After a period of 6-12 months outside the country, US Green Card holders lose their Green Cards.
In a time of grave concern for many green card holders, it's probably better to avoid this sort of inaccurate info. It's freakout time but let's stick to freaking out about true things.
http://lawandborder.com/risk-abandoning-green-card-abroad-6-...
Key things: 6 months absence can be a factor in challenging your status as a Lawful Permanent Resident. 12 months absence means your green card (the actual document) is no longer valid for re-entry but it doesn't automatically make you a non-LPR.
Customs and Border Patrol can deny you entry, as we've just seen, on the basis executive action, legally questionable or not. But they can't take away your LPR status - only an order from an immigration court judge can do that.
A lot of this is cold comfort to any LPR caught up in this and unable to re-enter right now - but there is a process and the status itself is not so trivial to take away. The call to help organizations who provide legal aid to such people (and refugees and other visa holders) seems like the right thing to me, it's probably the most immediate need.
If you are absent > 6 months you could end up with your green card status listed as 'abandoned', but even if you come back every 6 months that is no guarantee at all that it will not be listed abandoned.
The golden rule seems to be to be more than 6 months per year in the USA, preferably substantially more than 6 months to avoid ambiguity.
Banners don't matter. Net neutrality mattered in October, doesn't really matter now. Get your head straight.
"You like this service? Our founder came to the US in 19XX"
"You enjoy this website? Here's a list of 2nd generation immigrants on our executive board"
...might get people to realise how much of the US economy is driven by 1st & 2nd generation immigrants.
"See! Immigration is good. These immigrants and their kids are building services!"
"See! Immigrants are hiring other immigrants and their children to provide lower cost labor and networking out-of-country and locking us out of the market."
If you want to change, you need a slogan like
"American made, American owned, American labor." along with the (now disappearing) attitude that American is not an ethnicity, it is a lifestyle.
1) You don't have the right to counsel in immigration hearings. There are several organizations that provide free legal aid.
2) Immigrant communities are scared and need to know their rights, and have a trusted source of information. There are unfortunately a ton of scammers who prey on scared people.
3) These organizations are a helpful intermediary between vulnerable people and government agencies, police, etc.
Of course, too many of the mostly white male tech company founders and investors are hoping to benefit from things like reduced corporate taxes to care about discrimination that doesn't affect them.
See also elitism vs meritocracy.
(In other words, you get what you vote for.)
As much as I think that the majority Democrat States should suck it up about losing the election, I also think it's fully within their rights to secede if their populace wishes.
Many of us live in "sanctuary cities" with local governments that plan to stand up to Trump's immigration policies anyway.
Strong business support here could easily inspire action by Sacramento and our congress critters.
Action now will matter a lot more than after the feds broaden their target.
Trump's power comes from the idea that he'll improve the economy. After this week, it should be clear that he'll do no such thing & maybe quite the opposite. Trump is too incoherent & impulsive.
He blames economic problems on the Chinese & Mexicans. Meanwhile, he ignores the role robots & Amazon will have in job destruction.
Corporate leaders can simply tell him to get lost when he sends a stupid tweet. With this he'll quickly lose his support base.
It'll be tough though. He is promising corporate america a big tax break which will instantly boost valuations (already has), giving CEOs nice bonuses & stock paydays.
They know what he refuses to admit: that a non-vocal majority of this country strongly supports the President and will NOT support anyone who publicly smites him.
Attacking the President as a normal consumer goods CEO is a losing proposition.
Even if you don't care about doing the right thing, losing some business from a (shrinking) minority of Americans is probably worth the positive publicity overseas, economic stability, retaining visa-holding employees, etc.
Edit: s/election/voting/
The election includes the whole primary system and the electoral college. Here I specifically mean the vote.
That's plenty for the seeds of doubt, especially given how easy it is to vote in several states.
I'm particularly interested in what types of machines and other voting procedures were in use there. It looks like they're optical scan machines, so hopefully they have the paper ballots on hand to do a proper audit. That, along with the voter rolls, should be able to determine what the issues were. That's a strength of using the optical machines as opposed to the purely electronic ones.
You're right that Detroit is just one city. It's also a city that's deeply troubled on many levels, so I'm not sure if it's fair to consider it typical. That's by no means excusing what look to be issues there. Those should definitely be looked into, and exhaustively. You're claim above is that there were enough fraudulent votes that Trump would have over 50% of the popular vote if they were removed. Detroit alone isn't enough to do this.
More important is to look at who's got owning shares in those machines.....
In the perfect world, we'd have open source machines that all enter voites into a public blockchain/ledger and you'd get a private key you could verify your vote with. Optical sounds awesome. But good luck with that. The fraud just seems to swing back and forth from left to right every X years instead. It's madness.
My claim is just a bet right now. But it's one I'm willing to put money on IF they actually do a national investigation, which I'm not confident will happen.
If voting integrity is something you feel particularly strongly about (I certainly do), I encourage to look into the work that's already out there. The 2000 election spurred a lot of research. Some good starting points are:
Ronald L. Rivest MIT
Auditability and Verifiability of Elections
ACM-IEEE talk March 16, 2016
https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf
---
Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007
Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography
I think the list includes (but I could be wrong):
Apple
Amazon
Oracle
IBM
Uber
Yahoo
EMC
eBay
AT&T
Tesla
And, of course, ycombinator.
Supporting quotations from the post (because evidence): "The tech community is powerful. Large tech companies in particular have enormous power and are held in high regard. We need to hear from the CEOs clearly and unequivocally"
"At a minimum, companies should take a public stance."