Open Source Communities Threatened by U.S. Immigration and Border Policies
In less than two weeks I’ll be attending The Perl Conference 2017 (TPC) in Alexandria, Virginia. I’m excited about TPC; I’ve attended this conference or its predecessor (Yet Another Perl Conference::North America) every year since 2000. But my excitement is tempered by the fear that many people I know from past conferences either will not be able to attend this year — or will choose not to attend this year — for one reason outside the conference’s control: the immigration and border policies of the United States government under the administration of President Donald J. Trump.
I won’t discuss the specifics of the Trump administration’s immigration and border policies here. They change from week to week and are under litigation. You can find discussion of those specifics by using any search engine.
Nor will I make a case here for why those policies should be characterized as specifically Islamophobic and — more generally — xenophobic. Trump has been calling for a “Muslim ban” since beginning his presidential campaign and continues to do so to this day. He has stoked the fears and anxieties of Americans (read: white Americans) from Day One.
Nor will I make a case here that U.S. immigration and border policies were free of the taint of Islamophobia until Donald Trump came along. The US Customs and Border Patrol has been subjecting U.S. citizens who are Muslim to extra scrutiny and harassment since at least the Obama administration.
What I will argue here is that the policies are likely to have an increasingly strong, negative impact on open source software communities in the United States and around the world. When I say “open source software communities” I’m talking less about “the tech sector” than about scientific communities where the free movement across borders of ideas has to be accompanied by the free movement across borders of the people developing those ideas. It’s not enough for us to be able, say, to chat on IRC with an open source contributor from Syria. That Syrian open source contributor needs to be able to attend conferences in the U.S. and other countries to discuss her contributions. It’s not enough for us to be able to go to Github and download the code of a Moslem citizen of France. That Moslem citizen of France needs to be able to meet with her colleagues in this country as well.
The harm is not limited to those who will be explicitly prevented by religion, citizenship or ethnicity from coming to conferences in the U.S. There will be citizens of other countries who will choose not to travel to the U.S. for conferences because they find U.S. policies repellent or because they fear a political climate in the U.S. increasingly hostile to “foreigners”. I already know of three attendees at previous TPCs/YAPCs who will not be attending TPC in Alexandria for such reasons. That diminishes the opportunities for U.S. citizens who are members of open source communities to learn from our international colleagues. For me personally, it’s very simple: I will not get to see my friends.
I don’t have any comprehensive action plan to address this problem. I do think that open source contributors in other countries for whom the U.S. immigration and border policies are an impediment to travel to the United States should consider going public with that. People in the United States need to know that there is a real cost to supporting or acquiescing in those policies.
At The Perl Conference we should try to organize a BOF (“Birds of a Feather”) session about this issue. But this is a problem not just for the Perl community, but for all open source communities. Let’s get the discussion going!
(After this article was published, I gave a lightning talk on the same subject on June 20, 2017, at The Perl Conference in Alexandria, Virginia.)
