Over the weekend, leftist journalists and activists across the United States and Latin American plan to hold a “Hackathon” directed toward creating websites, programs, and apps pushing illegal immigration. The so-called Americas Datafest is designed to “use digital collaboration to rethink immigration’s role in society,” according to the Associated Press. In the United States, Datafests will be held at Univision in Miami, as well as Harvard and Stanford.
The Americas Datafest Hackathon website describes the event as “an international 48-hour hackathon with local events in many cities where a diverse crowd comes together to tackle migration issues.” The site pitches: “Do you write code? Work with data? Research migration issues? Work with migrants? Report migration news? You are invited to our Datafest on November 2-3. You can participate in-person or virtually. The event will focus on immigration to North America and Europe and human flows between and within countries in Latin America as well as on general population shifts within the United States and Canada.”
The companies participating in the Hackathon include Facebook, Univision, Amnesty International, Microsoft Research, Technology for Social Change at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and many more. All of these groups are advocates for softer immigration restrictions. Application programming interfaces made available for use for purposes of the Hackathon include Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Linkedin, Twilio, Twitter, and Yahoo.
Ideas for the Hackathon have been compiled at the website, and include projects investigating “Who derives economic benefits from migration?” as well as “Migrants’ social and economic contribution” and “Migrants contribution to US economy.” Other projects target Arizona’s SB1070, hoping to “use technology –perhaps again using a phone’s GPS data– to be able to discern how long someone was stopped by the police, and perhaps use the phone’s voice memo functions to record conversations between the officer and the person being detained in order to get ‘neutral’ evidence of what exactly was said and asked for by the officer.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.