I find it amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp here.
“Oh, maybe they got mixed up with the visa because language”. No they did not.
“Oh, maybe it’s really difficult to find local talent”. No it isn’t. Not for them.
There are many advantages for them to illegally fly in a whole
Workforce. That is why they did it.
“
mattnewton · 1h ago
It’s more exasperation at how ridiculous this process is, treating foreign labor like dangerous criminals by default.
dazilcher · 1h ago
How do you suggest we should treat foreign illegal labor?
ivysly · 58m ago
how about like any other kind
votepaunchy · 44m ago
So how should we treat foreign illegal non-labor?
politelemon · 1h ago
Not like dangerous criminals. Not with white gloves. It isn't binary.
joenot443 · 1h ago
I'm expecting this to be one of those American news stories where the public reaction is entirely dependent on the current party in power, right?
It feels weird for HN to be going to bat for a company abusing labor laws, am I missing something here?
haswell · 20m ago
When the agency enforcing those labor laws is also blatantly violating the law while carrying out other highly publicized enforcement actions, they will be scrutinized for everything they do, including actions that were likely legal/necessary. That's part of the problem with the government breaking the law - legitimate actions are no longer seen as legitimate, because they have undermined themselves in the public eye.
I also don't think people are "going to bat for a company abusing labor laws" so much as they are highly suspicious of these enforcement actions given the complete lawlessness displayed elsewhere and imagine the possibility that there were more diplomatic solutions that still address the problem appropriately.
add-sub-mul-div · 27m ago
I think the respective parties are consistently welcoming and hostile to immigrants regardless of who's in power, I don't really know what you mean. Biden would have been hated by the left for doing this.
People are so both-sides poisoned they come out with these nonsensical takes reflexively just to virtue signal being "above" having a (public) stance.
rich_sasha · 1h ago
I haven't been following the story closely, but it is clear the Korean workers broke visa rules? Or do they just look a bit foreign and talk funny?
Even before Trump there were plenty of stories where ICE clearly didn't know their own country's visa rules.
rayiner · 1h ago
The New York Times write-up on this is pretty good: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/georgia-battery-plant-.... This plant was under investigation for a significant time. Some citizens and workers with visas were initially detained, but were released once their documentation was verified. The workers being deported were not Hyundai employees, and it seems clear from the company's response that they were not working in the U.S. legally.
hopelite · 1h ago
I can attest that’s companies, especially large ones will generally know the rules better than the various government agencies and people, precisely because they have an incentive to know, they pay people to know, and there is risk involved. They also usually make a determination that the reward is not only greater than the risk, but greater than the consequences, and they have always been proved correct in that calculation. That especially applies to the executives, the people who immensely profit and effectively never face any, let alone effective consequences, so peoples round them also just keep their heads down and look away or even just facilitate the illegal behaviors in order to brown nose and climb the corporate ladder.
It is somewhat astonishing, but it seems people are baffled when things don’t change even though consequences for corporations and executives are net positive. Why should they care when the c-suite runs off with way more money than before in the end anyways?
Take for example the recent greystar lawsuit by the government for essentially price fixing apartment rents, ie fraud, across the nation. Long story short; estimates are they profited about $2.2 billion every year, the government fined them/agreed to a measly settlement paid to the government; with zero relief or compensation to those they committed their crimes against, nor will the executives that made the illegal decisions suffer any consequences, nor will there be punitive consequences that make executives sit up in attention.
adolph · 1h ago
> amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp
At some level stories are told in a way in which there is a good-guy and a bad-guy and the megacorp drew the good-guy straw this time. It was just a few years ago a Hyundai owned subsidiary was caught in the US employing underage people from Guatemala [0].
The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a common underpinning of bad faith arguments.
It has been really disheartening seeing a generation of, presumably, leftists abandon decades old demands and movements from local worker protections, global environmental causes, or democratic oversight over ivy league institutes by parroting the same bad arguments their opposition did to them over these decades.
As long as I have been alive, very progressive leftists always argued that ivy league institutions need admission reform. They receive billions from our tax dollars, yet their admission policies have always favored the already wealthy and powerful (the rich, alumnus, donors, "elite"). They only pay lip service to "low income families" while straddling most middle class students in insane levels of debt and refuse to publish admission rates. Progressives have always argued that these organizations cannot exist without public (tax payers) funding and as a result should have democratic oversight and should be required to publish their admission rates. We should be withholding that funding or using it as a forcing function for them to do so. The opposition have always argued (in bad faith) to "leave them alone. Education should be independent and they should do whatever they want". Now that a right-wing administration actually put pressure on them (for reasons I disagree with), every "liberal" I know just jumps on the simplest of arguments that "They should be independent. There shouldn't be any oversight required or expected on these educational institutes. That's illegal.". Whats worst is trying to explain how this is a bad argument just gets you yelled at because you must be a "both sides are the same"-person or a secretly republican or "but we're not talking about admission here. We need to unit against the enemy with one argument then we'll figure it out later once education is not under attack" type BS arguments.
Same for tariffs and global trade rules and all the global environmental destruction, human rights violations, and local economy mayhem they caused. The argument isn't that these laws need to be tightened and reconsidered to reduce our dependency on slave labor or funding massive environmental polluters or not incentivizing the biggest consumer base on the plant to consider the diesel emissions cost of shipping massive contains full of plastic trinkets across the pacific only for 99% of them to end up in a landfill. Suddenly the argument from progressives and the left are all about the economy. The cost of TEMU for the poor American consumer and how this is the world we live in. There is nothing we can or should do to change it.
bpt3 · 1h ago
People don't want to think about details, they just want to continue to hate on the other team and Hyuandi (and their contractors) doing something that would be illegal in just about every country on earth could interfere with that goal.
lokar · 1h ago
For people saying "they should have had the right visa", no one does this.
Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
I’m guessing they were here on a business/consulting visa and doing more than that but it’s probably been de facto practice for years and hasn’t had issues. And I’m guessing the majority of them have skills in setting a factory up that are difficult to source locally.
dmix · 2h ago
They were flown in under visas to help set up the plant as consultants (at least at one of the plants). I don't think they were intended to continue working there after. Some of the visas were also expired.
The article also says:
> LG Energy Solution said Saturday that 47 of its employees were detained, 46 of them Korean. Another 250 personnel from “equipment partner companies,” most of them Korean, were also being held, it added.
So it seems there were multiple parent companies involved
givemeethekeys · 2h ago
Yeah, it would take a while to train the locals to speak Korean.
nemo44x · 1h ago
Indeed. Likely just a pragmatic thing here that’s always worked. Will likely end up with a new special kind of very short term visa to cover this sort of thing.
givemeethekeys · 1h ago
I sure hope not.
If they want to do business here, then they should be forced to hire here and train as needed and that includes teaching people their preferred ways of communicating.
jacquesm · 26m ago
If we flipped that on US companies operating in Europe then there would be many cries of murder.
nemo44x · 12m ago
Why, it’s like a 3 month consultancy thing not a full time role. I agree that locals should be hired for full time roles and that these guys went about it the wrong way, but previous administrations failed to enforce laws which created this de facto illegal situation.
tibbydudeza · 2h ago
They were LG Chem workers to set up the battery manufacturing plant at the Hyundai facility - the paperwork was not filed correctly - LG probably did this a few times already as practice - the workers are in a compound situation and don't interact with the locals.
Somebody snitched no doubt.
eunos · 1h ago
There's a Georgian TikTok user that is claimed snitching them. Heard also that she's running for office.
Shank · 2h ago
Do you have any information about this happening in the past, or the "compound situation" etc?
ocdtrekkie · 2h ago
Seems like the sort of thing our administration really wants to discourage, right? Definitely should deport those folks trying to... move manufacturing to America.
ajross · 2h ago
Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.
gruez · 2h ago
>Federal and immigration agents arrested 475 people on Thursday — mostly South Korean nationals — while executing a judicial search warrant as part of a criminal investigation into alleged unlawful employment at the facility.
> ...
>South Korea will “push forward measures to review and improve the residency status and visa system for personnel travelling to the United States.”
The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
ajross · 2h ago
> The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
No one ever does, by that standard. In the US, if you're a professional coming in to do some short-term thing, there's no visa process. You just fly in and get the stamp in your passport, which is technically treated as a "waiver of visa". Then you do your job and go home.
Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
gruez · 2h ago
>Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
Something tells me that working at a factory, even for "training" purposes is very different than attending a conference. Wikipedia confirms this:
>There are restrictions on the type of employment-related activities allowed. Meetings and conferences in relation to the travelers' profession, line of business or employer in their home country are generally acceptable, but most forms of "gainful employment" are not. There are however poorly-classifiable exceptions such as persons performing professional services in the United States for a non-U.S. employer, and persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale.[26] Performers (such as actors and musicians) who plan on performing live or taping scenes for productions in their country of origin, as well as athletes participating in an athletic event, are likewise not allowed to use the VWP for their respective engagements and are instead required to have an O or P visa prior to arrival. Foreign media representatives and journalists on assignment are required to have a nonimmigrant media (I) visa.[27]
ghaff · 2h ago
Even within the US, there's been something of a crackdown on out-of-state work from a tax perspective. Though it has been pretty inconsistent from what I've seen even if companies are starting to use auditors to track via expense reports--though, somewhat weirdly, they don't always follow state laws that are often set up around professional athletes and entertainers. Obviously most people have a right to work out-of-state but they may have to file appropriate tax returns.
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
> Obviously most people have a right to work out-of-state but they may have to file appropriate tax returns.
Which US resident would not have the right to work wherever they want in the US?
I don't know. Weasel word :-) I could hypothesize court orders for whatever reason.
eesmith · 1h ago
Working out-of-state is different from freedom of movement.
For example, if you live in New Jersey and work in New York you are obligated to file tax returns to both states.
See also the "Jock tax", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_tax, "the jock tax is the colloquially named income tax levied against visitors to a city or state who earn money in that jurisdiction".
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
>Working out-of-state is different from freedom of movement.
It is the same in the US. I do not see how having to pay taxes prevents anyone from working in a place.
Tax policy and the legal right to work somewhere are two different things. As far as I know, no non-federal jurisdiction in the US can officially say people of xyz characteristics cannot work here. At least not yet.
Also, the jock tax is just income tax.
The only reason it has a name is because it is more difficult to audit and prove tax evasion for most other people that work in various locales, but do not pay income tax they are legally required to, whereas the public nature of the work of entertainers and large incomes makes it easy for a government to prove tax was owed. Which the wikipedia link says:
>Since a state cannot afford to track the many individuals who do business on an itinerant basis, the ones targeted are usually high profile and very wealthy, namely professional athletes. Not only are the working schedules of famous sports players public, so are their salaries. The state can compute and collect the amount with very little investment of time and effort.
throw0101c · 1h ago
> Something tells me that working at a factory, even for "training" purposes is very different than attending a conference.
Building a factory as part of a multi-billion investment.
Is the administration serious about re-industrialization? If they are, then if they find visa discrepancies of foreign nationals to that, perhaps they should help the foreigners sort out the discrepancies so they can continue to help the administration achieve its goals.
Schnitz · 2h ago
Technically almost every white collar business traveler is working in the US illegally if you strictly apply the letter of the law. Let’s say you come here for two days of meetings and you are coding or doing some analysis on the third day before you fly home. You’ve now violated your business visa. The Trump administration can start enforcing the law like that and we’ll be even more screwed, because absolutely no non-US company will build anything if business travel to help spin up the office or plant is practically impossible.
lokar · 1h ago
And the same in other places. I’ve traveled to Europe many times without a work visa. I go to meetings, talk yo people and yes, write a bit of code. It’s what everyone does.
BurningFrog · 1h ago
Unless you're being paid a US wage by a US company this is practically impossible to discover, other than by raiding the office/factory like they did at Hyundai.
ajross · 2h ago
It was a factory under construction. While, sure, the law is ambiguous (which is the whole point of having "norms" like this in the first place), surely you'd agree that their work falls under "persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale."
I just can't understand how anyone thinks that a "Surprise! You're in jail now!" change of enforcement norms like this is a good thing.
gruez · 2h ago
>It was a factory under construction. [...] surely you'd agree that their work falls under "persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale."
I can't tell whether you actually think the factory was under construction and therefore the exemption you mentioned would apply, or are trying to mislead people with some sneaky wording (ie. that it was under construction at some point). In any case according to wikipedia[1] it was constructed between 2022-2024, and "full production" (of cars, presumably) began in October 2024, almost a year ago. By all accounts it wasn't "under construction".
That said, I'm sure that something as complicated as a car factory would be continually upgraded and repaired, and maybe some of that would fall under "installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale", but at the same time that shouldn't be used as an excuse for multinationals to import arbitrary amount of foreign workers to work there, bypassing the normal visa process. Moreover it's questionable whether that "installing..." excuse would even hold. The OP article mentioned that over 400 workers, mostly south korean nationals were arrested in the raids, but another source[2] suggests the factory's employment is around 400 people. If it was really installing equipment, I'd expect it to be 5-10% of the factory's workforce, not 50-100%.
> In any case according to wikipedia[1] it was constructed between 2022-2024, and "full production" (of cars, presumably) began in October 2024, almost a year ago. By all accounts it wasn't "under construction".
As someone who has worked in IT for a few decades, I have had to go 'into production' with services while things still needed to be, and were still being, built out.
Factories are large and complex: just because one part has been deployed doesn't mean another part has. One simple possibility: they went 'into production' being able to produce X units per week, but work was being done to be able to expand to X+30% units.
lokar · 1h ago
The car factory has been done for a while. What was being fitted out was a new LG battery factory next to it.
lars_francke · 2h ago
That is not true.
There is a process, it's usually tedious but it exists.
I did it for Singapore, the US and Israel. They mostly took multiple months but I never wanted to take any chances. For the US it was a "B-1 in lieu of H-1B" visa for example.
Attending a conference is something different than what these workers did.
There are rules around what a "business trip" is and what is not and what "work" is.
xadhominemx · 1h ago
There are visa types specifically created for this sort of situation (e.g. E2 visas). But those visas are only available to certain nationals and South Koreans are not among them, which is very stupid given the strong commercial and strategic ties between the USA and South Korea.
abcd_f · 2h ago
> Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing.
I flew to an expo where our company had a booth and the US border patrol took me aside and started asking if I'd be selling things there or working at the booth in some other form. I told them that I am a tech going to see other companies' stuff. They then discussed something between themselves for 10 minutes and let me pass. This was 20 years ago, so them being picky is certainly not a new thing.
ajmurmann · 1h ago
The fact that something normal, we need to happen as a country, is ambiguous and sparks a 10 minute discussion is the big red flag. Immigration and business visits need to be clear and quick. We need naive immigration reform.
stackskipton · 1h ago
US needs immigration reform bad but problem is you have two competing sides. Plenty of companies want to bring in cheaper/visa tied workers and US workers who want to protect their wages. Few voters have any faith in politicians to not completely screw over average American.
nemo44x · 2h ago
I’m guessing they were doing that or similar but doing more than is scoped for that. And everyone has probably been doing this for a long time for short term specialist tasks, so it’s industry practice now.
wombatpm · 2h ago
This administration is taking people who dutifully show up for court hearings as part of their asylum claims and shipping them back to their country of origin.
To make it worse, they are sending their confidential asylum paperwork to the country directly.
The South Koreans are lucky they are being sent to the correct Korea.
Discordian93 · 2h ago
"Deported" now seems to be an euphemism for being sent to a concentration camp in a random third world country, so I guess they have to use different language for actual deportations.
joezydeco · 2h ago
The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.
This isn't exactly new territory. A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
ghaff · 2h ago
As a tech person, I've never had trouble entering Europe from the US to go to a conference or whatever but I'd be very careful with respect to honorariums or expenses being covered for speaking, etc., which I have heard of people getting in trouble over. (Of course, some countries do have explicit requirements for business-related visits.)
dmix · 1h ago
Every country is careful with rules like that. The main difference is the US has been the #1 destination for almost everyone in the world to work/live for decades, so it's a major supply/demand issue that border guards have to deal with. People often compare it to European countries. Random countries that are people's 15th choice to immigrate, where they don't need to try as hard with enforcement. Or at least didn't until recently, since Europe also began experiencing American-southern border style immigration issues.
BurningFrog · 1h ago
South Koreans, like most developed countries, get an automatic 90 day B-1 "visa waiver" visa when entering.
fsckboy · 2h ago
some had no visas, some had tourist visas, some had expired visas
firesteelrain · 1h ago
Well this extra context makes what ICE did totally understandable. I would expect any country to do the same.
VBprogrammer · 1h ago
The crackdown is certainly being done for the wrong reasons but it does seem strange to me just how much of the US is built around the idea of a second class of citizens who don't have documentation. It seems like a significant portion of farmworkers, construction, hospitality and childcare are routinely done by people who aren't legally in the country.
I'm sure there is more of this than in Europe than I'm aware of (food delivery is one example we're recently had a lot of focus on in the UK) but it's certainly not at the point that it's routine and expected.
How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?
toast0 · 1h ago
> How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?
Some jobs are cash jobs, the employer doesn't report the income and the employee likely doesn't either, this isn't legal for the employer or the employee, but enforcement is uneven.
For jobs with proper payroll, income reporting and employment tax withholding, it's common to 'borrow' someone else's tax id. That's not legal either of course, although the employer may be ok if they were reasonably unaware of the borrowing. If the borrowed tax id is only used for work by one person, and the withholding is close to correct (or a tax return is filed for that tax id), then taxes are being paid properly, even if they're attributed incorrectly. If the tax id is used by multiple people, then the combined income might be subject to a larger tax than if earned by multiple tax ids, and withholding is likely to be iffy (withholding tables are built around a single job).
I think I've heard of ways for someone without work authorization to get their own tax idea so they can have make properly attributed tax payments, but I don't remember the details.
firesteelrain · 1h ago
Your questions are valid however diverges from the main point. The South Korean citizens in question were breaking the law. Whether we agree on ICE’s approach and how that reflects on optics is more of a political question for this administration. Clearly, the South Korean citizens were not following established US Visa Law and Policy.
dmix · 1h ago
There's been a successive series of US federal administrations that gave them a pass, either through lack of enforcement or inventing temporary work visas that also covered people who already illegally immigrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_protected_status Biden expanded this authority to cover ~1.2M new people
Also in states like California they let undocumented immigrants get drivers licenses. They can even get bank accounts and mortgages in some states (which is basically impossible here in Canada).
ajross · 2h ago
> The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.
Because there is no visa process for short term professional work in the US, and never has been.
> A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
That's just wrong. Virtually the entirety of the professional world travels around between industrial countries on tourist visas. Otherwise anyone going to a trade show is an "illegal" at risk of deportation.
ehnto · 2h ago
That is my impression of travelling to the US right now. Non zero risk of baseless detainment and deportation, and a non zero risk of being sent to a different country than the one you live in.
No thanks. I'll stream the conference online.
detaro · 2h ago
There's work and work. Most "tourist" visa will cover things like attending conferences or tradeshows, meetings with a different branch of your employer or customers etc, but on the other side more dedicated work, conference talks you are compensated for, ... can quickly be treated differently.
And if you don't come from a preferred part of the world even the former can quickly be quite a process to prove it.
ghaff · 2h ago
Exactly. Being nervous, of a "suspicious" ethnicity, giving any indication that you're being paid for being in the country, can probably all lead to issues. As I wrote elsewhere, aside from some countries that require a visa for any explicit business activity, a basic visa is typically fine to go to a conference or meet with a customer, much less send some emails.
metrix · 2h ago
I don't quite understand what happened other than "deported by ICE".
sb8244 · 2h ago
The article makes it sound as if there were govt negotiations to have them sent home. It is light on details though, but with that many people of a friendly nation / corporation I imagine they get treated differently.
I interpreted that to mean they may not have permanent US immigration issues vs "being deported".
fsckboy · 1h ago
the national debate and evolving policies wrt deportations the past year has focused on:
1. getting those with criminal records depoarted and not allowed back (a fair number of whom have been depoted and have violated the ban on returning)
2. getting those who've wished to settle and work jobs to leave voluntarily by buying them plane tickets and giving them cash stipends and not barring their reentry in the future
These Koreans who came to Georgia on behalf of their company will probably not have their tickets paid for by the US nor get the stipend, so yes, they are treated differently as you suggest.
after the surprise arrests executing the judicial warrant, the Korean company and government stepped forward and expressed a commitment to helping these workers, which occurred without negotiation, although you could call the flurry of phone calls after that negotiations, it was probably more like "Q; what do we need to do" "A: you need to bring them home". neither country nor the companies involved is looking to disturb relations, though perhaps this is adjacent to a tariff negotiation.
jacquesm · 21m ago
> neither country nor the companies involved is looking to disturb relations
Relations are disturbed. You can take that to the bank. The SK government just stepped up for their citizens as they should. But US/SK relations just got dinged.
notpachet · 1h ago
> 2. getting those who've wished to settle and work jobs to leave voluntarily by buying them plane tickets and not barring their reentry in the future
If you think the current administration is giving cash stipends to anyone it's been working to deport as part of its dragnet, I have a very large bridge to sell you.
fsckboy · 57m ago
it's a real policy (it's an app), provide a link if you have a source that says it's not, otherwise you're just unproductively snarking. it's certainly cost effective, a few thousand voluntary is much cheaper than administrative means.
dfxm12 · 1h ago
"Deported" has several meanings, especially in recent context for deportees from the USA. One can be deported to a detention facility in a country one has no ties to, for example. This unfortunately has happened often enough that it is important to distinguish exactly which flavor of deportation is happening...
rayiner · 1h ago
> One can be deported to a detention facility in a country one has no ties to, for example.
You're only sent to a third country if you insist on not being deported back to your home country.
treetalker · 1h ago
Before IIRIRA in 1996, US immigration law had separate processes for deportation and exclusion. Since then, we have a single, unified process called removal. So technically deportation no longer exists. It is more proper to say that someone is being removed.
skybrian · 2h ago
Yes, but it still seems like relatively good news for temporary workers who have a home in a safe country to go back to. We’re not talking about Haiti.
eunos · 1h ago
It's a bit different since they "srlf-deport" before the government formally deport them. That mean they are not banned from coming to the US next time.
rayiner · 2h ago
It sounds like there is no real dispute that the folks being deported were working illegally. The NYT says some folks with visas or citizenship were initially detained but then released: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/georgia-battery-plant-.... None appear to be Hyundai employees. The plant was under investigation for a significant amount of time as well.
Where are the goalposts? Are you suggesting that some people found to be working illegally shouldn’t be deported? You should listen to this excellent podcast by the NYT about how our “norms” of non-enforcement of our immigration laws has consistently been contrary to what politicians told the public: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... Politicians have been baiting and switching the public on immigration since 1965.
dtjb · 2h ago
Norms and goalposts aside, what’s the value in adopting a formal policy of harassment against non-criminal, non-violent workers?
Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.
Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.
gruez · 1h ago
>Norms and goalposts aside, what’s the value in adopting a formal policy of harassment against non-criminal, non-violent workers?
Deterring irregular economic migration? If the government adopts a non-formal policy of not prosecuting non-criminal non-violent workers, it's implicitly saying it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble. You might think this is fine because free movement of labor is good or whatever, but that's not what most Americans want.
dtjb · 1h ago
Americans don’t want economic growth, or don’t want foreigners in the country?
I feel like we should be honest - Americans are perfectly comfortable picking and choosing when laws get enforced. We do it all the time. We don’t treat every law as sacred. Enforcement is selective in a million other areas, from antitrust to wage theft to pollution. Nobody insists those must be pursued to the letter every single time.
So why single out immigration as the one area where “the law is the law” trumps any rational or humane appeal? It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference. One that just happens to line up with race and class anxieties rather than some universal devotion to the rule of law.
rayiner · 52m ago
You're attacking a strawman. Immigration law is like any other quota law. The point isn't whether a single person has satisfied a legal formality. The point is to regulate the aggregate scale of the activity through a legal procedure. It's like county fishing or park visitor licenses that are made available for a nominal fee or for free. The point isn't the license itself, it's to control the aggregate volume of fishing or visitors to the parks.
Similarly with immigration, the purpose of the legal formalities is to constrain immigration volume. If you think those volumes are not high enough, you can advocate to increase them. In 60% of polling this issue, Gallup has found that the support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34%, and was under 10% from 1965-2000.
As to the rationales for limiting the volume of immigration, they are two-fold. One, people don't buy the argument that immigrants are good for them economically. Economists have lots of theories about public policy that people don't buy, like the idea of getting rid of corporate taxes: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Two, people have cultural preferences and want to limit the scope of cultural change. That's a perfectly legitimate rationale for limiting immigration. People in the Bay Area would be pretty upset if internal migration made Mountain View culturally more like Alabama. People in Wyoming would be upset if immigration made their town more like New Jersey. And those are people in the same country!
jacquesm · 34m ago
> You're attacking a strawman.
You are defending a criminal.
- it is not normal for the military to be sent to cities and locations that are run by political enemies to round up people
- putting people in concentration camps (that's what they are) is not normal.
- deporting people without due process is not normal
- using the military for policing duties is not normal
You're a lawyer. All of this should horrify you.
The USA was on the right path with decreasing immigration by making its neighbors more wealthy. Guess who ended that? The Trump regime creates problems which then only the Trump regime can solve, which is a game older than politics. And you're falling for it, hook, line and sinker.
For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
jacquesm · 11m ago
Yes, I know we have detention centers. Believe me I'm not happy about them.
> The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.
The US is an outlier in relying wholesale on an illegal workforce without representation and without healthcare or access to the legal system to keep their economy afloat.
> For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Sorry, and given that this is a point of law, you are utterly wrong on this, which makes me wonder what else you are wrong about where you are so confident.
> Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
You keep saying that, here and elsewhere. But it just isn't true.
> As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
That is very much not true and you know it. The biggest problem with US immigration law is that it is (1) ridiculously complex (2) dealt with by understaffed entities (3) kept in place because industry and agriculture more or less depend on it and (4) effectively makes the country a vast amount of money.
If you're so horrified by it then you can blame your parents for picking a country to emigrate to that was soft on emigration. You can't pin this on the emigrants, many of whom were in the USA well before you were even born.
Note that what I said was that most americans do not support "it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble". That's not the same as "ICE raids as currently implemented" or even "don't offer current pathway to citizenship for current undocumented workers".
rayiner · 20m ago
The difference is more about the appetite for aggressive enforcement than the underlying policy. There is little appetite in either party for increasing the volume of legal immigration.
> Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty.
That's because Congress has been promising "measured enforcement" for 60 years, but in that time the foreign-born population has ballooned from 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century. The goal is big, visible enforcement actions that will disincentivize people from immigrating above the limits set forth in the law.
dtjb · 1h ago
I fail to see how the percentage of foreign born citizens is a problem in any way.
rayiner · 48m ago
You're welcome to your belief, but that puts you in an extreme minority not only among Americans, but among people anywhere in the world. It's simply a fact that culture is real, that it shapes the society, and that immigrants bring foreign culture with them in ways that change the destination society.
https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.").
I'm a foreigner myself. Even though I grew up in the U.S. since age 5, the cultural difference between me and my wife (whose family immigrated here from Britain before the American Revolution) are stark. I think most Americans have a hard time understanding just how foreign their foreign-born acquaintances are, because many of the differences are below the surface: https://opengecko.com/geckoview/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/C....
dfxm12 · 52m ago
It's only a problem for white supremacists.
rayiner · 51m ago
It's only "white supremacy" if you'd object to, e.g. a majority-Bangladeshi town or neighborhood where people behaved indistinguishably from people in Idaho, Wyoming, or Vermont. But if assimilation was real--if people could be transplanted from one cultural context to another seamlessly--opposition to immigration would be almost non-existent.
acdha · 1h ago
> Politicians have been baiting and switching the public on immigration since 1965.
This is the symptom of the underlying desire certain industries have for cheap workers who can’t complain about working conditions. Those politicians are responding to that demand, not just acting in a vacuum. That’s why it’s almost unheard of for employers to suffer penalties and why you see this cycle in states like Texas where people talk tough about immigrants but every time someone suggests employers be required to use e-verify the Republican leadership kills the bill due to the impact on construction and agriculture:
Yes, the traditional GOP sold out America. That's why George P. Bush couldn't get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.
TimorousBestie · 2h ago
> Where are the goalposts? Are you suggesting that some people found to be working illegally shouldn’t be deported?
H1-B reform should be table stakes and simple for this administration to tackle, since they “don’t give a shit” (a direct quote from VPOTUS) about laws and the legislative process.
If the administration actually cared about making it easier for foreign companies to invest in domestic production capacity, they could accomplish it overnight.
ajross · 1h ago
> Where are the goalposts?
Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no?
To counter-quip: what is the goal? I genuinely don't have any idea in this circumstance how the reactionary right wing adherence to ideology does anything but harm the country they claim they're trying to improve.
I mean, do you want Hyundai to build factories in the US? Everyone seems to claim so. Yet here is a Hyundai factory that seems likely to be shuttered or delayed for years because of... ideology?
rayiner · 1h ago
> Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no?
Please listen to the NYT podcast I linked. In 1950, immigration had been severely restricted for three decades, dropping the foreign-born population from 14.7% in 1910 to 5.4% in 1960. Then, Congress enacted Hart-Celler in 1965, but promised that it would not increase immigration. According to Gallup, public support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34% since that time, and from 1965 to 2000, was under 10%. But in that timeframe, the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century.
So no, continuing to ignore the immigration laws Americans voted for and have consistently supported is not a good prior.
acdha · 1h ago
> the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century.
This is going to be exaggerated by the decline in the domestic birth rate over that same period. It’s widely recognized that the U.S. has avoided the aging population effect seen throughout the advanced economies solely due to allowing more working-age immigrants.
philwelch · 2h ago
This is one of many issues that people are disingenuous about. They just want open borders even if it means ignoring the law and the preferences of the American people.
SanjayMehta · 2h ago
It’s a language issue.
When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
A shoddy way and shortsighted to deal with companies which are investing in your country.
bitcurious · 2h ago
> I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
Why would you suspect that a company flying in hundreds of laborers can’t afford a lawyer to give the same guidance your HR company gave? It’s tax evasion and cost cutting.
jacquesm · 19m ago
When I was much younger I was sent 'onsite' regularly to set up machinery that had been made by the company I worked for. This is still pretty common in anything related to industry because you're just simply not going to be able to train a local to troubleshoot/install a machine that they have no clue about. Some of this stuff takes years to become familiar with.
SanjayMehta · 1h ago
Experts setting up machines are not “labour.”
No comments yet
xadhominemx · 1h ago
It’s not a language issue - it’s because a quirk in US immigration law means South Koreans are not eligible for the E-2 visa, and are stuck competing for capped categories like the H-1B.
A group of house reps have been trying to fix this issue since 2012, but have never gotten it through committee.
gruez · 1h ago
>It’s a language issue.
>When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
Were you actually there for "meetings"? or actually doing stuff like writing reports?
Jach · 1h ago
At a former US job of mine, for a US headquartered company, I (a US citizen) was told similarly for my trips to Canada. I don't think it was by HR or legal though, it was either an older team member or one of the managers. But they reiterated that when I would occasionally travel to our Canadian office where half my team was, I should say I was there for meetings and I was not managing anyone. (I don't know what our team's manager said if they asked on the latter bit.) The primary purpose was of course meetings (and meeting artifacts), and it was never longer than a week, though my layman understanding would still call that "work", and in any case I'd have my work-issued general purpose computer with me. But this phrasing is all just to get past border control with minimum fuss and just my passport (card). I highly doubt in this particular post's case the problem is a "language issue".
On a conference trip to Italy, they basically asked me nothing. "Where are you going? Ok, next." Hardly any security either. You even had to walk through a gift shop to get to the customs area. It was nice.
__turbobrew__ · 1h ago
Almost everyone I know who goes to the USA for “business meetings” on a b-1 actually works while in the US whether it be coding, report writing, consulting for money, professional services, etc…
SanjayMehta · 1h ago
That’s for me to know and you to wonder.
Trust me, no one in my role thought travelling once a quarter through EWR was a privilege. Haven’t had to visit for ten years and will never have to again, thank goodness.
“Oh, maybe they got mixed up with the visa because language”. No they did not.
“Oh, maybe it’s really difficult to find local talent”. No it isn’t. Not for them.
There are many advantages for them to illegally fly in a whole Workforce. That is why they did it.
“
It feels weird for HN to be going to bat for a company abusing labor laws, am I missing something here?
I also don't think people are "going to bat for a company abusing labor laws" so much as they are highly suspicious of these enforcement actions given the complete lawlessness displayed elsewhere and imagine the possibility that there were more diplomatic solutions that still address the problem appropriately.
People are so both-sides poisoned they come out with these nonsensical takes reflexively just to virtue signal being "above" having a (public) stance.
Even before Trump there were plenty of stories where ICE clearly didn't know their own country's visa rules.
It is somewhat astonishing, but it seems people are baffled when things don’t change even though consequences for corporations and executives are net positive. Why should they care when the c-suite runs off with way more money than before in the end anyways?
Take for example the recent greystar lawsuit by the government for essentially price fixing apartment rents, ie fraud, across the nation. Long story short; estimates are they profited about $2.2 billion every year, the government fined them/agreed to a measly settlement paid to the government; with zero relief or compensation to those they committed their crimes against, nor will the executives that made the illegal decisions suffer any consequences, nor will there be punitive consequences that make executives sit up in attention.
At some level stories are told in a way in which there is a good-guy and a bad-guy and the megacorp drew the good-guy straw this time. It was just a few years ago a Hyundai owned subsidiary was caught in the US employing underage people from Guatemala [0].
0. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
It has been really disheartening seeing a generation of, presumably, leftists abandon decades old demands and movements from local worker protections, global environmental causes, or democratic oversight over ivy league institutes by parroting the same bad arguments their opposition did to them over these decades.
As long as I have been alive, very progressive leftists always argued that ivy league institutions need admission reform. They receive billions from our tax dollars, yet their admission policies have always favored the already wealthy and powerful (the rich, alumnus, donors, "elite"). They only pay lip service to "low income families" while straddling most middle class students in insane levels of debt and refuse to publish admission rates. Progressives have always argued that these organizations cannot exist without public (tax payers) funding and as a result should have democratic oversight and should be required to publish their admission rates. We should be withholding that funding or using it as a forcing function for them to do so. The opposition have always argued (in bad faith) to "leave them alone. Education should be independent and they should do whatever they want". Now that a right-wing administration actually put pressure on them (for reasons I disagree with), every "liberal" I know just jumps on the simplest of arguments that "They should be independent. There shouldn't be any oversight required or expected on these educational institutes. That's illegal.". Whats worst is trying to explain how this is a bad argument just gets you yelled at because you must be a "both sides are the same"-person or a secretly republican or "but we're not talking about admission here. We need to unit against the enemy with one argument then we'll figure it out later once education is not under attack" type BS arguments.
Same for tariffs and global trade rules and all the global environmental destruction, human rights violations, and local economy mayhem they caused. The argument isn't that these laws need to be tightened and reconsidered to reduce our dependency on slave labor or funding massive environmental polluters or not incentivizing the biggest consumer base on the plant to consider the diesel emissions cost of shipping massive contains full of plastic trinkets across the pacific only for 99% of them to end up in a landfill. Suddenly the argument from progressives and the left are all about the economy. The cost of TEMU for the poor American consumer and how this is the world we live in. There is nothing we can or should do to change it.
Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
The article also says:
> LG Energy Solution said Saturday that 47 of its employees were detained, 46 of them Korean. Another 250 personnel from “equipment partner companies,” most of them Korean, were also being held, it added.
So it seems there were multiple parent companies involved
If they want to do business here, then they should be forced to hire here and train as needed and that includes teaching people their preferred ways of communicating.
Somebody snitched no doubt.
> ...
>South Korea will “push forward measures to review and improve the residency status and visa system for personnel travelling to the United States.”
The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
No one ever does, by that standard. In the US, if you're a professional coming in to do some short-term thing, there's no visa process. You just fly in and get the stamp in your passport, which is technically treated as a "waiver of visa". Then you do your job and go home.
Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
Something tells me that working at a factory, even for "training" purposes is very different than attending a conference. Wikipedia confirms this:
>There are restrictions on the type of employment-related activities allowed. Meetings and conferences in relation to the travelers' profession, line of business or employer in their home country are generally acceptable, but most forms of "gainful employment" are not. There are however poorly-classifiable exceptions such as persons performing professional services in the United States for a non-U.S. employer, and persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale.[26] Performers (such as actors and musicians) who plan on performing live or taping scenes for productions in their country of origin, as well as athletes participating in an athletic event, are likewise not allowed to use the VWP for their respective engagements and are instead required to have an O or P visa prior to arrival. Foreign media representatives and journalists on assignment are required to have a nonimmigrant media (I) visa.[27]
Which US resident would not have the right to work wherever they want in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
For example, if you live in New Jersey and work in New York you are obligated to file tax returns to both states.
See also the "Jock tax", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_tax, "the jock tax is the colloquially named income tax levied against visitors to a city or state who earn money in that jurisdiction".
It is the same in the US. I do not see how having to pay taxes prevents anyone from working in a place.
Tax policy and the legal right to work somewhere are two different things. As far as I know, no non-federal jurisdiction in the US can officially say people of xyz characteristics cannot work here. At least not yet.
Also, the jock tax is just income tax.
The only reason it has a name is because it is more difficult to audit and prove tax evasion for most other people that work in various locales, but do not pay income tax they are legally required to, whereas the public nature of the work of entertainers and large incomes makes it easy for a government to prove tax was owed. Which the wikipedia link says:
>Since a state cannot afford to track the many individuals who do business on an itinerant basis, the ones targeted are usually high profile and very wealthy, namely professional athletes. Not only are the working schedules of famous sports players public, so are their salaries. The state can compute and collect the amount with very little investment of time and effort.
Building a factory as part of a multi-billion investment.
Is the administration serious about re-industrialization? If they are, then if they find visa discrepancies of foreign nationals to that, perhaps they should help the foreigners sort out the discrepancies so they can continue to help the administration achieve its goals.
I just can't understand how anyone thinks that a "Surprise! You're in jail now!" change of enforcement norms like this is a good thing.
I can't tell whether you actually think the factory was under construction and therefore the exemption you mentioned would apply, or are trying to mislead people with some sneaky wording (ie. that it was under construction at some point). In any case according to wikipedia[1] it was constructed between 2022-2024, and "full production" (of cars, presumably) began in October 2024, almost a year ago. By all accounts it wasn't "under construction".
That said, I'm sure that something as complicated as a car factory would be continually upgraded and repaired, and maybe some of that would fall under "installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale", but at the same time that shouldn't be used as an excuse for multinationals to import arbitrary amount of foreign workers to work there, bypassing the normal visa process. Moreover it's questionable whether that "installing..." excuse would even hold. The OP article mentioned that over 400 workers, mostly south korean nationals were arrested in the raids, but another source[2] suggests the factory's employment is around 400 people. If it was really installing equipment, I'd expect it to be 5-10% of the factory's workforce, not 50-100%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group_Metaplant_...
[2] https://georgia.org/press-release/hyundai-supplier-pha-creat...
As someone who has worked in IT for a few decades, I have had to go 'into production' with services while things still needed to be, and were still being, built out.
Factories are large and complex: just because one part has been deployed doesn't mean another part has. One simple possibility: they went 'into production' being able to produce X units per week, but work was being done to be able to expand to X+30% units.
There is a process, it's usually tedious but it exists. I did it for Singapore, the US and Israel. They mostly took multiple months but I never wanted to take any chances. For the US it was a "B-1 in lieu of H-1B" visa for example.
Attending a conference is something different than what these workers did. There are rules around what a "business trip" is and what is not and what "work" is.
I flew to an expo where our company had a booth and the US border patrol took me aside and started asking if I'd be selling things there or working at the booth in some other form. I told them that I am a tech going to see other companies' stuff. They then discussed something between themselves for 10 minutes and let me pass. This was 20 years ago, so them being picky is certainly not a new thing.
To make it worse, they are sending their confidential asylum paperwork to the country directly.
The South Koreans are lucky they are being sent to the correct Korea.
This isn't exactly new territory. A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
I'm sure there is more of this than in Europe than I'm aware of (food delivery is one example we're recently had a lot of focus on in the UK) but it's certainly not at the point that it's routine and expected.
How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?
Some jobs are cash jobs, the employer doesn't report the income and the employee likely doesn't either, this isn't legal for the employer or the employee, but enforcement is uneven.
For jobs with proper payroll, income reporting and employment tax withholding, it's common to 'borrow' someone else's tax id. That's not legal either of course, although the employer may be ok if they were reasonably unaware of the borrowing. If the borrowed tax id is only used for work by one person, and the withholding is close to correct (or a tax return is filed for that tax id), then taxes are being paid properly, even if they're attributed incorrectly. If the tax id is used by multiple people, then the combined income might be subject to a larger tax than if earned by multiple tax ids, and withholding is likely to be iffy (withholding tables are built around a single job).
I think I've heard of ways for someone without work authorization to get their own tax idea so they can have make properly attributed tax payments, but I don't remember the details.
Also in states like California they let undocumented immigrants get drivers licenses. They can even get bank accounts and mortgages in some states (which is basically impossible here in Canada).
Because there is no visa process for short term professional work in the US, and never has been.
> A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
That's just wrong. Virtually the entirety of the professional world travels around between industrial countries on tourist visas. Otherwise anyone going to a trade show is an "illegal" at risk of deportation.
No thanks. I'll stream the conference online.
And if you don't come from a preferred part of the world even the former can quickly be quite a process to prove it.
I interpreted that to mean they may not have permanent US immigration issues vs "being deported".
1. getting those with criminal records depoarted and not allowed back (a fair number of whom have been depoted and have violated the ban on returning)
2. getting those who've wished to settle and work jobs to leave voluntarily by buying them plane tickets and giving them cash stipends and not barring their reentry in the future
These Koreans who came to Georgia on behalf of their company will probably not have their tickets paid for by the US nor get the stipend, so yes, they are treated differently as you suggest.
after the surprise arrests executing the judicial warrant, the Korean company and government stepped forward and expressed a commitment to helping these workers, which occurred without negotiation, although you could call the flurry of phone calls after that negotiations, it was probably more like "Q; what do we need to do" "A: you need to bring them home". neither country nor the companies involved is looking to disturb relations, though perhaps this is adjacent to a tariff negotiation.
Relations are disturbed. You can take that to the bank. The SK government just stepped up for their citizens as they should. But US/SK relations just got dinged.
If you think the current administration is giving cash stipends to anyone it's been working to deport as part of its dragnet, I have a very large bridge to sell you.
You're only sent to a third country if you insist on not being deported back to your home country.
Where are the goalposts? Are you suggesting that some people found to be working illegally shouldn’t be deported? You should listen to this excellent podcast by the NYT about how our “norms” of non-enforcement of our immigration laws has consistently been contrary to what politicians told the public: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... Politicians have been baiting and switching the public on immigration since 1965.
Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.
Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.
Deterring irregular economic migration? If the government adopts a non-formal policy of not prosecuting non-criminal non-violent workers, it's implicitly saying it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble. You might think this is fine because free movement of labor is good or whatever, but that's not what most Americans want.
I feel like we should be honest - Americans are perfectly comfortable picking and choosing when laws get enforced. We do it all the time. We don’t treat every law as sacred. Enforcement is selective in a million other areas, from antitrust to wage theft to pollution. Nobody insists those must be pursued to the letter every single time.
So why single out immigration as the one area where “the law is the law” trumps any rational or humane appeal? It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference. One that just happens to line up with race and class anxieties rather than some universal devotion to the rule of law.
Similarly with immigration, the purpose of the legal formalities is to constrain immigration volume. If you think those volumes are not high enough, you can advocate to increase them. In 60% of polling this issue, Gallup has found that the support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34%, and was under 10% from 1965-2000.
As to the rationales for limiting the volume of immigration, they are two-fold. One, people don't buy the argument that immigrants are good for them economically. Economists have lots of theories about public policy that people don't buy, like the idea of getting rid of corporate taxes: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Two, people have cultural preferences and want to limit the scope of cultural change. That's a perfectly legitimate rationale for limiting immigration. People in the Bay Area would be pretty upset if internal migration made Mountain View culturally more like Alabama. People in Wyoming would be upset if immigration made their town more like New Jersey. And those are people in the same country!
You are defending a criminal.
- it is not normal for the military to be sent to cities and locations that are run by political enemies to round up people
- putting people in concentration camps (that's what they are) is not normal.
- deporting people without due process is not normal
- using the military for policing duties is not normal
You're a lawyer. All of this should horrify you.
The USA was on the right path with decreasing immigration by making its neighbors more wealthy. Guess who ended that? The Trump regime creates problems which then only the Trump regime can solve, which is a game older than politics. And you're falling for it, hook, line and sinker.
For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
> The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.
The US is an outlier in relying wholesale on an illegal workforce without representation and without healthcare or access to the legal system to keep their economy afloat.
> For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.
Sorry, and given that this is a point of law, you are utterly wrong on this, which makes me wonder what else you are wrong about where you are so confident.
https://www.vera.org/news/what-does-due-process-mean-for-imm...
Have a read, and maybe adjust your priors a bit.
> Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.
You keep saying that, here and elsewhere. But it just isn't true.
> As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
That is very much not true and you know it. The biggest problem with US immigration law is that it is (1) ridiculously complex (2) dealt with by understaffed entities (3) kept in place because industry and agriculture more or less depend on it and (4) effectively makes the country a vast amount of money.
If you're so horrified by it then you can blame your parents for picking a country to emigrate to that was soft on emigration. You can't pin this on the emigrants, many of whom were in the USA well before you were even born.
Note that what I said was that most americans do not support "it's fine to people to violate immigration laws and come here to work, as long as you don't cause trouble". That's not the same as "ICE raids as currently implemented" or even "don't offer current pathway to citizenship for current undocumented workers".
Also, you can’t lump non-voters in with the immigration proponents. Multiple studies have found that Trump would’ve won by an even larger margin if everyone would have voted: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec... https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2...
That's because Congress has been promising "measured enforcement" for 60 years, but in that time the foreign-born population has ballooned from 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century. The goal is big, visible enforcement actions that will disincentivize people from immigrating above the limits set forth in the law.
I'm a foreigner myself. Even though I grew up in the U.S. since age 5, the cultural difference between me and my wife (whose family immigrated here from Britain before the American Revolution) are stark. I think most Americans have a hard time understanding just how foreign their foreign-born acquaintances are, because many of the differences are below the surface: https://opengecko.com/geckoview/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/C....
This is the symptom of the underlying desire certain industries have for cheap workers who can’t complain about working conditions. Those politicians are responding to that demand, not just acting in a vacuum. That’s why it’s almost unheard of for employers to suffer penalties and why you see this cycle in states like Texas where people talk tough about immigrants but every time someone suggests employers be required to use e-verify the Republican leadership kills the bill due to the impact on construction and agriculture:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...
H1-B reform should be table stakes and simple for this administration to tackle, since they “don’t give a shit” (a direct quote from VPOTUS) about laws and the legislative process.
If the administration actually cared about making it easier for foreign companies to invest in domestic production capacity, they could accomplish it overnight.
Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no?
To counter-quip: what is the goal? I genuinely don't have any idea in this circumstance how the reactionary right wing adherence to ideology does anything but harm the country they claim they're trying to improve.
I mean, do you want Hyundai to build factories in the US? Everyone seems to claim so. Yet here is a Hyundai factory that seems likely to be shuttered or delayed for years because of... ideology?
Please listen to the NYT podcast I linked. In 1950, immigration had been severely restricted for three decades, dropping the foreign-born population from 14.7% in 1910 to 5.4% in 1960. Then, Congress enacted Hart-Celler in 1965, but promised that it would not increase immigration. According to Gallup, public support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34% since that time, and from 1965 to 2000, was under 10%. But in that timeframe, the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century.
So no, continuing to ignore the immigration laws Americans voted for and have consistently supported is not a good prior.
This is going to be exaggerated by the decline in the domestic birth rate over that same period. It’s widely recognized that the U.S. has avoided the aging population effect seen throughout the advanced economies solely due to allowing more working-age immigrants.
When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
A shoddy way and shortsighted to deal with companies which are investing in your country.
Why would you suspect that a company flying in hundreds of laborers can’t afford a lawyer to give the same guidance your HR company gave? It’s tax evasion and cost cutting.
No comments yet
A group of house reps have been trying to fix this issue since 2012, but have never gotten it through committee.
>When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
Were you actually there for "meetings"? or actually doing stuff like writing reports?
On a conference trip to Italy, they basically asked me nothing. "Where are you going? Ok, next." Hardly any security either. You even had to walk through a gift shop to get to the customs area. It was nice.
Trust me, no one in my role thought travelling once a quarter through EWR was a privilege. Haven’t had to visit for ten years and will never have to again, thank goodness.