SeaCode, illegal immigration, and liberal hypocrisy

"Liberals" are up in arms about SeaCode, a plan to float a cruise ship in international waters off San Diego. Aboard would be 600 programmers from other countries, diligently typing away. The plan is to be able to combine cheap foreign labor with close proximity to the U.S. for meetings with the companies they're churning out code for and to avoid time zone issues.

The linked thread is called "Sweatshops at Sea" and the author brings up several ways labor laws and such could be abused.

Bear in mind, we're talking about 600 programmers.

Meanwhile, seemingly every move "liberals" and Democrats make is to bring in more cheap labor by keeping the border as porous as possible. See, for just one example, the Kennedy-McCain amnesty plan that would encourage millions more illegal aliens to come to the U.S. (That reminds me: did McCain ever return FAIR's phone calls after promising to debate them about his scheme?)

I don't know exactly how to explain this, as my mind is thankfully wired a bit differently. Perhaps it's a matter of whose ox is being gored, or perhaps it's because those foreign programmers won't be voting illegally, or something. If the ship were full of illegal alien nannies, busboys, and janitors, the "liberals" and Democrats would be the first in the line to call anyone who opposed SeaSerf xenophobes and racists.

Odd, ain't it?

(Via Cap'n Kevin, who's outraged as well: washingtonmonthly. com/archives/individual/2005_07/006721.php)

Comments

I made a point of noting that we don't know if the programmers will be abused or not; I only said that there was a high potential for abuse.

The key issue is the location. You could be working in the worst hellhole sweatshop in Bangalore, but at least you have the option to walk away if you can't take it anymore. If you're three miles out on the ocean, you don't have that opportunity, and that concerns me.

As to the larger issue of illegal immegration -- I think just about everyone agrees that the US immegration system is deeply flawed. There are a number of different ways it could be fixed, but since that's not an area I specialize in, I've refrained from offering much in the way of an opinion on how to fix it.