Yes, but to the current US regime any battery larger than a AA one is a threat to national security.

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.

There also happens to be a large Korean population in certain areas of Georgia, and many companies have been caught using undocumented workers there.

Take a drive through the streets of Duluth and you will see more signs in Korean than English.

I think more often one can attribute incompetence rather than malice in 99% of cases like this.

911 was an inside job! Or maybe the us of a had an oopsie.

   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.

Yeah, but you are also protected by most rights, such as those against unlawful detention, if you are legally inside the U.S.

Of course, what the law is doesn’t really matter anymore.

> 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").

AWS announced that they'd have an EU 'governed' region with only EU citizens working on it.https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-europea....

I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.

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

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.

> 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.

People do that because VISA credit card brand is spelled all caps on its logo.

They’re too busy turning and burning to study laws!!

Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it.

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.

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..

He does live in the US, as his visa allows. Living somewhere and living somewhere permanently aren't the same thing.

> 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."

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 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.

The belief that the voter base is easily manipulated and does not have earnest opinions is an overtly political belief.

"was exactly opposite"? What is it currently?

Things Red Team worries about:

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.

I think it's important to note that they were friends after a regime change.

> 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.

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.

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.

> Does anyone care or even remotely think about what Bush did as president 20 years ago?

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.

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.

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.

Neither is encouraging for the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Visa is not an acronym.

I agree, it's about converting the state to feudal, apparent regulation, under the table crypto Cyprus fealty pledges.

Two things to bear in mind here:

1) As much as JD Vance and his puppetmaster wishes they were the president, they are not. The tech fascism isn't happening, just regular kind. What you're seeing here with the "deregulation" is just a big fat scoop of plain corruption. Give Herr Führer a nice golden trinket and he deregulates your industry or tariffs your competitors.

2) While they are deregulating heavily, there's absolutely zero sense of "Small Government" going on. You need only look at the oppression of groups like LGBT people. There's no bigger government than controlling which toilets people use or inspecting the genitals of children if they want to participate in sports.

And outside of LGBT rights, just look at the whole situation around Israel. Literal secret police going around arresting people for non-violent protest and simple thoughtcrime.

> Usually fascist gov enlarges the state but in this case they’re shrinking it to loyalists controlling the tech.

Privatization and increasing state authority are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, fascist regimes in the 20th century were very notable for their intense privatization.

Fascist governments often empower superficially private organizations, including giving them power over functions previously done by the state while also blurring the boundaries between state authority and private organizations; that’s just the basics of fascist corporatism.

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.

Sure, but that doesn't seem to apply here whatosever. 475 people isn't 'knowledge transfer.'

You assume ATF is lying at face value, thats fine. Remember that they also have access to paystub info, tax filings, etc, for workers at this plant. They already know who they are looking for. It's plain foolishness to think this was just a random checkpoint.

An appropriate response from the employer is, "We have thorough records on all our employment, we take employment laws very seriously, and we believe to the best of our knowledge that our employees are in proper legal standing in compliance with the laws of the state of Georgia." (update: from the article, they say are committed and cooperating)

Also, Biden-era Dept of Labor accused Hyundai of using child labor throughout its supply chain. UNDER THE AGE OF 14 in an auto factory. But sure, let's presume innocence and assume the feds are the illegal ones on this next turn.

>>“Our investigation found SL Alabama engaged in oppressive child labor by employing young workers under the minimum age of 14, and by employing minors under 16 in a manufacturing occupation,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Kenneth Stripling in Birmingham, Alabama. “Employers are responsible for knowing who is working in their facilities, ensuring that those individuals are of legal working age, and that their employment complies with all federal, state and local labor laws.”

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/WHD/WHD20221011

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.

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.

SBF?