ICE has bravely rescued us from the menace of people building battery factories. Forget fentanyl, trafficking, or violent crime—our real existential threat was clearly a few Korean engineers with power tools. Obviously, they were biding their time before graduating to cartel kingpins. And thank heavens the plant won’t be finished—who actually wants it and the jobs, infrastructure, etc it would bring.
Sleep well, folks—America is saved, one deported factory worker at a time.
The bit that gets me is another country is kinda handing over its technology to USA, so why get in the way?
When US engineers went to China to offshore US factories there, I doubt China got in the way. Probably watched with heavy interest but definitely not hindered in any way.
It’s the other end of the spectrum from migrants from other countries doing the large scale manual labor for little pay by American standards, but high pay by their own. Ultimately everyone benefits.
It’s not about economics. It’s about racism and nationalism through and through. You can’t look at it with a rationalist lens or it can’t make sense. The issue is the dilution of a perceived whiteness of the American identity being threatened by non-white immigration. It doesn’t matter why the Korean workers were here or how tenuous or nonexistent the immigration violation claims were. It matters they weren’t white.
For proof, which hasn’t been particularly hidden, see the extreme efforts to create a false narrative (including the president confronting a foreign leader with photographs from a completely different country) of white persecution in South Africa and a recalibration of refugee program to prioritize white South Africans. It’s the whole “reverse discrimination” malarkey (as if discrimination is structurally one way) playing out with fabrication and lies since they couldn’t find real facts. A rationalist argument can’t be found, because it’s not rational - it’s just racist nationalism.
This is going to be remembered in history globally as one of the embarrassing low points that beggars the question of American moral standing , which is likewise a fallacious tu quoque argument. What’s going on ignores the fact the founding fathers were enlightenment liberal humanists of the extreme degree, and while creatures of their time, endeavored hard to establish a construct in the constitution and bill of rights a system that will eventually and stably arrive at an ideal liberal humanist society. They recognized with pretty clear sightedness their own imperfections in this regard and recognized society changes slowly, but believed the constitution and bill of rights would make the change inexorable. I for one agree after studying it for some time. This means this aberration we see today, which is reminiscent of Sulla’s attack on the Roman republic, was well planned for an accounted for. They knew clearly and better than we do the natural tendency of man, and specifically corrupt ambitious racist theologists as their time was steeped in, and built a system that mean reverts always towards a liberal humanist outcome.
The question to my mind is will I live to see the damage undone and is my daughter equipped to right the ship in her life time.
>Ultimately everyone benefits.
>It’s not about economics.
What about the local citizen who is clearly neither the migrant nor the capitalist, both of whom conduct wage arbitrage the local doesn't benefit from? How is that not economic and why is that assumed to be racist? Savannah is almost 50% Black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah,_Georgia#Demographics but they can't employ a workforce that even maybe resembles the local demographics?
Why isn't it rational for the local citizens to see a business skirting the law to get American consumer dollars but avoid American wages and calculate that's not just not to their benefit, its to their detriment?
Is it that these were hundreds of the best battery factory professional engineers in SK or just a cultural match?
How is competence built with any offshoring of a new thing? I think it’s a stretch to say Americans can’t be trained to make a factory.
I think the simplest explanation is the likely one: that costs money, we can avoid paying if we use an underclass that doesn’t follow the rules or share the costs of locals we can undercut.
> Is it that these were hundreds of the best battery factory professional engineers in SK or just a cultural match?
SK has been building battery factories for a while, naturally, they ended up with an experienced talent pool.
> How is competence built with any offshoring of a new thing?
China has the blueprint: enforce knowledge sharing/knowledge transfer to local entities, and provide adequate direction and government funding.
> I think it’s a stretch to say Americans can’t be trained to make a factory.
Experience =/= capability - Americans certainly can be trained, but who's paying (and waiting) for that? Does it make economic sense to do so for a one-and-done project? LG Chem (and its vendor ecosystem) have been building battery factories for well over a decade now, and will continue to use that competency. What would happen to your hypothetical newly-trained, all-American battery-factory builders once the Savannah project is up and running? Especially under this administration that is set on cutting the knees from under renewables.
Okay but they’re so far away and indirectly related they might as well be on a different planet from the POV of locals.
I don’t think race affects the vote for permitting or funding this program that equates to anything more than “my donors treat me very well if I vote for thing so line goes up”. In other words, enabling a underclass is entirely compatible with diverse .gov representatives.
Without knowing the specifics, I would assume two things. Once the factory is working, it will employ local people - either people who already lived there or people who came to the town to work in the factory. It will also support an ecosystem of suppliers, some of whom will build their factories nearby.
The second thing is that usually businesses pay some sort of local tax that supports the town infrastructure, is that not the case there?
In the pov of locals excluded (or let’s say not hired) from the factory, they have less chance of access to a wage and skill development than those on the inside.
It’s possible we didn’t get it built so they just didn’t reach the step where they do a hiring event. It’s also possible they were never going to hire locals, and parts and labor were shipped in with no intent to use the area for anything but a footprint and utilities.
We see what we want to see in these things, and you’re right, it could have had some positives eventually.
> It’s also possible they were never going to hire locals
I find that very unlikely. In Slovakia we have a lot of Korean factories (Kia, Samsung etc) and while the management is Korean, they always hire local workers if available, otherwise agencies hire who's available - in our case workers from Serbia, Ukraine and Central Asia (that's not an unique situation, there is a general shortage of relatively-low-wage workers in the EU so people from outside are brought in to work here full time).
Sleep well, folks—America is saved, one deported factory worker at a time.