on Zuckerberg is bullshit designed to make “you” feel better about what a complicit, worthless asshole “you” are when there are countless jobs doing things that aren’t expressly and intentionally evil.
There are no good people working at these companies.
Being clear, the you in my comment is the generic you - not directed at you the individual I’m replying to.
This is a standard cop-out that bears challenging every time it's used.
By refusing the job, you narrow the number of people who can do the job, making it more expensive, both because there are fewer candidates to do the job and because it makes the hunt for employees take longer. It also gives cover for others who aren't confident to stand against the job by themselves when they see others refuse it.
There's a non-zero chance that refusing such a job means it becomes too expensive to be feasible, especially if it requires expertise held by a limited set of individuals.
> By refusing the job, you narrow the number of people who can do the job
By refusing a job, I only narrow my employment opportunities.
The bank won't take my goodwill as payment before they take the house for not paying the mortgage. This is essentially where the discussion ends.
The world is cursed. I have to engage with systems that were not of my creation, and that will devour me if I am complacent. But we keep moving forward anyway.
I would like these companies to not exist. For the billionaires that direct them to create immeasurable damage to society to pay for their misdeeds. I even vote for whichever party that promises to limit the reach of those companies.
What I won't do is damage the lives of those that depend on me in an empty gesture of moral grandstanding.
1. Partisan/tribal personality driven with a core of "us vs. them"
2. Government policy and the application of same.
The first has no business here, but I'd argue the second does in the context of "hacking civilization". Of course a lot of politics gets smeared about so you can't have one without the other (which is not an accident), but we should strive to find ways to talk about policies and their their merits and concerns.
Part of the problem is that software engineers aren't real engineers. Engineering disciplines formally recognize their responsibilities to the public, and are expected to refuse to build dangerous or harmful systems.
The mechanical engineers who design cars and the civil engineers who design the roads and bridges they traverse are held to these standards, and hold themselves to these standards. The software engineers who write code that actually controls vehicles in practice have no such culture. Relevant professional organizations like the ACM should be leading the charge, but they aren't because their membership doesn't care.
One solution is to license software engineers. What do people working in the industry think about that?
False comparison... There are also mechanical engineers that design trashy gewgaws. And electronic engineers designing giftcard chips.
And creating regulations for the word "engineer" is just a bad idea. Instead the common solution is independent certification bodies (perhaps with some government clout for practices that endanger people).
And regardless, you can only regulate individuals within your jurisdiction. Global commerce and services makes the idea of controlling the word engineer fruitless.
I suppose my point was that it’s detached from reality to say that real engineers refuse to build “dangerous” systems.
All of the most dangerous systems are built by engineers and outside the most progressive circles it’s quite obvious that these systems must exist amidst the anarchy of geopolitics.
The story that is being spun and maintained by news entertainment outlets like Wired is quite impressive.
Even more impressive is how effective it is to pull small sleight-of-hand moves, like referring to these processes as “immigrant-tracking”, as if the federal government is somehow at war with immigrants. One really has to admire the raw narrative-building chutzpah of these outlets.
> a group of Dutch Nazi collaborators [...] in Amsterdam, during the Nazi Germany occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. [...] The bounty paid to Henneicke Column members for each captured Jew was 7.50 guilders (equivalent to about US $4.75).
Adjusting for inflation that's ~$91, if any had a profit motive rather than an ideological one, perhaps they supplemented it by looting from victims...
There are people from and not from El Salvador that are being sent to a concentration camp there. We don't know what is happening to people being sent to other random countries.
What do you think is happening to the people who are deported? Maybe not murdered explicitly but they're definitely not having the red carpet rolled out in whatever country they land in. The US is looking for any suitor country to take "illegals" and don't care what happens after, be it for bad or worse, rarely "better".
Take a look at what happened to people deported and sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. (Torture, check, starvation check, held indefinitely without conviction of a crime, check)
Pretty damned close to how Jews were treated in WW2. I guess short of the end part where they were gassed and their corpses shoveled into ovens.
Their immoral-mass-murder really ramped up when they couldn't achieve their desired rate/expense of the immoral-mass-incarceration and immoral-mass-exiling they were already doing.
Even if your statement was correct--it isn't, ask the victims in CECOT--it isn't reassuring or exculpatory: "Don't worry guys, we may have spent 11 months speed-running years of the Nazi trajectory, but don't worry, we're stopping at only this much of the cruelty. I promise, for realsies this time. Double pinky-swear."
I'm not playing dumb, I'm asking for sources.
It's not that hard to link to articles that support your claims, the burden of proof is on you.
CECOT is a prison, are you saying regular people are being deported to a prison? If they are criminals that's a different story of course. I mean actual crimes to be clear, I don't count being illegal in the US.
I'm exasperated, because you felt confident "correcting" other people about US "deportations" in 2025, while being oddly unaware of months of major controversies and a complete departure from anything resembling "normal" immigration function.
> CECOT is a prison, are you saying regular people are being deported to a prison?
Yes! Yes! That is exactly what they did!
1. The Trump administration claimed we were somehow in a state of invasion by a crime gang from Venezuela and that somehow that allowed him to use Alien Enemies Act of 1798. A law last-used for the notorious Japanese Internment Camps during World War 2. [0]
2. The administration declared a bunch of Venezuelans as "gang members", with no charges nor trial, including several who at the time had legal status to be here, often based on nothing but "too many tattoos I don't recognize." [1]
3. They renditioned those people to a different country (El Salvador) and directly into a prison "for terrorists" (CECOT) and paid the local dictator to do it. [2][3]
4. They tried to move so fast that no judges could react, and still ended up violating court-orders to not transfer people into El Salvador, and then claimed they had no power or responsibility to fix it. (Even though they were paying US tax dollars to El Salvador to keep it going.)
So yeah, kinda a big deal, and I trust this is more than enough for you to answer other questions with your own web-searches.
> I'm exasperated, because you felt confident "correcting" other people about US "deportations" in 2025
I still very confident about my original claim that this is not even close to people being sent to German concentration camps to be (slowly) murdered. You (or anyone else that responded to me) have provided zero proof of that happening.
I do appreciate you taking the time to provide sources for your claims, thank you for that.
I agree that better, more concrete proof is needed before deporting suspects to a prison. While a point system probably catches people that have managed to evade law enforcement and that should be in jail, there is also a bigger chance of regular people getting caught up.
If the only difference is the lack of active murdering happening at the concentration camps, then that is hardly a defence against the claim that the current situation is similar to what my family faced 80 years ago. You do not need to carry water for those who seek to emulate past atrocities.
> The group arrested and delivered to the Nazi authorities 8,000–9,000 Jews. Most of them were deported to Westerbork concentration camp and later shipped to and murdered in Sobibor and other German extermination camps.
In my opinion that is a very big difference.
Most people that are deported don't end up in a prison either, they are returned to their home countries.
I see no rational way your opinion matches the reality on the ground. Can you provide any evidence that most of the people deported against their will and without due process and put into detention centres (nee concentration camps) considered the destination their home country.
i dont see why, hacker news is loaded with enthusiastic young entrepreneurs and I posted this thinking some brilliant protege of Peter Thiel would be inspired to "disrupt" the "surveilling and abducting people" industry with the promise of a $280M reward....
People will flag articles when they don't feel safe to participate in the discussion, especially if they hold views that appears to be dissenting. An open and thriving environment for discussion is one that welcomes people of different views and opinions.
A strong indicator of an article that get flagged, and which also trigger the flame war detection on the site, is a bunch of comments that are either grayed out or flagged. The one will feed the other into a death spiral for the article.
This whole program is a variation of "The Process is the punishment". Regardless of what your opinion of immigration is, this is all just politicking and power-grabbing. Under that light, you will see that it is M$280 for fear mongering more than actual deportation efforts.
I think you've got it backwards: The current administration--and its 2016-2020 predecessor--have demonstrated they are exactly the type of "captain" that wrecks ships trying to play chicken with an incoming lighthouse.
Republicans already passed a budget giving ICE a crazy amount of taxpayer dollars, a subset of that being $45 billion-with-a-B directly earmarked for the creation of new "detention centers". If "economic reasons" were gonna stop them, it would have already happened.
The thinking comes from the understanding that even on a pirate ship, if the Captain tries to sink the ship, he will be offed. History has proven this again and again.
Not really: History has plenty of opposite examples as well.
Some particularly striking cases involve cults, where the members are anything but exemplars of homo economicus.
Yes, we were using a captain/ship metaphor for bad leadership ruining everything, but that doesn't mean everybody on board is structured as a pirate crew.
Wow that is crazy may be YC next funded company will be on this. But there are so many ethical considereations here. Tracking immigrant means they will track citizens as well. We need to see how these companies are moderated
No I mean I am an immigrant I am already tracked more than a citizen. We have accepted that fact. But the tracking is done with government portal. But asking third party sources to keep a tab on immigrant can go bad very quickly both for immigrants and citizens. I think it is worse for citizens.
I am an immigrant in a very rich and beautiful country (hint, not America) and they don't track me specifically or make my life more miserable. Consider what you do with your life and if this is what you actually want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech
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