Entrepreneur and investor Alexis Ohanian made a bold assertion to the internet about the founding of his website Reddit.
The online forum is known for having a discussion page about nearly every topic — and often implementing extremely left-wing moderation and rules enforcement across its many pages.
‘[Border security] shouldn’t come at the cost of crushing lives.’
Ohanian invented Reddit in 2005 as an online bulletin board dubbed “the front page of the internet.”
He ended up resigning from the site’s board of directors in 2020, at which point he urged the company to replace him with a black candidate in honor of George Floyd.
Now, the entrepreneur has said the site would have never existed had federal immigration law been enforced before he was born. Ohanian was born in New York City in 1983 to an American father and a German mother, whose immigration status was not legal.
Responding to programmer Paul Graham’s X post about “masked thugs” who are “dragging people off the street at gunpoint” — referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — Ohanian revealed that his mother overstayed her welcome in the United States.
“As the son of an undocumented immigrant (my mom overstayed an au pair visa for years before marrying my dad, a U.S. citizen), it’s deeply personal: Reddit wouldn’t exist if ICE had come for her,” he wrote. The Au Pair visa permits bringing in a foreigner for childcare services.
Insisting that he did “think border security matters,” Ohanian then advocated for mass amnesty of illegal immigrants.
Border security “shouldn’t come at the cost of crushing lives,” Ohanian claimed. “A sensible amnesty / legalization policy (like what Reagan offered in 1986!!) could strike a better balance: Path to citizenship for law-abiding, hard-working undocumented immigrants <>.”
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Adding nuance to his proposal, Ohanian said that those who do not come forward to a pathway for citizenship should “face enforcement under due process.”
“This isn’t open borders, it’s smart borders + humane immigration reform. The guys up at the crack of dawn in the Home Depot parking lot <> or the women hustling their home-made food on the corner are <> the men & women we want contributing to this great nation. We shouldn’t be rounding them up at gunpoint.”
Former Republican candidate Blake Masters, who ran for Senate in Arizona, mocked Ohanian in his replies.
“Reddit not existing had we enforced immigration law is a great argument for enforcing immigration law,” Masters wrote, echoing criticism from other detractors.
Ohanian made additional arguments in response to his original post. For example, he bragged that his “$38B Market Cap” was evidence that “undocumented immigrants can have some pretty productive kids.”
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While the majority of the replies sarcastically mocked the website guru for providing a great reason to enforce existing laws, Ohanian was not without some support.
Marko Stankovic, vice president of cloud computing company Zenlayer, similarly claimed that if he “came to the US in today’s climate, I don’t think we would have been able to stay.”
He added, “Ironic that a lot of the tech entrepreneurs and CEOs (including many Trump supporters) came over on H1B or student visas.”
However, one X user’s rebuff of Ohanian’s logic seemingly captivated the sentiment of those who disagreed with him:
“I can’t even comprehend the level of entitlement to stay here knowing you’re not permitted, then demand citizenship because you stayed so long that it would be inconvenient to leave,” the user wrote.
As for what web surfers may be using if Reddit never existed, tech and education expert Josh Centers told Blaze News, “I think we would still have a lot of independent forums and the web would be a lot healthier.”
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