14 DAY TRIAL // Google will donate money to help out employees and others affected by the anti-immigration executive order signed by Donald Trump a few days ago.
USA Today reports that the company has put together a crisis fund amounting to $2 million, which can be matched with up to $2 million in donations from employees. On top of this, company execs will be giving money individually to the cause as well, making this the largest crisis campaign Google has ever set up.
The money will go to four organizations - the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Immigrant Legal Resource Center, International Rescue Committee, and UNHCR. While Google has not announced this officially, choosing instead to send news about the initiative in a memo to its employees, the information was confirmed by a company spokesperson.
For the record, the ACLU has come out and said that over the weekend it received 5 times as much money as it usually receives in a whole year. After doing a little bit of math, it seems that over 356,000 online donations were made, totaling over $24.1 million. On top of the money that will be coming from Google, Lyft has also announced it would donate $1 million over the next four years to the ACLU.
Google was directly affected by the ban
This isn’t really a surprise given the company’s stance on immigration. It’s been known for years that not only is Google against such a ban, but it seeks a more lax legislation regarding the H-1B “non-immigrant visa” which would help US companies more easily temporarily employ foreign workers.
Google has been quite troubled by the new executive order signed by Trump. The order imposes a 90-day block on entry to the United States for citizens from seven countries that are predominantly Muslim, blocks admittance of Syrian refugees indefinitely, and puts a cap to the number of refugees allowed to enter the country this year at 50,000, which is about half the number that entered the country last year. Refugee admittance was also suspended for 120 days.
Unfortunately, the ban also applies to those with valid visas, which has pushed Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, to send an internal memo recalling al Googlers back to Mountain View. According to the memo, 187 Google employees were directly affected by the ban and there was hope they would be able to return to the US before the order took effect. Whether that happened or not is unclear, but given the number of people blocked in airports over the weekend, we’d say not all of them made it back in time.
Tech world is full of immigrants
The situation has been so dire that even Sergei Brin, Google co-founder and current president of Alphabet, joined protesters at the San Francisco International Airport, The Verge reports. This ban must have hit close to home for Brin whose family emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union back in 1979 to escape Jewish persecution. It should also be mentioned that the current head of Google, Sundar Pichai, is also an immigrant.