There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. Eg. Hearing of cases where people from my home country were sent home when asked on entry "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.
This is definitely going to have effects for other companies in the USA. Eg. TSMC in the USA is currently being bootstrapped by a Taiwanese workforce. A similar raid there would just shut down the whole TSMC in USA project. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/50...
The USA might as well put up a 'closed for business' by now.
Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.
How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?
> Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS
Lots of talk, but how much action?
People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out economically. It's like a repeat of Covid but only for the USA, and I expect it to negatively impact large corporations more than small businesses.
Greenland wasn’t a joke. Nothing that is said is a joke. It’s all real. If there isn’t push back of a substantial amount it will happen. With some pushback or indication that effort will be required personally on the part of the president then it gets delayed or conveniently forgotten.
Who is a trust worthy partner? If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other. It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other
"Confused" or they're incentivized to meet a quota to hang on to their jobs, and in many cases are themselves explicitly motivated by racial animus, and are fine with trampling over the law?
The surface details are irrelevant deportation numbers are below Obamas. These are scattered operations in search of two things roughly. The purpose is to have a paramilitary operation directly lead by the Oval Office without buffers - remaining in power extralegally and without elections whether they are held or not. When you need to arrest and harass anyone without a warrant, the easiest thing to do is claim they are non-citizens. Countless citizens have been arrested under this pretext already. And to be able to extract wealth extralegally. Every act falls under these two concepts, and Project 2025 was a pre textual conduit for this that uses political ideology as a path to feudal dictatorship.
Visa just gives the officer the option to let you in. He can deny you entry virtually at will. CBP officer is god at the border. I have been temporarily denied entry even as US citizen, until they checked with their superiors for a few hours and found out they could not in fact do that.
Odds are they just wanted that person gone and the real reason can't be spoken out loud.
> He can deny you entry virtually at will. CBP officer is god at the border.
Do you know what the actual laws/regulations are for this stuff? My understanding is that there are in fact valid and invalid reasons for denying entry to a valid visa holder, but that the valid reasons are in practice broad and subjective enough that a CBP officer could nearly always justify their decision (something like "I wasn't convinced they would abide by the terms of their visa").
The reason, even in the article, is clearly stated - immigration without a valid immigrant visa. It's a valid reason and no amount of reddit upvotes over "iTs DuAl InTeNt!11!!" makes a difference.
There are just two kinds of US visas: non-immigrant and immigrant. You are not allowed to immigrate on a non-immigrant visa. "Dual intent" applies only to the issuing of a visa: by default a non-immigrant visa can only be issued to someone who has proven the lack of an immigration intent (which is assumed by default, so one has to prove the lack of thereof in order to get a visa) but there is an exception for some non-immigrant visas, which can be issued without such a proof. This is all "dual intent" means. Not "it's an immigrant visa if I intend it to be one!". These visas are still non-immigrant and carry all the restrictions of other non-immigrant visas i.e. they don't allow immigration. So while it's fine to have an intention to immigrate with such a visa, it's illegal to actually immigrate. This is not some esoteric knowledge and can be found within 15 minutes of internet search and reading.
I imagine the protagonist of the article said something that showed he has immigrated, at least the article describes him as an immigrant - he lives in the US and has nothing to come to in the home country. Thus the reason for denial of entry.
"confused" is a pretty generous reading of the situation. They just don't want anyone here from outside the US. Or anyone who isn't white, really. If they don't have a justification for kicking someone out they'll make one up or just use it as a way of scaring other people. Too many hispanic people are being picked up outside their immigration court hearings or lawyer's offices while trying to immigrate "the right way" for it to be confusion or coincidence.
> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow.
Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).
So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
Ya, its a good bet this is what happened to the South Koreans on site. Since this was under construction, and the construction industry contractors and sub-contractors are known for using lots of undocumented immigrant labor, ICE was probably there to catch them.
ICE has been widely accused of working on internal quotas. It's likely that they just don't care. They found foreigners working, so into the pens they go. The fact that these are engineers brought in to supervise construction doesn't enter into the picture.
That’s not an accurate description of the case you linked. No reason was given for the denial. The subject of the story was asked about work by the immigration officers but nothing indicates that he was removed from the country because of work. He seems to have been removed because they wanted to remove him, not because of innocent confusion about his visa.
Orders given to ICE at times have been to just independently go out and find people "you know where to find them". I don't think they so much do, any given agent isn't some super detective.
> "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.
Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.
Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
This is not a technical problem at all, the law is not that stupid. Non-immigrant visa means you have an intent to return to your home country at some point, it's not like you can't say "I live here" despite actually living there..
> "One of the agents can be heard telling workers they had a search warrant for the entire site and asked that construction “be ceased immediately.”"
It's a $7.6 billion factory that produces exclusively electric vehicles, employs "1,400+" (ultimately 8,500 [b]) and is claimed as the "largest economic project in Georgia history". By way of background—here's the wiki,
So, there's supposedly all these millions of 'illegals' working everywhere.
So someone hired them. What business managers and leaders are being charged with hiring illegal workers? Do we even have a single manager/leader/owner charged?
That’s the sad part of all this that enrages me, we deport a dishwasher or a roofer but the criminals getting rich off of their exploitation get off free in virtually all cases.
Locally, we had an HSI raid on a business that had 10+ illegal underage workers living in an illegal bunkhouse built in the back of their building.
No criminal charges for the owner or any managers, no fines that have been reported for the numerous amount of code violations in their flophouse, and every day I drive by the building on my way to work and a 100k truck + very expensive boat are parked out front.
It’s an affront to justice to see these crooks getting rich and laughing to the bank!
Tyson Chicken was literally giving their workers printed instructions on how to fill out tax/work/other paperwork if they weren't legal immigrants.
When reporters asked DHS about that when they were crowing about their "roundup" of 900 or so workers. "That's not part of the scope of this. We don't have any plans to investigate this".
For all the people who crow about legality... overstaying a visa, etc., is typically a misdemeanor. Aiding someone in staying in the country without authorization? Felony. "Tough on crime", my ass.
> That’s the sad part of all this that enrages me, we deport a dishwasher or a roofer but the criminals getting rich off of their exploitation get off free in virtually all cases.
It's a sign for how thoroughly defeated (or captured) the "opposition" party is in the United States that they are incapable of adopting a coherent position about this exact situation.
How are we letting the 1% get away with this? They give tacit approval to immigrants to break the law in order to work in the United States, creating an unprivileged underclass that they can abuse. Then, when some kind of enforcement happens, the capital class suffers no consequences and the poor workers are inhumanely rounded up and deported.
Criticizing the wealthy is truly the third rail in American politics. Other than vehement support of Israel, supporting the rich at the expense of the downtrodden is the only assailable, bipartisan political "norm" remaining.
It is actually even worse than this! Owners intentionally hire undocumented workers knowing they'll be able to exploit them because they can't call enforcement for safety or labor violations because of the risk they put them in. Being able to use ICE to resolve any brewing labor disputes or unionization efforts is a sweet perk too.
And they love this shit btw. It's not just cold opportunistic use of the incentives and systems they find. They love the unjust power it gives them in their personal domains and over the people around them. It's why they so reliably support trump in the end. They want serfs and he wants them to have serfs.
Under the pretext of incompetence is the administration simply engaging in destroying the US economy to create a fortress situation in collapse that allows implementation of military jurisdiction? Clearly, there's a program running with an endgame.
I'm less sure that there is an endgame. Seems more likely to me that it is being run as a reality TV show where the idea is to maintain a high level of viewer engagement.
And no-one is thinking that the only reason reality tv shows don't end in disaster is because it is a tv show, i.e. an artificial and contained/constrained environment.
The implementation of fascism was both across the board (legislation, edict, mass-firings, academic overthrow, consolidation, regulation, financial, trade, etc) and highly coordinated in a radically sped-up timeframe that had been planned by hundreds of people carefully sequestered in secrecy that launched day-one. That's not reality TV in the slightest. It's revolution or counter-revolution. M Gessen in contrast states it took Putin 10 years to do what Trump did in 6 months.
Not only is there a carefully designed endgame, it's so well hidden in pretexts within pretexts, that journalists, opposition, even political theorists can't for certain declare it, except that it's overthrow.
1. Chaos - it’s good for kleptocracy, and is a denial-of-service attack on our attention
2. The appearance of something being done. Dems represent the status quo, people are sick of the status quo. Something appearing to happen is better than the status quo for a lot of people. Biden deported ~2x more people in 2024 than trump has so far. ICE raids are a performance.
3. Like everything else they do, it’s a shakedown. You want protection from the raids and the chaos? Come kiss the ring of your local maga don.
I agree, but add that the mass expansion of ICE with bounty hunters, freelancers from the white nationalists with fewer deportations indicates that's freikorps into SS quasi-state paramilitary outside the legal checks.
It’s a reign of terror. Nobody knows who or what will be next on the chopping block. The only hope is to lick Trump’s boots to get an exemption. His gang practically holds the whole country hostage for ransom. Their tactics are working (in their own perception), why would they need an endgame?
It wouldn’t surprise me if they were overly aggressive in what they used visas for. It’s also possible they hired a low quality firm to do their visas (some of the big 5s subcontract to some terrible sub tiers) and they simply did the paperwork wrong.
Similar situation have happened to my coworkers when going on foreign assignment.
The ESTA VISA waiver which is the easiest form of entry to the USA for close allies like South Korea explicitly allows business activities. The idea is that it's meant to be easy to come to the USA for consultation, conferences, trade shows etc. The most basic VISA for countries like South Korea explicitly enables this.
If they came to the USA legally it's hard to understand how they didn't have the right to do things like consult on the build-out of the new factory.
If anyone wants to argue the ESTA doesn't allow this (despite the explicit wording that it does) you're basically saying no more international business conferences and no more business trips to USA offices without a very heavy weight multiyear immigration process.
Which is fine if you want to come out and suggest that. It'll kill what's left of Vegas, the airlines, conference centers, etc. It would also harm any international business in the USA but if you really really want to go around saying "ICE are right to detain the South Koreans here" I'm OK with that. I'll make sure that people from my home country understand that the USA is completely closed for business.
As an American, I can't imagine why anyone would risk coming here for a conference unless it was truly make-or-break. A clerical error in your visa could land you in jail indefinitely in Somalia. The risk/reward is way off.
The factory was still under construction. I suspect that a (legally entered) South Korean management team hired local subcontractors without understanding the oversight that would be required, and the subcontractors hired (non-Korean) undocumented aliens as often happens in construction.
Whistleblowers and local reporting [0] indicate lax safety standards in the construction of the plant, with three dead by May. OSHA has opened at least fifteen investigations into the construction site [1]. The latest story on OSHA investigations is dated today [2], and it mentions that OSHA did not receive reports of several accidents. That might well be because some of the injured were undocumented workers. That recent report mentions Glovis EV Logistics America by name and two unidentified subcontractors as targets of the OSHA investigation.
I would not be at all surprised if OSHA didn't have ICE raid this place to shut it down before more people got hurt.
ICE doesn't have the strongest record when it comes to paperwork either. It's possible Hyundai screwed up (and the slap on the wrist they got in 2022 isn't much of a deterrent), but it's also possible that ICE responded to someone suggesting Hyundai might have illegals amongst its workforce by indiscriminately detaining all foreign nationals there...
But yes, raiding that sure would be another massive hit, further helping destroy America's reputation & isolating us from the world. Which based on all evidence & actions, is what this administration is doing: destroying the US empire's soft power as fast as possible. With Gabbard working basically for the opposition to make sure foreign influence campaigns & meddling to have free reign to run amock as they please, as well.
Comment was meant honestly (deterring onshoring), but yes I was being sarcastic about the Foxconn thing, for the purposes of highlighting how honest/effective these efforts have been.
How resilient is a nation state? This is a question I keep asking myself. I was kind of surprised how the USA bounced back from Trump I. But I really wonder if there is going to be a similar recovery this time around. The amount of outright destruction is overwhelming. So, you raid the Hyundai facility. And then in a few years time you wonder why foreign companies no longer want to invest into factories on US soil. The knock on effect of all of this stuff is enormous and the consequences are going to be many years in the coming. And yet, it all just happens, there is no meaningful pushback against any of this.
this may well be like the downfall of rome. slowly but surely, the country will sink into irrelevance (ok, maybe not completely irrelevant, but certainly less than now).
i think the reason there is no pushback is that things are happening too fast at an unprecedented scale that we can't even envision the consequences, let alone predict them. we are completely unprepared for this and by the time we can figure out how to deal with it, or even stop it, it will be to late.
it is also possible that many believe that this will stop by itself with the next president, and so there is no point in trying to stop things now. in a way i actually agree with that. walking in unity but realizing your error and changing course is a better choice than risking a civil war.
civil war sounds alarmist, and maybe it is, but i fear that without consensus on what is the right course of action, worse without consensus that the current trajectory is bad, i don't see any other outcome. before anything can be done, a consensus on what that should be is simply necessary. and unfortunately, it should be obvious that there is no such consensus now. if there were, we wouldn't even have this controversy.
It took the Roman Republic less than 30 years to go from the Gracchi brothers incident (133BC) to the first consulship of Gaius Marius in 107BC, a divisive populist who was elected consul an unprecedented 7 times. From then on, we have the Social war in 91BC (effectively a civil war in Italy), Sulla's civil wars (against Marius) culminating in his dictatorship in 82BC, and ultimately Julius Caesar's civil wars culminating in his dictatorship in 49BC, which marks the end of the Republic.
An incident like the Gracchi brothers' populist power grab, which led to the first significant outbreak of political violence in Rome in centuries, was not immediately transformative but it did sow the seeds of conflict.
I personally think Trump, and especially Jan 6th, is the Gracchi brothers moment of the USA.
My optimistic interpretation is slightly different. So far the US is still a democracy with a President wo doesn’t take the law too seriously.
On the other side every democracy looses a bit focus over time and laws to keep government clean get softened, IMHO.
But let’s say the next election happens and the opposition will be voted in (if not, god knows where this ends) , then there will be a government with a state apparatus in tatas. They have the burden but also the opportunity to rethink how things are supposed to work and can make changes that most previous governments did not even thought possible.
Maybe, I don’t know. But maybe this slightly painful time is part of a renewal process that in the end will be helpful.
And Trump of all people makes it involuntary possible.
The US nuked Japan in the 1940s and only a short few years later were close allies.
Similarly, Germany was the de facto enemy of the Ally aligned world in the 40s and only a few short decades later best friends with most.
You can identify countless similar atrocities in US history after which relations stabilized within a few years.
Most in life are short term oriented and it's rare that these things produce lasting effects on perception.
Does anyone care or even remotely think about what Bush did as president 20 years ago? Some politically oriented and historically minded folks yes, 99% no.
They really have to be long lasting and persistent transgressions to produce generational distrust e.g. Japan invading China/Korea many times over the last few hundred years.
However the new gen seems far less concerned about this too.
Given Trump's larger than life character/ego/presence, it's more likely that anything he does will be attributed to him instead of the country as a whole. Which makes his actions perhaps even less impactful than a more neutral presenting president doing the same.
> The US nuked Japan in the 1940s and only a short few years later were close allies.
I don't think that's a great example. A few years after the bombs, Douglas MacArthur was ruling Japan. They didn't have much of a choice. Japan was occupied for almost 7 years, had their constitution rewritten to make them essentially reliant on the US for security.
Those two examples relied on heavy investment over many years by the worlds sole superpower to bounce back. See the Marshall Plan and MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan. These things do not happen automatically, and unlike those examples, there doesn’t seem to be a rich, well-run superpower waiting in the wings to lift anyone back up. I’m sure some relations will normalize post-47 but economic might and attractiveness to the world may not.
The US military physically occupied and restructured the governments of Japan and Germany. A better example might be Vietnam, which has become a US partner but it took a couple generations.
It took about 50 years before India started to trust that relations with America could be positive. Then it took a lot of trust and concessions on both sides to strengthen that over the next 20 years under Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden - all of whom went out of their way to court India as an ally and a counterweight to China.
Then Trump decided his shitty Nobel Prize mattered more and threw 20 years of hard work in the dump.
The consensus in India is that America is perfidious. You claim that countries have goldfish memories, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Indo-American relations. It was immensely hard to build this relationship and easy to burn it.
But who knows? Maybe you have an insight into how Indian people think.
No, uncertainty and stability matter in business, a lot. Not that Trump is the reason we lack political stability. It’s the two party system Washington warned us about, boaz and jachin. But that lack of stability is arguably pretty stable itself. American dynamism has pros and cons. Much of today’s context goes back to political and trade decisions made back in the 90s.
> I was kind of surprised how the USA bounced back from Trump I. But I really wonder if there is going to be a similar recovery this time around. The amount of outright destruction is overwhelming.
It is as resilient as the people (in power?) want it to be:
> To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
Why is it that every high-brow discussion of US politics soon ends up quoting one of the founding fathers? As an outsider, I think the fundamental issue in the US political system is that there doesn't seem to have been any new ideas since the eighteenth century. It's just a bunch of rhetoricians quoting the same ancient texts, as though the US faces exactly the same problems it was facing two and a half centuries ago.
James Madison has been dead for a while. The supreme court has so far failed to check Trump's power and congress and the senate are in his pocket. If there ever was a time that those institutions should have acted in the interest of the nation rather than in the interest of the parties then a while ago would have been fine. Now it is late, if not too late. For all that its worth Madison's writings are irrelevant, what matters is acts and there are very few of those.
Hopefully foreign companies understand the nuance that Trump is a perfect storm of having been a reality show celebrity for several decades, born into money, bad upbringing, personality type that's immune to shame.
Others trying to be him have not been able to replicate his success electorally. Lowest common denominator celebrity is key to his success.
Theres a good case to be made that he's an aberration and there won't be another demagogue after him to so effectively capture his audience and survive the corruption and incompetence that follows.
He has potential heirs that are smarter and more disciplined than him, but ironically that path doesn't lead you to a life of pop culture/paparazzi/TV celebrity.
Thats not to say we don't deserve to have lost significant trust and respect. But if you take the long view, it's not an extrapolation of this.
That would all be acceptable if the checks and balances would work as advertised. The fact that they do not - I think that is safe to conclude now - makes this a completely different level issue.
The long view is that it's clear that the voters can be trusted to vote someone like him in twice, and the Republican party can be trusted to completely emasculate itself to maintain a petty fraud's cult of personality.
I think the flip side is that whilst Trump's personal quirks and appeal might be unique, half the American polity unquestioningly does his bidding and endorses his insanity and it's not like his positions on the rest of the world are particularly unpopular or institutional trust and credible business-friendly conservatives are going to magically appear out of the ether when he's gone.
The long view might not look like "Trump's boot trying to stomp on you forever", but it doesn't look like "America is a trustworthy ally, especially in business" either. It isn't going to stop the world from suckling on the US money teat, but it is going to make them a lot more selective about if and when they do so.
In a bizarre plot twist, the US is gradually easing into the very same role of a cult-personality, unreliable, non free trade State that they've been bitching about for almost a century now.
> I was kind of surprised how the USA bounced back from Trump I.
what'd we bounce into? what did we bounce back from? what effects are you talking about specifically.
I work in aerospace and the sentiment was exactly opposite. People cheered both Trump elections and were dead terrified of a blue win ruining contracts and business.
I don't ask because I am overtly political, I ask because I think it's fascinating that both sides seem to think we're a stone's throw from the apocalypse.. which very much seems to be projected onto the voter base on purpose..
If there's a dichotomy that I can't really reconcile politically, it's the fundamental idea that people coming here is bad. That we cannot allow anyone else in. We can't even allow things from other countries to come here.
The effects of this insular isolationism can only be explained by simplicity that doesn't hold up in reality: things will be more prosperous for us if we keep what we have to ourselves. But in truth growth is growth. To build prosperity, we need more production, which means more people. Perhaps your share gets bigger, but the pot gets smaller.
> dead terrified of a blue win ruining contracts and business
This is expected behavior, but not to be taken seriously as a moral argument. Preserving liberty and rule of law vs preserving money, so hard to choose...
> I think it's fascinating that both sides seem to think we're a stone's throw from the apocalypse.. which very much seems to be projected onto the voter base on purpose..
Projected by whom, by what means, and to what end?
Consider that both sides may have legitimate reasons to be concerned with this term that didn't apply to Trump's first term, and that what you see isn't simply some form of mass-manipulation or "projection onto the voter base."
I dont understand why you are downvoted. It seems like people have a real knee-jerk reaction to anything contrary to their world view which is exactly what you are commenting on.
All most all the replies to your comment have nothing to do with the substance of what you said. The reality is that the us system is predominantly run by bureaucrats which make sweeping changes hard. This is a feature of the system.
This means that whatever party is in charge will have a harder time enacting the crazy.
I never understood the “my side”/“us vs them” from people. There is only one side and we are all on it.
1. If a democrat is elected, they will take all their guns (their campaign rhetoric keeps saying this will happen, but it continues being no part of democratic presidential campaign messaging, and hasn’t happened the times they warned it definitely would—this one’s fake)
2. Election security. But republicans keep getting into positions to investigate this and either not doing it (because they know it’s BS) or doing it and finding only a handful of mostly-accidental cases that don’t favor either party. Also fake.
3. Leftward shift around acceptance of non-standard sexual and social norms. This one’s real. Whether it’s a problem or just… fine and not worth worrying about? That’s another matter.
4. A bunch of totally wacky shit like litter boxes in classrooms. Fake.
5. Healthcare prices. Real! Democrats also worry about this.
6. Socialism. LOL we’re not remotely near it, very nearly nobody elected in the Democratic Party is left of center-right in most of the rest of our peer states, on economic issues and social safety nets and such. Fake issue.
7. Illegal immigrants increasing the crime rate (fake) and taking our jobs or driving down wages (true, with an asterisk that the effects are complicated, but sure, true) and bringing in drugs (you want citizen drug mules, they cross the border easier, or to just use shipping containers or cargo trucks entering the ordinary way with some greased palms as you can do crazy volume that way, this is fake)
8. Crime being out of control. Broadly, fake. (“But police stats could be…” yeah we have victimization surveys too, people study this and already thought of your objection. Again, fake)
9. Colleges being too liberal. Look at all that “fake” stuff above. Yeah gee I wonder why, dude. Real, but wholly self-inflicted.
10. Rampant fraud in social programs, by the people receiving the aid. This is extremely well-studied. Fake.
11. The budget deficit. Except Republicans are even worse for the budget than democrats, over the last 40 years. By, like, quite a bit. Mostly because they think tax cuts magically pay for themselves, plus Bush’s wars. They mocked the shit out of Gore for talking sense on this topic, and elected cut-taxes-and-spend Dubya. So. Real issue but they are extremely confused about who to vote for to improve it.
There are more but you get the idea. Yes, Fox News and Mark Levin and all them have convinced republicans the world is going to end if democrats win elections. But it’s largely based on completely made-up shit.
Left as an exercise for the reader to make a list for Democrats’ side. Nb how much of its worry about Republicans causing harm by trying to address the fake issues above. Probably most of it. And that’s a real thing that happens, to be worried about.
Readit News
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-w...
This is definitely going to have effects for other companies in the USA. Eg. TSMC in the USA is currently being bootstrapped by a Taiwanese workforce. A similar raid there would just shut down the whole TSMC in USA project. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/50...
Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.
How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?
I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.
Lots of talk, but how much action?
People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.
What does this mean? Like “the nationalists” would start taking away domain names of people they don’t like or something?
https://newrepublic.com/article/196154/stephen-miller-erupts...
- what a given visa allows
- whether or not someone is a naturalized citizen
- whether or not someone is a citizen by birth
and all kinds of things that seem like they should be core, table stakes knowledge of the job they are supposedly doing.
I'm sure ICE would be the first to point this out in court -- so it's kind of ironic having to point this out here.
Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.
Odds are they just wanted that person gone and the real reason can't be spoken out loud.
Of course, what the law is doesn’t really matter anymore.
Do you know what the actual laws/regulations are for this stuff? My understanding is that there are in fact valid and invalid reasons for denying entry to a valid visa holder, but that the valid reasons are in practice broad and subjective enough that a CBP officer could nearly always justify their decision (something like "I wasn't convinced they would abide by the terms of their visa").
There are just two kinds of US visas: non-immigrant and immigrant. You are not allowed to immigrate on a non-immigrant visa. "Dual intent" applies only to the issuing of a visa: by default a non-immigrant visa can only be issued to someone who has proven the lack of an immigration intent (which is assumed by default, so one has to prove the lack of thereof in order to get a visa) but there is an exception for some non-immigrant visas, which can be issued without such a proof. This is all "dual intent" means. Not "it's an immigrant visa if I intend it to be one!". These visas are still non-immigrant and carry all the restrictions of other non-immigrant visas i.e. they don't allow immigration. So while it's fine to have an intention to immigrate with such a visa, it's illegal to actually immigrate. This is not some esoteric knowledge and can be found within 15 minutes of internet search and reading.
I imagine the protagonist of the article said something that showed he has immigrated, at least the article describes him as an immigrant - he lives in the US and has nothing to come to in the home country. Thus the reason for denial of entry.
911 was an inside job! Or maybe the us of a had an oopsie.
ICE folks seem to be sometimes confused about citizen versus non-citizen:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...
* https://globalnews.ca/news/11309378/kenny-laynez-ice-detaine...
Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).
So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
Take a drive through the streets of Duluth and you will see more signs in Korean than English.
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Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.
Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
It's a $7.6 billion factory that produces exclusively electric vehicles, employs "1,400+" (ultimately 8,500 [b]) and is claimed as the "largest economic project in Georgia history". By way of background—here's the wiki,
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group_Metaplant_...
And (lots) more background from IEEE Spectrum (someone had recently posted to HN),
[b] https://spectrum.ieee.org/hyundai-metaplant-georgia ("Hyundai’s Metaplant Seeks Hard-Working Robots")
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So someone hired them. What business managers and leaders are being charged with hiring illegal workers? Do we even have a single manager/leader/owner charged?
Locally, we had an HSI raid on a business that had 10+ illegal underage workers living in an illegal bunkhouse built in the back of their building.
No criminal charges for the owner or any managers, no fines that have been reported for the numerous amount of code violations in their flophouse, and every day I drive by the building on my way to work and a 100k truck + very expensive boat are parked out front.
It’s an affront to justice to see these crooks getting rich and laughing to the bank!
When reporters asked DHS about that when they were crowing about their "roundup" of 900 or so workers. "That's not part of the scope of this. We don't have any plans to investigate this".
For all the people who crow about legality... overstaying a visa, etc., is typically a misdemeanor. Aiding someone in staying in the country without authorization? Felony. "Tough on crime", my ass.
It's a sign for how thoroughly defeated (or captured) the "opposition" party is in the United States that they are incapable of adopting a coherent position about this exact situation.
How are we letting the 1% get away with this? They give tacit approval to immigrants to break the law in order to work in the United States, creating an unprivileged underclass that they can abuse. Then, when some kind of enforcement happens, the capital class suffers no consequences and the poor workers are inhumanely rounded up and deported.
Criticizing the wealthy is truly the third rail in American politics. Other than vehement support of Israel, supporting the rich at the expense of the downtrodden is the only assailable, bipartisan political "norm" remaining.
And they love this shit btw. It's not just cold opportunistic use of the incentives and systems they find. They love the unjust power it gives them in their personal domains and over the people around them. It's why they so reliably support trump in the end. They want serfs and he wants them to have serfs.
Trump's own donors systematically hire illegals:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/uline-mexica...
And no-one is thinking that the only reason reality tv shows don't end in disaster is because it is a tv show, i.e. an artificial and contained/constrained environment.
Not only is there a carefully designed endgame, it's so well hidden in pretexts within pretexts, that journalists, opposition, even political theorists can't for certain declare it, except that it's overthrow.
1. Chaos - it’s good for kleptocracy, and is a denial-of-service attack on our attention
2. The appearance of something being done. Dems represent the status quo, people are sick of the status quo. Something appearing to happen is better than the status quo for a lot of people. Biden deported ~2x more people in 2024 than trump has so far. ICE raids are a performance.
3. Like everything else they do, it’s a shakedown. You want protection from the raids and the chaos? Come kiss the ring of your local maga don.
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https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
It wouldn’t surprise me if they were overly aggressive in what they used visas for. It’s also possible they hired a low quality firm to do their visas (some of the big 5s subcontract to some terrible sub tiers) and they simply did the paperwork wrong.
Similar situation have happened to my coworkers when going on foreign assignment.
If they came to the USA legally it's hard to understand how they didn't have the right to do things like consult on the build-out of the new factory.
If anyone wants to argue the ESTA doesn't allow this (despite the explicit wording that it does) you're basically saying no more international business conferences and no more business trips to USA offices without a very heavy weight multiyear immigration process.
Which is fine if you want to come out and suggest that. It'll kill what's left of Vegas, the airlines, conference centers, etc. It would also harm any international business in the USA but if you really really want to go around saying "ICE are right to detain the South Koreans here" I'm OK with that. I'll make sure that people from my home country understand that the USA is completely closed for business.
As an American, I can't imagine why anyone would risk coming here for a conference unless it was truly make-or-break. A clerical error in your visa could land you in jail indefinitely in Somalia. The risk/reward is way off.
Whistleblowers and local reporting [0] indicate lax safety standards in the construction of the plant, with three dead by May. OSHA has opened at least fifteen investigations into the construction site [1]. The latest story on OSHA investigations is dated today [2], and it mentions that OSHA did not receive reports of several accidents. That might well be because some of the injured were undocumented workers. That recent report mentions Glovis EV Logistics America by name and two unidentified subcontractors as targets of the OSHA investigation.
I would not be at all surprised if OSHA didn't have ICE raid this place to shut it down before more people got hurt.
[0] https://www.wjcl.com/article/hyundai-bryan-county-constructi...
[1] https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a...
[2] https://www.gpb.org/news/2024/09/05/osha-investigating-one-h...
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/what-happened-to-foxco...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38518446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392169
But yes, raiding that sure would be another massive hit, further helping destroy America's reputation & isolating us from the world. Which based on all evidence & actions, is what this administration is doing: destroying the US empire's soft power as fast as possible. With Gabbard working basically for the opposition to make sure foreign influence campaigns & meddling to have free reign to run amock as they please, as well.
i think the reason there is no pushback is that things are happening too fast at an unprecedented scale that we can't even envision the consequences, let alone predict them. we are completely unprepared for this and by the time we can figure out how to deal with it, or even stop it, it will be to late.
it is also possible that many believe that this will stop by itself with the next president, and so there is no point in trying to stop things now. in a way i actually agree with that. walking in unity but realizing your error and changing course is a better choice than risking a civil war.
civil war sounds alarmist, and maybe it is, but i fear that without consensus on what is the right course of action, worse without consensus that the current trajectory is bad, i don't see any other outcome. before anything can be done, a consensus on what that should be is simply necessary. and unfortunately, it should be obvious that there is no such consensus now. if there were, we wouldn't even have this controversy.
An incident like the Gracchi brothers' populist power grab, which led to the first significant outbreak of political violence in Rome in centuries, was not immediately transformative but it did sow the seeds of conflict.
I personally think Trump, and especially Jan 6th, is the Gracchi brothers moment of the USA.
On the other side every democracy looses a bit focus over time and laws to keep government clean get softened, IMHO.
But let’s say the next election happens and the opposition will be voted in (if not, god knows where this ends) , then there will be a government with a state apparatus in tatas. They have the burden but also the opportunity to rethink how things are supposed to work and can make changes that most previous governments did not even thought possible.
Maybe, I don’t know. But maybe this slightly painful time is part of a renewal process that in the end will be helpful. And Trump of all people makes it involuntary possible.
Similarly, Germany was the de facto enemy of the Ally aligned world in the 40s and only a few short decades later best friends with most.
You can identify countless similar atrocities in US history after which relations stabilized within a few years.
Most in life are short term oriented and it's rare that these things produce lasting effects on perception.
Does anyone care or even remotely think about what Bush did as president 20 years ago? Some politically oriented and historically minded folks yes, 99% no.
They really have to be long lasting and persistent transgressions to produce generational distrust e.g. Japan invading China/Korea many times over the last few hundred years.
However the new gen seems far less concerned about this too.
Given Trump's larger than life character/ego/presence, it's more likely that anything he does will be attributed to him instead of the country as a whole. Which makes his actions perhaps even less impactful than a more neutral presenting president doing the same.
I don't think that's a great example. A few years after the bombs, Douglas MacArthur was ruling Japan. They didn't have much of a choice. Japan was occupied for almost 7 years, had their constitution rewritten to make them essentially reliant on the US for security.
Then Trump decided his shitty Nobel Prize mattered more and threw 20 years of hard work in the dump.
The consensus in India is that America is perfidious. You claim that countries have goldfish memories, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Indo-American relations. It was immensely hard to build this relationship and easy to burn it.
But who knows? Maybe you have an insight into how Indian people think.
If they don't they are idiots. To name a few things: 9/11, the foreign policy disaster and money pit of the Iraq War/GWOT, the easily-avoidable GFC.
Those were both significant events in their own right and fundamental causes of the Trump presidencies.
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It is as resilient as the people (in power?) want it to be:
> To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* James Madison, Papers 11:163, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-010...
Others trying to be him have not been able to replicate his success electorally. Lowest common denominator celebrity is key to his success.
Theres a good case to be made that he's an aberration and there won't be another demagogue after him to so effectively capture his audience and survive the corruption and incompetence that follows.
He has potential heirs that are smarter and more disciplined than him, but ironically that path doesn't lead you to a life of pop culture/paparazzi/TV celebrity.
Thats not to say we don't deserve to have lost significant trust and respect. But if you take the long view, it's not an extrapolation of this.
Neither is encouraging for the future.
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what'd we bounce into? what did we bounce back from? what effects are you talking about specifically.
I work in aerospace and the sentiment was exactly opposite. People cheered both Trump elections and were dead terrified of a blue win ruining contracts and business.
I don't ask because I am overtly political, I ask because I think it's fascinating that both sides seem to think we're a stone's throw from the apocalypse.. which very much seems to be projected onto the voter base on purpose..
The effects of this insular isolationism can only be explained by simplicity that doesn't hold up in reality: things will be more prosperous for us if we keep what we have to ourselves. But in truth growth is growth. To build prosperity, we need more production, which means more people. Perhaps your share gets bigger, but the pot gets smaller.
This is expected behavior, but not to be taken seriously as a moral argument. Preserving liberty and rule of law vs preserving money, so hard to choose...
Projected by whom, by what means, and to what end?
Consider that both sides may have legitimate reasons to be concerned with this term that didn't apply to Trump's first term, and that what you see isn't simply some form of mass-manipulation or "projection onto the voter base."
All most all the replies to your comment have nothing to do with the substance of what you said. The reality is that the us system is predominantly run by bureaucrats which make sweeping changes hard. This is a feature of the system.
This means that whatever party is in charge will have a harder time enacting the crazy.
I never understood the “my side”/“us vs them” from people. There is only one side and we are all on it.
1. If a democrat is elected, they will take all their guns (their campaign rhetoric keeps saying this will happen, but it continues being no part of democratic presidential campaign messaging, and hasn’t happened the times they warned it definitely would—this one’s fake)
2. Election security. But republicans keep getting into positions to investigate this and either not doing it (because they know it’s BS) or doing it and finding only a handful of mostly-accidental cases that don’t favor either party. Also fake.
3. Leftward shift around acceptance of non-standard sexual and social norms. This one’s real. Whether it’s a problem or just… fine and not worth worrying about? That’s another matter.
4. A bunch of totally wacky shit like litter boxes in classrooms. Fake.
5. Healthcare prices. Real! Democrats also worry about this.
6. Socialism. LOL we’re not remotely near it, very nearly nobody elected in the Democratic Party is left of center-right in most of the rest of our peer states, on economic issues and social safety nets and such. Fake issue.
7. Illegal immigrants increasing the crime rate (fake) and taking our jobs or driving down wages (true, with an asterisk that the effects are complicated, but sure, true) and bringing in drugs (you want citizen drug mules, they cross the border easier, or to just use shipping containers or cargo trucks entering the ordinary way with some greased palms as you can do crazy volume that way, this is fake)
8. Crime being out of control. Broadly, fake. (“But police stats could be…” yeah we have victimization surveys too, people study this and already thought of your objection. Again, fake)
9. Colleges being too liberal. Look at all that “fake” stuff above. Yeah gee I wonder why, dude. Real, but wholly self-inflicted.
10. Rampant fraud in social programs, by the people receiving the aid. This is extremely well-studied. Fake.
11. The budget deficit. Except Republicans are even worse for the budget than democrats, over the last 40 years. By, like, quite a bit. Mostly because they think tax cuts magically pay for themselves, plus Bush’s wars. They mocked the shit out of Gore for talking sense on this topic, and elected cut-taxes-and-spend Dubya. So. Real issue but they are extremely confused about who to vote for to improve it.
There are more but you get the idea. Yes, Fox News and Mark Levin and all them have convinced republicans the world is going to end if democrats win elections. But it’s largely based on completely made-up shit.
Left as an exercise for the reader to make a list for Democrats’ side. Nb how much of its worry about Republicans causing harm by trying to address the fake issues above. Probably most of it. And that’s a real thing that happens, to be worried about.