creakingstairs 2 hours ago

> “There was widespread anger across the political spectrum in South Korea at the behavior of the U.S. authorities"

Korean politics (like everywhere else) has gotten incredibly polarised in the last few years, but this incident managed to unite them for a little while before they devolved back to blaming each other as for why this had happened.

grej 2 hours ago

In addition to Korea being one of our most important military allies in the world, you need batteries for military drones, and the US is way behind in the development of a domestic manufacturing supply chain for next gen batteries.

So now we know clearly that nationalist xenophobia the true most important priority for this administration. Or at least, more important than either the domestic economic interests of their own base or strategic national security interests.

  • breadwinner an hour ago

    > nationalist xenophobia the true most important priority for this administration

    It is a little more complicated than that. It is what around 40% of American population want. (Then another 9.5% or so voted for Trump based on the price of eggs, the fact that the other candidate was a woman, and so on).

    • asdff an hour ago

      40% of the voting population*

Animats 2 hours ago

The US is way behind in battery technology. This was a badly needed technology transfer into the US. And now it's broken, for at least six months.

  • ElijahLynn 2 hours ago

    and possibly greatly reduced foreign investment for 3 years

    “Other attorneys and I are hearing from companies in Asia and Europe who say, ‘Maybe we should hold off on big investments in the U.S. for at least three years.’”

    • cogman10 an hour ago

      Exactly. If I'm a foreign company thinking about setting up a factory in the US, I'd probably pass.

      With the tariffs it's already going to be hard to get the equipment you need into the US without spending a significant amount of money. But now you run the risk of the US arresting and deporting all your skilled workers setting up and managing that factory? No thank you.

      Absolutely braindead move.

  • jeffbee 2 hours ago

    What happens in six months?

    • Jtsummers 2 hours ago

      It's in the article, that's when they'll resume work on the plant.

      > According to LG Energy Solution, construction at the plant will remain on hold until the first half of 2026, reported WJCL, delaying by several months when U.S. workers can begin jobs at the facility.

      ICE took away the workers that were delivering and installing equipment, which introduced delays into the construction process.

      • Animats an hour ago

        That assumes that LG can find workers who want to risk going to the US.

        The government of South Korea is forming a "task force" with the US embassy in Seoul to try to get visa procedures fixed so this doesn't happen again. "Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said the body will be led by director-level officials, emphasizing that its purpose is to facilitate practical consultations rather than political declarations." The view from the Korean side is worth reading. [1] This may reduce Korean investment in the US.[2]

        [1] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/foreignaffairs/20250916/korea-u...

        [2] https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/09/south-korea-v...

cyanydeez 2 hours ago

Are we all just going to let fascist lubricant flow over clearly defineable facts?

  • spunker540 2 hours ago

    What is the fascist lubricant you refer to?

  • josefritzishere 2 hours ago

    Most of us only know knew fascism from history books. But I think the part that has been the most surprising is how stupid it is.

    • ReflectedImage an hour ago

      Basically, fascism creates a system where people are promoted based on political loyalty rather than competency.

      The most loyal people will be the people who lack skill since they only have the position due to the higher ups ensuring loyalty.

    • Animats 2 hours ago

      That's a good insight.

      Inept authoritarianism - the worse of both worlds.

      • toomanyrichies 2 hours ago

        One could argue that incompetent authoritarianism is better for the country than competent authoritarianism.

        It's just too bad those are our only choices at the moment.

    • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago

      > the part that has been the most surprising is how stupid it is

      Read The Wages of Destruction.

      The Nazis were economically inept. This part of fascism’s history—its incompetence–is often overwritten by stories of gleaming German engineering and Italian timeliness.

retox 2 hours ago

[dead]

trhway 2 hours ago

planned economies, rat tails and cobras breeding, lines of code counts, etc. the history is abundant with examples. There is a popular saying in Russia (originated by a famous for his "language skills" Prime-Minister from the 90-ies - Chernomyrdin) - "We have never had such a thing happen, and it has just happened again".

EnPissant 2 hours ago

Serious question for people who oppose ICE enforcing immigration law: What do you want for the USA? Completely open borders? Closed borders, but we don't enforce it very well? Something else?

I sincerely really don't understand.

  • kergonath 2 hours ago

    What you do not understand is due process and innocent until proven guilty. You don’t just abduct people on the streets and deport them to a random country without at least making sure that they don’t have a residence permit. Well, you don’t in a civilised country, anyway.

    • randrus an hour ago

      Absolutely this.

  • cogman10 2 hours ago

    For me, open borders with easy documentation.

    We survived for decades with basically just that. People could come up from mexico to work the fields in the summer and head back for the winter with basically no friction at the border.

    The question to ask is "what is the border actually protecting"? When you start to drill in the reasons for a strong border, they all end up being fabricated problems.

    "To stop drugs". Well, most drugs are either being manufactured in america or they are brought in by US citizens not smuggled across the border.

    "To stop human trafficking". The ironic part here is the most common human trafficking happens because of the strong border. "We'll deport you" is used to keep workers abused. A weaker border gives workers much more bargaining power.

    "To stop crime". Most crime is done by citizens of the US, not immigrants. And, again ironically, overly punitive borders does exactly the opposite of stopping crime. When someone that's undocumented can't talk to the police they are far less likely to be a witness for a crime or to report a crime. It further encourages gangs. A lot of gangs spring up because people can't go to the cops. That's part of the reason the mafia flourished. It's the reason militant organizations like the Black Panthers were formed.

    "To create jobs". This one might be a wash. However, it has to be said that more people means a higher need for services in areas which can in fact create jobs.

    "To avoid spending on services". This just doesn't happen outside of maybe emergency room care. Undocumented workers are FAR less likely to use any public services because they don't want to be deported. And so what if they do? Is it really such a bad thing if a non-citizen gets an education here? Don't we want more skilled and educated residence?

    Let me put it in contexts of other countries. I as a kid, made a few trips to Canada and back. Back in the day you could do that without even presenting passports, it was kinda wild. Did Canada suddenly explode because of that easy border crossing? No, it was just a non-issue.

    Similar things happen in the EU. The relaxed border controls for EU members hasn't resulted in chaos. It is, for the most part, a non-issue. People generally do not move, you still have most people born in whatever EU nation they are from staying there. The same would be true of the US.

  • tgma 2 hours ago

    Someone once told me you can't understand US politics without understanding Linear Algebra.

    End of the day each party needs certain to appease certain people in certain locations. Like any marketing team they segment their "customer" i.e. voter base[1], then rationalize actions to get there post hoc.

    The general public depending on the news channel they wire their head into will have the same opinions.

    Hence, it will unlikely to get a sensible answer by asking this in a forum. The actual answer is behind the scenes from political operatives who do the literal political calculus.

    PS [1]: this is one reason identity politics is so appealing to them as it's logistically easy as it maps well to their customer segments

  • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago

    I want enforcement of our immigration laws. ICE is deporting fewer illegal immigrants than Obama despite blowing Saudi Arabia’s military budget on the problem.

    The entire endeavour is thoroughly corrupt, lawless and ineffective. It’s being run for TV, not for results.

    So we get stupid spectacles like this from influencer ICE that make us, in the long run, trillions of dollars poorer, all while doing nothing to remove migrants much less gangs or cartels from our streets.

  • jjk166 12 minutes ago

    I want ICE to go after the drug traffickers and violent criminals they claimed were so common and such a problem. When drug trafficking and violent crime is completely stopped, then we can talk about the best way to handle skilled workers with minor paperwork errors.

  • anigbrowl 35 minutes ago

    This is not a serious question. Nobody, including the Koreans, has been been arguing that ICE should have just ignored it. The objections are twofold: that instead of raising the issue administratively with the company they just rolled in and arrested everyone in sight (including people with valid visas), and that they engaged in egregious human rights violations.

  • Loughla an hour ago

    Due. Process.

    Just because someone isn't white and speaks english as a second language does not make them illegal or a criminal.

    There used to be the presumption of innocence. This is no longer the case.

    That's what I want. Simple rule of law in the us the way it is supposed to be.

  • wara23arish 38 minutes ago

    Im an immigrant and I think it’s something that needs to be done.

    The people responsible are the ones who let this happen. The solution is gonna be ugly no matter what.

    too much immigration literally suppresses wages, all other arguments are secondary and not imp enough imo

    • anigbrowl 32 minutes ago

      The solution is gonna be ugly no matter what.

      That's bullshit. This notion that human rights don't matter in law enforcement matters is cancer.

  • cjensen an hour ago

    What I would like:

    First, ICE should be competent. There's a long history of them being the dumbest and most thug-like people to hold a badge. Compare this to the US Postal Inspectors, who are the most competent. Reform has long been needed from top to bottom. Consider that they basically use skin color as probable cause, which is enraging and lazy.

    Second, the silly quotas focus on the wrong issue. The government, being incompetent, is meeting quota by voiding valid permission-to-stay because they know where those people live. They are manufacturing people to deport because they are not competent to find people who can be legally deported.

    Third, this is a case of supply and demand. The system is focused on the supply side composed of desperate workers rather than demand side of people who hired them for personal profit. This is silly: come down hard on one meatpacking plant and you "solve" the problem of hundreds of illegal immigrants with a single criminal charge. Trying to stamp out the immigrants one-by-one is inefficient and unjust.

    Lastly, this is pretty much all the fault of the Republican Party. George W Bush wanted to make a grand compromise where sufficient barriers to entry were erected in exchange for amnesty. The nativist wing of the Republican Party went apoplectic at compromise and killed any practical solution for decades. There will never be a solution so long as one side wants to deport law-abiding hardworking taxpayers whose parents brought them here as children.

    • cogman10 an hour ago

      > Third, this is a case of supply and demand. The system is focused on the supply side composed of desperate workers rather than demand side of people who hired them for personal profit. This is silly: come down hard on one meatpacking plant and you "solve" the problem of hundreds of illegal immigrants with a single criminal charge. Trying to stamp out the immigrants one-by-one is inefficient and unjust.

      A major reason ICE and a strict border exist is to depress wages and enable employer abuse. That's why this is never the approach to solve immigration problems.

      Being able to say "behave or we'll deport you" is exactly the point. If you flip it around you'll quickly find a bunch of employers that cry about how wonderful these workers are and that we need to "have a heart".

      Undocumented workers won't, for example, form a union or make complaints to OSHA.

  • bradford 2 hours ago

    > What do you want for the USA? Completely open borders? Closed borders, but we don't enforce it very well? Something else?

    The 2024 bipartisan border bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_b...) seemed like a good compromise to me. Of course, it wasn't brought to a vote by the house (for reasons that I won't elaborate on), so it's mostly a hypothetical.

    And, if I had to choose between the two, I'm more supportive of the Biden era immigration policy than I am of the current Trump policy.

  • amanaplanacanal an hour ago

    I believe that I have the right as a human being to travel wherever I wish, or move to wherever I am the most happy. I don't believe the government should have the power to limit my right to travel. And I believe all people should have the same rights I do.

    • EnPissant an hour ago

      If 1 billion people from other countries want to come to the USA tomorrow. Should they be allowed?

      • cogman10 an hour ago

        If they can get here, sure.

        I don't think it's logistically possible for 1 billion people to migrate in a day.

      • mcphage 10 minutes ago

        That sounds like an awful lot of people who will want to buy food, houses, televisions, mobile phones, automobiles, ziploc bags, photocopiers, vinyl siding, and so on.

        Where would we find the people to build all those things, and do all that work? Why, we’d need like 1 billion more people to do all that!

        And what would that do to our GDP? Multiply it by 4 or 5? How horrible!

  • ajross 2 hours ago

    I think you do understand. But for the record, here's the boring centrist bougie liberal take on immigration policy:

    1. If we have jobs available, people should be able to immigrate to do them.

    2. Changes in enforcement policy should be just. If people are here doing jobs, we should assume that they have jobs worth doing. Norms are norms for a reason.

    3. If someone breaks those rules, sure, arrest them and deport them. But not to a gulag in El Salvador.

    • cogman10 2 hours ago

      I'd just push back on the deportation. Why would we want to deport someone that commits a crime? If someone kills someone do we really want to trust that the government we deport them to will jail them? Especially since they have pretty much no way to actually investigate that murder?

      Imagine you are canada, A canadan citizen kills an american while visiting. The US immediately deports that person because "they are a murder". What do you do as the Canadian government? Do you just take the US's word that "this person is a murderer"?

      • khuey an hour ago

        IMO it sort of depends.

        For a serious crime like murder you want to imprison them for their sentence and then deport them. You obviously don't want the most serious consequence for a foreigner coming to the US to murder someone to be deportation.

        But for a minor crime like shoplifting maybe just tossing them out is fine. Is it worth locking them up for a couple months when you can just wash your hands of them?

      • ajross 2 hours ago

        For clarity: yes, criminal law would take precedence for domestic crimes. I'm saying that if one presupposes a justly and reasonably administered Immigrant Work Visa program, that it's reasonable to arrest and deport people who sneak in without having such a visa.

        • cogman10 2 hours ago

          But now you are talking about upending people's lives over misdemeanors. Should we deport someone for speeding?

          I just don't see a work visa program as having any benefit. Anyone working in the US should be protected by workers laws the same as if they have a visa or not. Why should we put limits on who can work for who and be employed by who. Who actually benefits from such limits?

          • ajross 30 minutes ago

            > Who actually benefits from such limits?

            People who work. It's just an economic argument. The US (and any other targets of net immigration, really) has a higher wage level than the regions from which the labor is arriving, more or less by definition. That's why the labor force is moving.

            So if you allow completely unlimited population motion at zero cost, the system will seek to a state where all wages for a given job are the same, everywhere. And that means that we highly-paid Americans end up poorer.

            Now, is such a world more just? More fair? Maybe! But it's worse for us, and that makes it a politically infeasible solution to argue for. You'll never convince people to live poorer for the benefit of others.

            A feasible/reasonable/moderate/boring immigration policy would simply ask the question "How much immigration is needed to fill existing jobs (good for growth) without depressing wages (bad for workers)?", and allow that much.

        • vkou an hour ago

          If being undocumented is a crime, people accused of it are entitled to trial by a jury of their peers.

    • EnPissant an hour ago

      So your position is people should be able to come to the USA to work any possible job, but not to not work?

      • yodon 41 minutes ago

        > So your position is ...

        Part of getting past the wonderfully comfortable "restate anyone else's differing opinion in the weakest and most easily attacked strawman form" fallacy is taking the time to think about and engage with the best and most thoughtful form of the other opinion you could imagine that person holding, not just with the weakest and least thoughtful version.

        Should you still disagree with the best form of their likely opinion, you'll be much better equipped to engage in an actual dialogue that can lead to actual intellectual growth and change, commonly on both sides.

  • kelnos an hour ago

    You're asking the wrong questions.

    I care about being humane. I care about due process. I care about not assuming someone is an illegal immigrant just because they have darker skin or speak a language other than English. I care about people getting their time in front of a judge before they're flown off to some country that they may not have even set foot in before in their lives. I care about elected officials -- the people who represent me, regardless of whether or not I voted for them -- treating people like people, and not like animals.

    To answer your questions, though, I do think we should have open-er borders. I think we should have easier paths to residency and citizenship, for people who want it. I'm sick of the isolationism and xenophobia. It's disgusting. It's unamerican.

  • a456463 2 hours ago

    serious question: let's just shut down everything and see what could go wrong? let's also stop reading. get rekt

  • trhway 2 hours ago

    >Serious question for people who oppose ICE enforcing immigration law:

    People want ICE to enforce the immigration law without violating other laws and the Constitution. Unfortunately the current government and their supporters (and you seem to belong to that group) spin the insistence that ICE to not violate laws and the Constitution as the opposition to enforcement of the immigration law.

  • sonofhans 2 hours ago

    Serious answer — Bunny Colvin’s “Paper Bag” speech in The Wire — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2fV-_eiKxE

    This nation does now and always has depended on immigrants. This recent ICE nonsense is capricious (no public plan), punitive (targets mostly political opponents), and illegal (targets skin color).

  • jeffbee 2 hours ago

    People aren't mad about legitimate exercises of due process initiated by actual law enforcement agents acting within their normal mandates. People are mad that Miller's wannabe-SS abducted a mixed group of U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and visitors with visas, chained them together, and forced them to lick water out of dog bowls.

    • EnPissant 2 hours ago

      They claim they arrested a group who were violating the terms of their B-1 Visas[1]. Do you disagree with this, and why?

      [1] A B-1 visa is a U.S. nonimmigrant visa for temporary visits for business.

      • khuey 2 hours ago

        > They claim they arrested a group who were violating the terms of their B-1 Visas

        Has any evidence been presented by the government for this claim?

        • EnPissant an hour ago

          B-1 covers meetings, training, after-sales service. It does not cover productive line work. If that’s what happened, the class mismatches.

          • Jtsummers 26 minutes ago

            > B-1 covers meetings, training, after-sales service. It does not cover productive line work. If that’s what happened, the class mismatches.

            Meetings like one of the men mentioned in the article was in when they arrested him? He wasn't doing "productive line work", whatever that means for a factory that isn't even operating.

  • bsoles 2 hours ago

    > I sincerely really don't understand.

    This is utterly disingenuous. Do you really think "enforcing immigration laws" is what ICE is doing? Since when sending people to foreign countries without due process is a proper way to enforce laws?

  • stirfish 2 hours ago

    I'll answer, but first I want your best guess.