Don't let your legacy i T systems cost you money, innovation, and a place at the digital table of the future. You can change your systems and the economics of it with software from red hat. See how at red hat dot com. On Friday January, on his eighth day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order at the Pentagon. The content of the action was rumored for days, but no one quite knew what the order was going to
mean on a practical level. Secondly, I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here. We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country. The very threats are soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into it. In l A. Hussein Kasai, the c EO and co founder of a mid sized technology startup called on Fight Oh, was at his family's home when the news broke. He didn't really think much
of it at first. There's been a few executive orders that actually don't mean anything in terms of legally being enforceable. They don't mean much. So my first reaction was this is another one, and that this this, it just seems I'm not a lawyer, but it seems a pretty common sense that it just seems mostly like I can't see
how legally this could be enforced. Um, so you got real for me when when I saw the protests at that airports, including JFK say and the reports that that didn't individuals have now been either detained or asked to go back. And after I had just calls from the messages from lawyers or others offering support and saying don't
sign this, and so on if if you're traveling. Trump's order halted citizens of seven majority Muslim countries from coming into the US that's Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and included people with valid US work visas and initially Green cards too. Hussein doesn't simply disagree with the band. It affects him and his family directly. His father is Iranian. Hussein himself spent ten years of his childhood in Iran, and he's a British Iranian dual citizen.
Hussein is also a Green card holder, which means he's a legal resident, but he's nervous that because of his Iranian citizenship. His status here in the US might not be as secure as he wants thought, and that means it's going to get a lot harder for him to run his business. A major part of the reasons why myself and others moved to places like the US or Europe is is because it's different. Because you know, there's the rule of law, there's justice, as freedom is democracy
and all these things. Um So this is particularly surprising for us because we know what's what the other way is like, and hence it's not normal. It's dangerous. This is the starting points of very dangerous road to go down. Hi am Aki Ito, and I'm Olivia Zeleski, and this week on Decrypted, we're discussing Trump's executive order and what it means for the tech industry across the country. Over the last week and a half, we've been hearing stories
like Hussain's. We've heard them especially loud and clear here within the tech community, which relies heavily on the brains and the labor of skilled foreign immigrants. For weeks since Trump won the election, tech executives have been trying to make nice with him. But after this executive order, Silicon Valley is in full revolt. We'll see what this could mean for the tech industry going forward, as we hear
reports of even broader restrictions on foreign workers. Over the last weekend a half, the details have been changing quite a bit, so we're going to recap what we know for now. For one, anyone who was born in or as a citizen of the seven Muslim majority countries has been stopped from entering the US for ninety days. It means that people who are in the US when the order was issued cannot travel internationally, otherwise they might not
be able to come back in now. The order never applied to U s citizens, And as for Green card holders, they were getting detained at first, but then Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly came out and said Green card holders will be allowed in unless there's reason to believe they pose a threat to national security. And the situation has been changing fast. There's been a storm of legal challenges, and on Friday, February third, a federal judge ordered a
nationwide temporary block to the travel ban. As a result, over this past weekend, border officials stopped enforcing the execut of order, and the State Department has reversed its cancelation of what's said to be tens of thousands of visas for people from these seven countries. But Trump isn't backing down. Immediately after the federal judge ordered the suspension of the ban, the administration asked a federal appeals court to reinstate it, and the President has put out a couple of tweets.
One said, quote the opinion of this so called judge, which essentially takes law enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned. Another tweet from Trump said, when a country is no longer able to say who can and who cannot come in and out, especially for reasons of safety and security, big trouble. As of taping this on Monday, February six, we're still waiting to hear a final decision from the appeals court. Whichever side loses
could even bring this to the Supreme Court. This all means that Hussein, the CEO of the startup on Fido, is in limbo. On Fido is based in the UK, but Hussain spends most of his time here in the US, which has become his company's largest and fastest growing market. He spends about three to four weeks here in the US for every week he spends in the UK, and perhaps ironically in this contacts and Fido verifies people's identities
and runs background checks. The entire company is now just shy of a hundred and fifty people, with eleven in the rapidly growing US office, and and any company growing tech in particular, co founders play a pretty important role, anything from from enterprise client sales, to recruitment, to infrastructure work to just whiteboard sessions with the team on the product side and on the talent side, in the whole range of areas. It is why it's important to be
mobile now. Hussain says he's fortunate that even if he's forced to leave his life in California, he could still return to the UK. A he says it startups US business has grown enough that it could still run without him being physically there. Eighteen months ago, we may most definitely what have had to think of alternative plans We are now just because we're constantly looking to recruit and
constantly looking to grow um. But we're probably at the stage where it's it's if I spend less time, it's not going to be as damaging as it would have been eighteen months ago, but that's not true for all startup founders. The night before Trump signed the executive order, another Iranian entrepreneur, Sasha Islami, was boarding a flight to Argentina. He was planning to spend two months they're recruiting for his fledgling photo sharing app called ever Snap. He spoke
to our reporter Shelley Haggen about it. I arrived to Bueno Sirius eleven PM the day after Buenasirius time. All of a sudden, it starts getting messages from one of my friends in the US and he's telling me about what Trump has done. And at first I thought, Okay, well this is really bad, but it shouldn't affect me because I'm a Green card holder, UM permanent resident. Then if one hour later he sent me an article about how it's been confirmed that also permanent residents are also banned.
So um, then all of a sudden, things, you know, it gets pretty scary because I have all my all my business in the US. I have a gigantic house in San Jose that I have all my stuff there. You know, I I go to meetings all the time, right with business partners, with investors, with founders when I'm in the US, and it's something that my business relies on me being able to be there and most of
the time. For now, Sasha's hope is that by the time he's done with this two months recruiting in Argentina, any ambiguity will be resolved, at least for Green card holders like him. Nobody knows how it's going to play out within the next couple of weeks. Right um, every day we're getting some sort of new information, right and it isn't even the administration himself. They're not clear on
what it entails. So my plan is to just, you know, wait a week or two, see how everything unfolds, right, and then take a take an education educated decision after that. And then there's another couple we spoke with, the husbands and engineer at one of the biggest tech companies here in Silicon Valley, and he's been in the US for nine years. His wife is a medical researcher at a large university in California and she's been here for seventeen years.
They're both from Iran, and they've asked us not to use their names or their employers names because unlike Hussain and Sasha, they don't have the security of a U screen card. Their applications pending, and now they're worried it's never going to come through. I mean, the unstability, the unpredictability,
is just unbelievable. We had plans, we had I mean, I'm a kind of a math type, so I would just like look at the investments and figure out what's the right amounts to do in the four one K and what's the right balance of the funds and all that stuff, figuring out based on what when we want to retire, based on then we want to buy a house, and you start planning for thirty or forty years in the future in some way, right, And those plans were here in the United yes, And then suddenly now we're
thinking about plans for tomorrow, next week, next month, trying to predict what could happen if that happens. What can I do? How can I move fast? How can I be very dynamic to handle various different scenarios. It becomes from a stable life with the future. In one day or two it changes into a survival mode life in a way that I know nothing about my future. I don't know if I if I'm gonna be able to
legally work or stay at my home. I don't know where in the world and I can go because as I can't go back to your own for various reasons, including that time, I'm not a Muslim and I'm atheist. What would happen if you went backed her in and the so To be honest, I'm not sure. They may not care that much, or they may care a lot. A lot of it is kind of arbitrary, which I'm
kind of worrying may happen here too. Arbitrary stuff. If they don't like you for some reason, they're gonna dig up everything on you and then attach that level to you and then take your life away in various ways. Coming up, we take a look at how the tech industry has reacted to the executive order that's right after these words from our sponsor. Inside the most successful organizations, I T has gone from supporting the business to driving
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the couple who were not naming today. They're all directly affected by the travel ban, and I think you can really hear the uncertainty and the devastation in each of their voices. You Know, what's been really striking to me is how swift the response was from the tech community, just how vociferous it was, at least at the beginning.
We didn't hear a whole lot from other industries. And this was after months of careful steps that the tech industry was taking to reconcile the Trump Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalenik both agreed to join the President's Advisory Board and a host of tech leaders they went to Trump Tower to meet the then president elect during the transition. But after the travel band, top tech leaders like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out.
He wrote a very personal post about his wife's parents that they were refugees from Vietnam and China. It was on the very day that the order was signed. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an internal memo talking about the more than one hundred employees who have been affected by the actions, and he said that it's painful to see the personal cost of Trump's actions. And Uber's Kalenik, who joined Trump's Advisory Council, he announced on Thursday that
he was stepping down from the committee. In Seattle, Amazon and Expedia file declarations that support Washington States pawsuit against the executive order. Do you telling how the travel bands hurt their businesses? This was the very lawsuit that led to the nationwide temporary suspension of the travel restrictions. And in New York, an industry group called Tech NYC came out with a public letter to Trump opposing the executive order, and it was signed by some of the biggest names
in the New York tech scene. I spoke to their executive director, Julie Samuels. Many of the leaders in our tech community here in New York City felt that they wanted to do something, and you know, in these instances, it's kind of hard to know what to do. We're here in New York, We're not in d C. These executive orders had been signed already, so we took the opportunity to put together a letter once you can see um at on our website, which is tech NYC dot org.
Within twelve hours, we had over four hundred signatures um all. This took place on a Sunday afternoon, which is also notable. Um people were coming out of the woodwork. So this gets us to the question of why immigration. Why was it this the travel restrictions that provoked such an outcry from the tech industry. Well, for one, entrepreneurs are at the core of the tech industry. These tiny startups are often the ones coming out with the crazy next new
things that end up taking off. Between two thousand seven and nearly of new businesses in California were started by people born outside the US. Our reporter Shelley discussed this in more details with David Mendel's, the CEO of bright Cove.
There're a midsize online video software company in Boston. You know, I think you have to keep in mind that most of the tech community is in places like Massachusetts where we are uh Silicon Valley in California, New Yorkity, the Washington, d C. Metropolitan area, and these are people that live in incredibly diverse communities. UM for us, the idea of working with a Muslim individual of Iranian descent is not
an abstract idea. That's something I do every day. I think everybody here knows people who are being targeted or feel like they're being targeted by this, and so I think you really have no choice if you want to be true to the people around you but to feel strongly about this. So that's one point that these are your friends and your coworkers and your neighbors. A related point is that given how difficult it is for companies to find good coders, tech companies don't want to lose
any of them. Google alone said there are over a hundred employees affected by the band. Yeah, I actually didn't know this until we started reporting for this podcast, but there's a big community of Iranian engineers here in the valley and industry executives. You're also worried that it's going to hurt their ability to do business around the world. Here's David again. Well, I think there's all kinds of things that could happen in the future, and there's all
kinds of spin on effects. So how's the rest of the world going to react to America that is closing its borders, not just with immigration issues and refugee issues, but also all of the talk about tariffs. Um, that's a problem for me. Our business is approximately outside the United States. For an exporter, it is not in my interest for us to put up walls metaphorical ones in this case that make it harder for people to do business with countries and the United companies in the United States,
because I think what we'll see its retaliation. You know, it's hard to predict where things are going to go from here. But our colleagues in Asia, Peter Eelstrom and Serretha Ry, obtain a draft of a new executive order that the Trump administration is considering, and that draft proposes to get harder for all foreigners to get a work
visa here. The draft, which we should say has not come into effect for now, it's just a draft that's being passed around, says the changes would prioritize and protect quote, American workers are forgotten working people and the jobs they hold. And we'll note here that over the years there have been some reports that some companies maybe abusing the H one B work visa program that they hire foreign workers so that they can pay them lower wages than they
would otherwise pay their American workers. But tech and Yes Julie says that when smart, skilled foreigners come to work in the US, Americans end up benefiting too. It is incredibly important that we have open immigration policies that attract the best, the brightest from other countries here to build businesses here, to create jobs here. That's incredibly real. The list of big companies that were founded are co founded by an immigrant um is an incredible list. It includes
Tesla and includes Facebook. It includes some really big companies. Research shows that net new job growth in the United States comes from new firms. So while of course the majority of startups fail, the ones that grow are the ones that create all the new jobs. So we want people here growing those companies. Oh, Google, I left Google off the list. Think about how many new jobs Google has created in the last decade. Hussaying, the CEO of a Fido who he heard from earlier, is another example
of this. He's created eleven jobs here in the US through his startup, and he's looking to hire more people, and many of the tech workers affected by this measure don't think they'll be replaced by American workers. The Iranian engineer, whose wife is a medical researcher, Well, he said his employer has already offered to move them to another international office if that becomes necessary. The thing is that it's not like a job that if if I leave, it's
it's sitting there and somebody get it. I have the job because of the particular skill sets that I have. If I move, they move with me. It's it's not that there's a hole and there's an opening that if I'm not there, somebody else can feel it. It's it's not that we are taking somebody's jobs. It's you have those jobs a lot of people like us. The job kind of gets created for the person you want, this kind of person, and you figure out how to use them to push forward your goals and your company or
your side, or your university or something like that. So, as you said, it's not like the there's a there's a whole whole ful field on Fidos who say also told his two Randian employees that will move them to the UK if it comes to that. Yeah, it's not like he's going to fire them and hire two Americans in their place. Well, for now, we'll leave you on this note. Since the executive order was officially signed on Friday, have you both discussed potentially leaving the United States, maybe
going to Canada, maybe going to Europe. UM. I think we are thinking about um, looking at every everywhere that we can potentially go. This was the first thing that came to our mind that what if this continues? This is not just the one time. Yeah, there is no one in this world who can ever decide where they where they want to be born. No one has ever
been able to decide that you're born somewhere. And the hope was that there is this place on Earth, UM, a particular country on then a North American continent that didn't discriminate based on where you were born. Right to us, I think America is more than a just country with certain borders. It's an idea and I felt that that idea is shattering that we've been searching for equality right in I. I grew up in a kind of a
lower middle class family in Iran. I grew up my family was not connected in any ways to the power powers. I was always a second class citizen back home in so many ways, by not believing, by not being connected, by not being rich. And this was a country where we thought those things wouldn't matter. We thought, and and beside everywhere, weside in the movies, beside in the media, beside in the laws, reside in the corn institution, we saw it in the movements. I mean the civil rights movement,
the feminism movement. I mean I said, Okay, this is the country where people are fought for those values and they've achieved them, and we can go there and have it and be there with these amazing people. That's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Well tell us what you thought of this episode. Send a voice message to our producer Pia at p g A d k A r I at Bloomberg dot net, or write to me on Twitter. I'm at Olivia's Leski and I'm at
Akio seven. You can subscribe to Decrypt it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a rating in a review. This helps us make our show better and it also gets our podcast in front of more listeners. This episode was produced by Pierre get Cary Magnus Hendrickson and Liz Smith. Shelley Hagen and Sarah Friar helped with additional reporting. We'd like to say a special thanks to Shoubert Shawberry, who runs the Persian Tech Entrepreneurs Network.
He connected us with a variety of startups for today's show. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money, innovation, and a place at the digital table of the future. You can change your systems and the economics of it with software from red Hat. See how at red hat dot com.