Thread: More than 100 tech firms join legal fight against Trump's travel ban

More than 100 tech firms join legal fight against Trump's travel ban

Tracey Lien, James F. Peltz
Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Last week, they took to social media. This week, they’re going to court.

More than 100 technology companies — including industry big guns Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, and newcomers such as Snap, Lyft and Scopely — joined forces Sunday to file a friend-of-the-court brief, arguing against President Trump’s ban on refugees and travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

The joint brief, filed in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of a Washington judge’s move to halt enforcement of the executive order, contends the ban is unconstitutional, unfair and, above all else, bad for business.

“The order makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world’s best employees,” the companies said in the filing. “It disrupts ongoing business operations, and it threatens companies’ ability to attract talent, business, and investment in the United States.”

The filing comes after a week of activism from tech firms, whose industry emerged as the first and loudest corporate opponent of Trump’s executive order. It marks a noticeable departure from the sector’s long-held desire to appear apolitical for fear of alienating customers.

“For years, the tech industry tried to stay outside of politics,” said Eden Gillott Bowe, president of crisis and reputation management firm Gillott Communications.

Many tech chief executives stayed quiet in the days after Trump’s election victory. Leaders in the industry gathered at Trump Tower in December for a meeting with the then-president-elect, but no one confronted him about his campaign rhetoric, including a hard-line stance on immigration. Even those known for being outspoken on issues such as sexism and discrimination — such as Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg — were reticent on the new president and his policy proposals.

“But it’s gotten to the point where they no longer can” remain silent, Gillott Bowe said.

Part of it is optics, according to public relations experts, who cited mounting pressure internally from employees and externally from customers as a reason for firms jumping on the bandwagon.

“It’s similar to saying, ‘No comment,’” Gillott Bowe said. “When someone makes a crazy allegation and you say, ‘No comment,’ you look guilty. When bad things are happening and you don’t speak up, it looks like you’re silently agreeing.”

In this highly politicized era, public relations are especially important, as ride-hailing company Uber learned the hard way last week when a poorly timed tweet during a taxi strike over the immigration ban led to a customer revolt in which some 200,000 people deleted the Uber app from their phones. Uber — whose chief executive, Travis Kalanick, served on a panel advising Trump about economic issues before stepping down last week — was among the companies that signed the brief.

SpaceX and Tesla were added Monday. Elon Musk, who is CEO of both companies and also serves on Trump’s business panel, had been less critical of the order than many in the industry. "As soon as we saw the brief this morning, we insisted on being added,” a Tesla spokeswoman said.

Amazon.com, which has not signed the brief, plans to file its own declaration of support for a lawsuit filed by Washington state’s attorney general against Trump and his administration regarding the ban.

Other high-profile companies that haven’t signed the brief include IBM and Oracle, both of which have executives on Trump’s panel, and Palantir Technologies, whose co-founder, Peter Thiel, served as an advisor on Trump’s transition team and remains a supporter of the president.

Optics aside, business experts see the friend-of-the-court filing as a way for tech companies to stand up for their own business interests. After all, if the immigration ban were to expand, it could hit businesses where it really hurts: their bottom line.

“The order has had immediate, adverse effects on the employees of American businesses,” the companies said in the filing. “Several major companies reported substantial disruptions from the order because their employees were ensnared in the order’s travel restrictions.”

In an internal memo to employees, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said that about 100 employees were directly affected by the ban. At Microsoft, 76 employees were identified as being citizens of the countries listed as part of the travel ban.

“If the order stands, it is impossible for individuals and businesses to anticipate which countries may be affected next,” the brief states.

The companies warned that the instability and uncertainty the travel ban has created may incentivize immigration and foreign investment to countries other than the U.S. They also warned that multinational companies may decide to move their operations abroad, which would probably have adverse effects on the U.S. economy.

The technology industry relies heavily on foreign talent, particularly in light of the domestic talent shortage in fields such as science, engineering and mathematics. For all the industry’s talk about doing things differently, immigration and staffing difficulties are among the great unifiers.

Although the industry has rallied in the past in support of immigration reform that would make it easier for U.S. firms to hire talent from abroad — most notably with the creation of FWD.US, an immigration lobbying group founded by executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates — legal experts were struck by how quickly the industry galvanized around the friend-of-the-court brief.

“What’s so unusual here is the urgency with which they came together,” said Davis Bae, an immigration attorney at Fisher & Phillips, who represents both large tech firms and individuals. “It doesn’t happen often.”

The tech industry previously had success combating policies it has opposed, such as in 2012 when Google and other Internet giants led a successful campaign to scuttle legislation in Congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. The bills aimed to crack down on websites that traffic in pirated goods but were viewed by critics as an unwarranted intrusion on Internet freedom.

That was five years ago, back when some of America’s most powerful start-ups were still just ideas. With the technology industry now bigger, bolder and more ubiquitous than it was during the days of the Stop Online Piracy Act, legal experts believe the friend-of-the-court brief could have significant influence in court. At the very least, it marks the industry’s most vocal foray into politics yet.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...206-story.html

“The order makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world’s best employees,” the companies said in the filing. “It disrupts ongoing business operations, and it threatens companies’ ability to attract talent, business, and investment in the United States.”

You actually have no right to recruit, hire and retain some of the world's best employees. You are stealing these people from their own countries who need them and families who love them. You are at the same time using discretionary visa programs to hire foreign workers instead of American Workers.

But thank you all for showing yourselves so when Americans collect their unemployment and/or welfare checks while staring down a $20 trillion national debt, they'll know who helped cause the demise of our country. We knew some of you, but until this, we didn't know all of you. Now we do and because this is a court case and public information, a matter of permanent public record, you're company names will be memorialized forever.

At a time when our people and nation needed you, you chose to say hell with you, I want my visa workers from Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

That's pretty disgusting if you ask me.

Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives

By DAVID STREITFELDFEB. 6, 2017

Photo

A protest outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last month. Google and other Silicon Valley companies said that a ban on visitors from seven largely Muslim countries could hurt the economy. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

In late September, a group of tech leaders started a well-publicized effort to raise $100,000 for Hillary Clinton. In flush Silicon Valley, that is spare change. But by the time the election was over, the campaign had pulled in only $76,324.

For all its visceral dislike of Donald J. Trump, the tech community did not worry too much about him being elected or, once in office, carrying through with his program. Lulled by favorable polls, distracted by its own destiny, Silicon Valley was above all else complacent.

No longer.

After President Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order restricting immigration, high-tech has gone full-tilt political. Companies are being pushed by their employees, by their customers and sometimes by their ideals. They are trying to go far enough without going too far.

Nearly 130 companies, most of them in the technology field, filed an amicus brief late Sunday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which declined to reinstate the travel ban after a lower court blocked it. The brief, which was signed by an unusually broad coalition of large and small tech companies that included Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, Uber and Intel, said Mr. Trump’s order “violates the immigration laws and the Constitution.”

“Silicon Valley is stepping up,” said Sam Altman, who runs the valley’s most prominent start-up incubator, Y Combinator. “The companies are working on three fronts: They are vociferously objecting to the Trump policies they think are bad, they are trying to engage with him to influence his behavior, and they are developing new technology to work against policies and political discourse they don’t support.”

It is an improvised and complicated strategy. The companies are among the richest and most popular of American brands, which means they have a good deal of leverage. Yet they are also uniquely vulnerable — not only to presidential postings on Twitter and executive orders, but to the sentiments of their customers and employees, some of whom have more radical ideas in mind.

Document: Tech Industry’s Filing Against Travel Ban

Many of the companies initially placed their bets on engagement after an upbeat meeting with the president-elect in December. That modest approach, which even the most risk-averse executive can endorse, showed its limits last week. After widespread customer defections, Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, was forced to step down from one of the administration’s advisory councils.

“People voted with their feet, and Travis listened,” said Dave McClure, who runs the 500 Startups incubator and started the Nerdz 4 Hillary group that tried to raise the $100,000. “We need to hold the other tech leaders accountable in the same way.”

Resistance, Mr. McClure said, begins at home.

“You don’t have a voice with the president if you didn’t vote for him,” he said. “But employees and customers have a voice with the tech companies. Silicon Valley should be demonstrating at the front doors of Google, Facebook and Twitter to make sure they share our values.”

Several factors are propelling Silicon Valley to the front lines of opposition to Mr. Trump. Some have been widely noted: The companies are often founded by and run by immigrants, which made the executive order on immigration offensive and a threat to their way of doing business. Tech companies frequently stress the importance of talent from other countries to their businesses.

Less remarked on has been the political homogeneity of tech workers. “It’s not like you have 60 percent of the employees on one side and 40 percent on the other,” said Ken Shotts, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “They all have the same leanings.”

Mr. Trump does have some support in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Yet another factor pushing the companies is the perennially tight job market in technology. Executives cannot afford to alienate a large bloc of workers. Beyond this, there is the mythology of Silicon Valley, which holds that the work being done there is building a better future. Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil” is the most forceful expression of this.

“If you go around making a lot of statements about your exalted role in society, at some point your employees might just make you follow through,” Mr. Shotts said.

Photo
Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. Seventy-six of the company’s employees were affected by Mr. Trump’s ban. Credit Divyakant Solanki/European Pressphoto Agency

Since the executive order was issued, the companies have struggled to keep on the same page with their employees. Microsoft, for instance, initially made relatively muted comments that mostly celebrated immigration. Twenty-four hours later, it was much blunter, calling the order “misguided and a fundamental step backwards,” and saying it would create “much collateral damage to the country’s reputation and values.”

At an all-hands meeting at the beginning of the week with the chief executive, Satya Nadella, who was born in India, Microsoft employees expressed their concern. The company did not file a formal declaration supporting Washington State’s effort to block the order the way Amazon and Expedia did, but its public comments assisted the effort, Bob Ferguson, the state attorney general, said.

The immigration battle is in Microsoft’s self-interest. Seventy-six of its employees were affected by the order, the company said.

Some in Silicon Valley have more expansive hopes for the tech companies there.

“In 2016, we saw how technology could be used to polarize ourselves to extreme levels,” said Mr. Altman of Y Combinator. “The most important thing we could do is figure out how to use technology to depolarize the nation.”

Mr. McClure of 500 Startups said it was ridiculous “for the chief executives of the valley to suggest things like hate speech and bullying speech aren’t solvable problems. Google has been solving the problem of spam for the last 10 years. No reason they can’t fix the monetization of fake news.”

Perhaps the companies just need a little push. On Sunday night, the Super Bowl was in overtime and a dreary winter rain was falling in San Francisco. That was not enough to deter more than 100 tech workers from showing up for a meeting of a new group, Tech Solidarity, that hopes to tackle some of these issues from the bottom up.

Maciej Ceglowski, the organizer, canvassed the crowd. How many of you are immigrants? How many work for big tech companies? How many work for big tech companies that attended the Trump tech summit in December? In each case, numerous hands went up. Under the rules of the meeting, participants were not identified.

Lives Rewritten With the Stroke of a Pen

When President Trump signed his executive order on immigration, he upended the fates of people who had waited for years to get into the U.S. Here are portraits of those affected by the ban.

It was a very geeky event. Much of it was a fund-raiser for three legal aid groups that have been working to assist travelers caught in the ban. The speaker for the Council of American-Islamic Relations was asked what she needed. She replied that she was having trouble with her customer relationship management software.

“I’ve actually been pretty obsessed with C.R.M.s lately,” said a woman in the audience, volunteering to help.

Mr. Ceglowski is a software engineer who runs the one-man start-up Pinboard. He was visiting the United States in 1981 with his mother when martial law was declared in their native Poland. He is now an American citizen.

Best-known in tech circles as a caustic critic of the large tech companies and their attitude to issues like privacy, he took on the activist mantle shortly after Mr. Trump was elected. Since then, Tech Solidarity has held rallies in Portland, Ore.; New York; Seattle; Boston; and other cities.

He talked about Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of “Lean In,” which asks women, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Mr. Ceglowski noted that Ms. Sandberg found time to go see Mr. Trump, but not to go to the women’s march on Washington. The crowd laughed. Ms. Sandberg has said that she had a personal obligation that kept her from the march.

When Facebook employees did their own protest last week, he pointed out, it was done in secret so no one knew about it.

“We have to protest in public,” he said. The event raised $30,000 for the legal aid groups.

“It looked like two-thirds of the room were newcomers,” Mr. Ceglowski said after the event was over. Unlike the great Silicon Valley companies, which seemed to blossom overnight, he said he knew progress here would be slow. But he was hopeful that some of the attendees were previously apolitical folk who had taken their first steps to engagement.

“I want pressure from below to counterbalance the pressure management is already feeling from above,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re pushing at least as hard as Trump is.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/b...-facebook.html

It looks like these big executives aren't a big as they like people to think they are if a few visa workers can push them into taking a stand that ruins the company reputations in this country.