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?
There was an interview with a high ranking Microsoft lawyer the other week where the lawyer conceded that even if the company would be a European subsidiary and the employees would be European then Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws. Of course the employees would be bound by European law, let’s see how that pans out.
The US uses extradition in countries with treaties and rendition most everywhere else. If you're a US citizen you might be safe in Russia or backwoods Africa,Myanmar etc but most anywhere else you're fucked.
> Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that it is an American company. Being a multinational corporation like Microsoft or Mercedes Benz means you have to navigate rather complex legal situations, follow not just your home country's laws, but also the laws of the countries that you are operating in.
The fundamental risk for the EU is the Cloud Act. Since that facility is still owned by a company that is owned by a US company, the Cloud Act applies.
Microsoft tried a similar thing in Germany and it failed.
Sadly there are more than enough entities in the EU, including states and other critical sectors, that are more than willing to play pretend too. We've seen it with privacy deals, I fear this will be similar.
I'd call it realpolitik. The eu doesn't write its own software. This is the downside case of that.
I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.
Yeah EU is not competitive in tech. They missed the boat by.. decades. And the salary of engineers in EU is not good enough to make it attractive either for those who can and want to live abroad.
I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.
Honestly, I think it's straightforward to fix. Requirements to attempt to source domestically (or at minimum try hard) plus loosening the rules on firing employees (yes it sucks, but hiring is super risky when it takes 0.5 - 3 years of salary to dispose of an employee, either a bad one or one that isn't the right person for a growing business) would go a long way towards jumpstarting domestic software production.
There is an awful lot of software produced in the EU. The problem is that as soon as someone is even moderately successful with something a US (or rather, an SV) based entity will make you an offer you can't refuse.
That's not exactly true. There certainly are areas where US options are clearly the best, but even in cases where a local alternative is viable there is a massive push to use US based services instead, and unsurprisingly the local options then stay small when even their own governments refuse to use them.
I'm sure you're right, but having worked on both sides of the ocean, I can say that EU companies do keep the privacy angle in mind a bit more. I did work on medical devices though, so I might just have been in a bubble.
That's not enough. The only thing that would be enough would be a change of ownership but that clearly isn't on the table. Yet. But I would not be surprised if AWS/Azure/Google ended up divesting some of their DCs in Europe as a result of the exodus.
I agree that it might not be enough, but at the moment there also aren't good EU competitors in the cloud space. Good not in the technical sense, but good as in - people would be comfortable putting their eggs in the basket.
Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.
This isn't about reputation or high level services. Ultimately this is about certification and there are precious few alternatives with sufficient capacity that are certified and not somehow indirectly or directly owned by US entities. And there is a run on the ones that are.
If the US government decided to invade Greenland and ordered Amazon to cut off all network connections to Denmark, would this region still operate for Danish users?
If it did, and the US ordered Amazon to shut down the region, would it?
If the region kept on operating, and the US ordered Amazon to stop providing software updates, security updates, new license keys, etc. - how long could the region keep running?
Then change the parameters slightly and imagine the US using the threat of cutting off Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple services to Denmark as incentive to transfer Greenland to US control.
So you understand that an "EU 'governed' [Amazon] region with only EU citizens working on it" isn't actually independent from the US, much less sovereign to either the EU or Denmark, right?
> 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.
Plenty of action. This has gone way beyond 'mild discomfort but we'll just pretend it is all ok'. The last 6 months have seen a massive change in attitude.
So over the last 15 years the solid examples of moves that have been committed to are:
1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs
2. Two Danish cities
3. One German state
4. The Italian Ministry of defence
5. One Spanish region
They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).
Yes. But things really are different now. I think there was some expectation of checks and balances kicking in if things went really crazy and they didn't. So the trust factor is in the freezer right now, pretty much all over Europe. Yes, people still trade, yes, there is still traffic back and forth. But it is now because you have to, not because you want to. Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.
We were told that things really were different then too. And they were different by definition because they weren't the same, but that is not really evidence of anything. We were promised he colluded with Putin to hack the election and would become a dictator, that WWIII would be started, economy would be ruined, international trade would be stopped, undesirable citizens would be put into camps, etc. He really did not need courts or legislature on your side for that if you can control the military and a sizable portion of the country is on your side too. So that all turned out to be another cry wolf situation.
Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.
> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.
No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -
"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."
But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.
Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.
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
They dislike each other but my understanding is that, at least in the EU, they view each other as stable and trustworthy. No jokes about invasions, no deporting (or worse, imprisoning) legal immigrants, in general no caprice. Meanwhile the US simply cannot be counted on to be the historically stable and trustworthy partner that had defined us over the past 75-odd years.
From my experience, anti-Trump Americans are still embraced and appreciated by Europeans. That doesn’t mean they can trust the US gov’t and probably won’t be able to again for a few decades.
Until very recently the USA was the preferred technology partner for many EU ventures and was seen as a trustworthy ally because of mutual history since 1945.
> If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other.
A lot more than what? And what exactly did Europe do in recent times that would give American citizens that feeling?
> 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.
> Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it.
ICE agents and other Federal workers are largely insulated from consequences due to Sovereign Immunity protections. only egregious, malicious violations cause them personal liability. and Trump can dole out pardons if it comes to that.
> Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.
it's nice that they're fighting, but the Supreme Court has shown a remarkable tolerance for flagrant lawlessness by the Administration (e.g. DHS v. DVD.) sometimes because the Court is sympathetic to Trump's objectives, sometimes because they fear he'll ignore them and do it anyway, and they'll lose the resulting power struggle (nine sedentary septuagenarians vs. the US Armed Forces.)
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.
It's a possibility. It's why I've always thought the bribery or commission model makes for fairer and more efficient immigration. There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards.
Right now they only get rewarded if they deport or collar somebody, so that's all they seem to care about, and letting in good people is seen as more of a nuisance they must do while trying to get notches for their promotion.
> There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards.
Doesn't seem like much of an incentive to identify good productive people if the incentive scheme is defined as "accept a couple of hundred dollars" vs "don't accept a couple of hundred dollars"...
You can't bring in good people if there's not people.
There are already a few sprinkles here and there to reward them for stopping some of the bad people, but nothing if they let in a good person. $200 is better than nothing...
I don't think there's a shortage of good people trying to get into the US or the West...
Or that people responsible for processing visas and checking papers have been restricting numbers despite what their bosses and the wider public ask for. If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.
So what is your solution to get the border guard to have as much incentive to make sure good people, who mind you already have a visa, get in just as eagerly as he wants to collar the criminal who will bump up his chances at promotion?
I guess another option might be to give the similar kind of promotional awards to metrics of good immigrants being let in as they do to collaring criminals.
>If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.
I'm talking about the officer having an incentive to actually follow the "guidelines." His cost to reject someone is basically zero. He gets rewarded nothing for letting you in. I'm not talking about the officer getting paid to let in people without a visa, I'm talking about having an incentive to actually do his job and not just chase reasons to reject people with no cost to a bunch of false positives.
Edit:
(As an aside, the US actually has a loophole that allows US businesses to bribe foreign officials, including for immigration, to get them to do their job that they were already obligated to do. So really they would just be legalizing it for "them + the rest of world" instead just "the rest of world." Pure American exceptionalism to realize grease payments are legitimate and helpful everywhere but magically the US)
Regarding payments to foreign officials, the act draws a distinction between bribery and facilitation or "grease payments", which may be permissible under the FCPA, but may still violate local laws. The primary distinction is that grease payments or facilitation payments are made to an official to expedite his performance of the routine duties he is already bound to perform.
I'm not sure what I find more baffling, your continued insistence that some people's difficulties in getting into other countries are a matter of border guards needing incentives as opposed to very public top down hostility to immigration and obsession with perceived threats, or the suggestion that empowering border guards to extort people for bribes if they wanted to get into the country would somehow lead to fairer immigration routes, as opposed to more money being extorted from vulnerable people.
You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone...
>You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone...
While we're telling stories, here's two tales from me
1) Robbed at the Mexican border by police. They didn't even bother asking me, just took it. They get no real reward for jailing people so they were very happy for the $180 and then left me the fuck alone.
2) Enter USA. Passport, everything good, everything legit. Insane border patrol degradingly strip searched me, watched me as I performed bowel movements, jailed me, took me halfway across the state in a prisoner van, and then ran up $1k in medical bills while they search my body for drugs that didn't exist. Unceremoniously dumped at the border with no apologies when absolutely nothing unlawful was found. Still debt collectors chasing me for this.
Now, which was fairer? Definitely getting robbed. The Mexican just wanted his reward. The US CBP could only get a reward by getting me arrested.
Now do both societal models suck? Yes they do. But as a guy on the street, I cannot change society, especially if I am an immigrant presenting at the border to a country I've never been to in my life. What I can do is get robbed of $200, and be in a fairer position than getting robbed of $1k of medical bills and a day in jail I'll never get back, or deported while some officer tries to win some dumb metric.
I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges.
That is the reality I am dealing with. Not a made up la-la land where top-down society is going to be changed by the immigrant presenting at the border. Legalized bribery is relative fairness in this world we live, compared to many of the actual alternatives many people have on the ground where they are staring at someone who gets to play god and the only question they have is how they can maximize their rewards.
A false dichotomy is thinking the alternative is border guards who respond without incentives, one of which is cash.
There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. The question then is how to game their robbery to best help the rest of humans, not just hope magically they will be nice.
> I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges.
I mean, why on earth wouldn't he do both if there's any incentive to do the latter, especially if he's dealing with individual immigrants rather than a people smuggling racket that might offer repeat business? You're accusing me of talking about "made up la la land" (i.e. the majority of the civilized world where border guards are paid flat salaries, not deportation bonuses) whilst inventing a society in which legalized theft from immigrants somehow results in border guards defying orders and incentives to scrupulously ensure all the "good" people get in.
Officers don't get a payout generally just for falsely arresting people and it eats up time they could be robbing someone else. It's generally more profitable to take $200 from a bunch more people than to burn a bunch of time falsely arrest someone, but more profitable for their career to arrest someone actually guilty than to do a bunch of robbing.
Therefore in the USA corruption model you end up with a bunch of false arrests while in the LatAm corruption model you end up with a bunch of fast robberies but not so much the lengthy deportation/arrest of innocents based on the officer thinking that's the bigger reward.
The way I've had this play out time and time again is my shit gets robbed in the third world but I have no problems entering, and the exact opposite issue with the USA.
Of course you could point to say the Swedish model where as far as I can tell they have no incentive to do any job whatsoever. I've entered Stockholm straight on a flight from a sketchy part of Iraq and no one even bothered to look at me or even question where I was coming from or what I might have with me. Their border guards must just lounge in a room drinking tea and draw their salaries or something.
The bit where a bored person checks your papers and maybe asks a basic question to gauge the awkwardness of your response is the norm for the civilised world and many other parts too, and doesn't seem less secure than shaking down arrivals from sketchy parts of Iraq for $200 but having no incentive (or other staff) to do anything else afterwards...
But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.
Look I don't expect to convince you at this point because we obviously come from two different realities.
Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time.
Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.
I'm perfectly happy to believe that in your actual reality the world's most paranoid, politicised and expensively resourced border control had more time to make your life a misery than frontline guards (apparently without any backup to deal with jailings) in another country whose interest in foreigners began and ended with the assumption most of them had more cash than them. I just don't believe the theory that if only US frontline border control staff were given leeway to pinch the contents of wallets they'd completely forget the national 'security threat' obsession, and all those people hired specifically to deal with alleged smugglers and terrorists sent to them by frontline staff would sit and twiddle their thumbs and absolutely nobody would care at any level.
Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.
I have a genuine question -- how do these "non-paranoid" countries incentivize their staff to let people through while still catching true threats? That's ultimately the problem we're trying to solve. The 3 main models I've seen thus far are following
1) US model, guards only rewarded for catching criminals or deporting. Lots of false negatives at no cost to guards so they fuck with you a lot for no apparent reason. Canada somewhat similar.
2) LatAm model, bribes/theft to incentivize the to not burn up time with false negatives, but they sonetimes are rewarded enough for true positives to not just let them go.
3) "Swedish" model. Straight salary and then not give a fuck. Seems everyone gets through with not much thought.
LatAm model seems most practical of what I've seen but I haven't spent much time in Europe or Asia, mostly middle east, the Americas, and southeast asia.
I mean, "Swedish" model works pretty well for the majority of travellers, especially since the US and Mexico famously don't succeed in stopping drug trafficking across their borders anyway. If you want border staff to be more thorough in vetting threats, you hire for competence rather than corruption.
LatAm model where they're too busy robbing people to care about actual threats (who are generally particularly happy to pay them off, including offers of recurring payments) seems like obviously the worst of both worlds. Though frankly my own LatAM border highlights were watching Ecuadorian airport staff meticulously searching the multiple suitcases every local family brought with them from Colombia and then not even bothering with a token gesture at my bag, and having no real issues at land borders despite crossing them with a strikingly different-looking temporary passport. Apparently the Bolivian border guard was enthusiastic enough about his job to give US Americans a lecture on why they had to pay to arrange a visa-on-arrival everyone else got for free
"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.
In fairness, it shouldn’t. I think it is acceptable that the foreign workers have valid US work visas and can demonstrate that. Maybe constitution plays sometimes fast and loose with work visas, but that does not automatically make it ok.
I have worked abroad many times and work permits were always under heavy scrutiny by my own company, to the degree that we send one unhappy soul home mid week because some regulations were not met and he came back week smiling because he got a pay rise as comparable rated as local was a requirement.
The problem is, US Visa Waiver Program do explicitly allow business trips using "tourist" "visa"(it's not a visa, it's a waiver. So you won't even have a visa. You also won't be a "tourist", you're a "visitor" under VWP). So it's completely normal for them to be totally unable to demonstrate anything issued or approved by the US government whatsoever other than the oval stamp. They wouldn't even have a visa, and it's legal, as far as how the laws and regulations and official guidance read. I haven't heard that's changed, at least yet.
>Some crossed into the US illegally; some had visa waivers and were prohibited from working; (Steven Schrank, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge)
If the visa waiver suddenly no longer allows working business trips to the USA this is huge news. The terms of the waiver explicitly state it's allowed but it seems not in practice.
This is a definite "get out now" to anyone on a ESTA in the USA right now. Attending a conference, trade show or consulting on a build out of battery plant?" Get out now.
Have you read the requirements? Business visas or ESTA waivers have never allowed "work", there is nothing sudden about it. You can attend conferences and trade shows and have meetings. You can not "work" though.
I'm not an immigration lawyer so I don't know exactly what the requirements cover and what they don't. You are not allowed to "engage in active employment", but I have been permitted in paid for by my employer to attend meetings with company colleagues which is apparently okay.
I imagine a Korean engineer or project manager visiting to meet colleagues and inspect the site should be okay on a business visa or waiver. One who was there working on plans or overseeing construction might not be. You would hope the company had carefully checked these things.
The ICE agents have an overly strict and often incorrect interpretation of visa law. It wouldn’t be the first time this week where they decided to deport someone without adequate cause (and tourists aren’t really guaranteed due process).
So I completely agree on principle. But nonetheless the political job being done by DHS/ICE is not to uniformly and fairly scrutinize all visa holders in the interest of justice. They're supposed to be locking up the "illegals" constantly being held up as an enemy class by the ruling regime, and in practice that means "Latin American laborers", and not "Korean engineers".
No one was sold on throwing international professionals in jail just for showing up to do a job they took in good faith. That's clearly wrong, in a way that rounding up the "bad" people isn't. And so it shows up the horrifying implications of current policy.
The obvious goal is not to police illegal immigration but to purge the US of as many immigrants as possible and halt immigration in general so that "native born Americans" can get all of the jobs they think immigrants (and "DEI" hires - it's so difficult not to read all of this as code for "not white") have "stolen" from them. The ham-fisted arbitrariness and cruelty is the point.
Ya, but it is sad in both cases. Sad for the South Koreans that are unfairly being accused of working illegally, and sad for the un-documented immigrants who are exploited at both ends by Republicans (they run the construction companies so take profit in their work, and then they use them for political advantage via scare tactics).
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.
That might be true, but that wasn't really their point.
Being accurate is less important than trying to get the lie out in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so the lie can be repeated in front of people who might not realize this sort of information offhand.
I spent a good minute thinking of the best reply. You're right, the truth was immaterial to them and they were posting in bad faith. Proving that this is the result of cooperation, to me, was the quickest way to unravel the rest of their post.
Until the federal government starts following its own laws there is zero point in states and cities engaging in good faith with it.
Good faith is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact, or opening your wallet to a conman, who goes back on every deal he makes.
(And this conman takes your tax money, and then instead of providing you the services that he is required to - by law, witholds it for reasons of pure spite and caprise. If he won't hold up his end of what he is required to, why should anyone else lift a finger to extend any courtesies to him?)
450 people arrested. I am skeptical of even that number. 450 working here illegally? Ok… prove it. Names and visa statuses please. The raid happened yesterday, you’re telling me they have conclusive proof 450 people are working illegally less than 24 hours later? Not remotely likely
Much more likely? 450 koreans working here legally but not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country.
> not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires every noncitizen who is 18 years old and over to carry evidence of their immigration “registration documents” at all times.
Noncitizens refer to lawful permanent residents (green card holders) and other nonimmigrants in the U.S., including but not limited to foreign students, exchange visitors, and foreign workers. “Registration documents” effectively refer to valid immigration documents.
Great unreasonable legal requirement! Now you can deport anyone who left their passport in their hotel room. I hear ICE is hiring, they’d love this stuff.
In other countries even citizens have to carry identification at all times. I don't see why requiring noncitizens to do the same is particularly onerous.
Also, detained != deported. If you have been stopped by a police officer for a traffic ticket and couldn't leave at will, you were being detained too.
> In other countries even citizens have to carry identification at all times.
We spent the entire Cold War criticizing “papers, please” culture so at the very least seems like we should recognize this as a major change and do something old-fashioned like passing a law to make it legal. The free countries like France or Spain which have similar requirements have actual legal authorization making the terms clear.
We did. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires every noncitizen who is 18 years old and over to carry evidence of their immigration “registration documents” at all times.
That only applies to non-citizens. You were talking about citizens, who are not required to carry ID under U.S. law. They are also not allowed to just stop random people asking about citizenship without cause, although they are appealing court losses in cases involving American citizens of Mexican or Native American descent trying to get SCOTUS to overturn that.
As much as I hate to re-enter this convo, aerostable_slug is right. You've consistently been wrong throughout this whole conversation.
The people detained were suspected of being here illegally and weren't citizens. Being detained is not the same as being deported, and is simply holding until more information is known. The INA was created before the cold war and only applies to non-citizens, which is a milder policy than a lot of developed countries. Plus, while I'm not inclined to believe everything the government says, immediately rejecting government data because it violates your desired world view is childish, especially when there's no reason to doubt it.
This thread is a bit muddled since it’s mixing talk of citizen (not required to carry ID) and non-citizen (required, but cannot be stopped without reasonable suspicion outside of border areas and has the right to remain silent: i.e. ICE can’t go to a stadium and demand over the PA that everyone volunteer status) rights, and I think some of my comments about the former were confused with the latter. In any case, don’t trust me when you can get an actual lawyer’s summary:
> immediately rejecting government data because it violates your desired world view is childish, especially when there's no reason to doubt it.
You appear to have confused me with someone else. That said, given both the highly politicized climate and the many recent examples of claims being dropped or falling apart in court, I think it’s prudent to only trust things defended in a court of law. It’s certainly plausible that there was a tip about immigration fraud which meant that they had clear cause for stopping people but it also wouldn’t be surprising if people under intense pressure to hit quotas made some bad calls. I’m sure that many of the numbers they report are valid - large chunks of the economy depend on foreign labor - but expect the final numbers will be substantially lower.
> "The people detained were suspected of being here illegally and weren't citizens."
The people detained included US Citizens who weren't carrying documentation of their citizenship.
> "...The judicial warrant for the search at the Hyundai plant named just four people. Relying on that warrant, ICE detained nearly 500 people. DHS admitted that included U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and people lawfully here on visas.'"
It's an absurd law for basic reasons: if US citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship, and non-citizens are, then the law either is totally pointless and unenforceable; or (in this case) trigger-happy police unlawfully detain US citizens on suspicion. It's a Catch-22: a US citizen is not obligated to carry *the papers proving they're not obligated to carry papers*.
>Much more likely? 450 koreans working here legally but not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country.
The facts will inevitably be: hundreds of Korean nationals were illegally working in the US. The correction will be a small blurb somewhere, posted months from now, after the next fake new outrage comes about.
Trust the experts only makes sense if you’re talking about something where experts exist, and are speaking.
ICE et all is a goon squad, and most of their employees have only a high school diploma and a few months experience driving around in white vans disappearing seniors. If i need that done, i know who to trust. If i need the truth? They are not experts in the truth.
But ok, let’s say we believe them. By their own stats, 30% of the people they arrest are let go without charges or deportation. So by their own accounting, 450 arrests will be 315 deportation/incarcerations, and 135 people treated like cattle for having the wrong skin color or an accent. And given the complete lack of due process why on earth should we even believe them about the 315?
Given all that has happened in the past 220+ days it is more probable that the real underlying truth will be this is a targeted raid to either enact revenge upon Georgia for not playing ball with Trump v1.0, and/or to exert pressure on Hyundai and South Korea to squeeze more juice.
Both can be true: this can be a targeted raid by an administration obsessed with petrol powered vehicles, and the Korean workers are working illegally.
Are you just following me around to every comment?
I am not an immigration judge or a prophet, so I don't know how every case will turn out, but 450 is a lot. It's enough that even if some are here legally, as would be expected since people are detained for reasonable suspicion not proof, it would still be hundreds of illegal immigrants.
Most of the immigrants are not from South Korea, they're from central/south america. My understanding of the situation so far is that some South Koreans came here to manage the project, some on questionable visas themselves, and they hired hundreds of laborers (illegally). If you want to build a factory in the US you should follow the laws we have, you can't pick and choose which laws to follow.
> "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..
I'm sure that's great comfort to the guy who was deported.
I'm just saying that I advise all my friends on similar visas to say they're "working" in the US if asked, rather than say "living". Don't give people with power over you any excuse to ruin your life.
Oh sure, your comment came across to me as implying that the agent had reasonable grounds to deny entry even if that reason was a technicality. I'm just saying he didn't, not one iota, not even on a technicality. It was 100% bullshit. I have had the displeasure of going through US immigration myself many times and understand the caution and deference, maybe it would have helped but it sounds like they had made up their minds.
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...