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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26116 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Does nobody have respect for the rule of law? This seems related to the concept of incentivizing lying that came up again in the recent ACX review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase

If you have rules and laws and you consistently don't enforce them, then you reward and incentivize rule breakers and liars. We have immigration laws. First and foremost, we should enforce the immigration laws. Then, after doing so, if we find out that we don't have the optimal level of immigration then we should change the number of immigrants we allow.

If foreign manufacturers are forming plans to build facilities in the United States, they should form their plans with the intention of hiring primarily locals, with whatever management or trainers they bring in having legal visas. These plans should involve carefully screening hired laborers to make sure they are legal. If their plans have already factored in plans to hire illegals but are worried about getting raided and choose not to, then good. They should either reformulate their plans to follow the law, or take their business elsewhere.

If we establish a precedent of enforcing immigration laws, then investors will take them into account and the economy will equilibrize accordingly. If we then end up with more American factories, or foreign factories with American workers because a hole was opened up for them to fill, then good, and we have more jobs for Americans. If not, and there ends up being a shortage of factories because we genuinely need the foreign expertise, then we'll be able to observe that and stick some more visas in the immigration budget. And then they'll be legal, and we'll have control over how many there are.

In no world is "make harsh laws and then fail to enforce them because they are too harsh" the correct decision.

Does nobody have respect for the rule of law?

Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.

So far, Trump has been less of a Kantian paladin who enforces the laws of the land whatever the consequences may be, and more of a petty tyrant who uses "I am just enforcing the law" as an excuse to punish his enemies.

  • You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.
  • You are employing illegals on your farm or in your hotel? Don't worry, wise king Donald has decided that he is fine with that, nobody will arrest your workers. (Also, as illegals lack social security numbers, I am wondering how you can even pay them without breaking federal labor law.)

In some cases, Trump seems to be targeting cities for harsh ICE enforcement simply because they did not vote for him.

Is it possible that Hyundai was blatantly cheating with their visa? Certainly.

But my money is on them being targeted because CW-wise, electrical cars (except for Tesla) are a technology of Trump's opponents, or because South Korea has lately not spread their ass-cheeks to Trump's satisfaction.

The South Koreans now probably wish they had built their factory in a more reliable partner country like China instead.

Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.

Reuters: Workers say Korea Inc was warned about questionable US visas before Hyundai raid

Many South Korean workers were sent to the U.S. on questionable documents despite their misgivings and warnings about stricter U.S. immigration enforcement before last week's raid on a Hyundai site, according to workers, officials and lawyers.

For years, South Korean companies have said they struggle to obtain short-term work visas for specialists needed in their high-tech plants in the United States, and had come to rely on a grey zone of looser interpretation of visa rules under previous American administrations.

When that changed in the early days of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, some workers were denied entry to the United States under statuses that did not fully allow work, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen workers from various companies, government and company officials, and immigration lawyers.

Many of the people arrested were skilled workers who were sent to the U.S. to install equipment at the near-complete factory on a visa waiver programme, or B-1 business traveller visas, which largely did not allow work, three people said.

"It's extremely difficult to get an H-1B visa, which is needed for the battery engineers. That's why some people got B-1 visas or ESTA," said Park Tae-sung, vice chairman of Korea Battery Industry Association, referring to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.

One person who works at the Georgia site told Reuters that this had long been a routine practice. "There was a red flag ... They bypass the law and come to work," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

LG Energy Solution is working with Hyundai to build the factory.

Officials at LGES were aware of the long-standing issues and some of the companies' employees and contractors were reluctant to travel to the United States for fear of being denied entry, two of the sources said.

@CertainlyWorse @faul_sname @JarJarJedi

B-1 visas do allow some types of work - I bet LGES argues that the workers were there "to install, service, or repair equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company", or "to train U.S. workers to perform these services", both of which are permissible activities under a B-1 visa per CBP's own documentation provided that the workers do not receive compensation from a US source.

If the workers did receive compensation from a US source, that means someone fucked up somewhere, but my guess is what actually happened is that CBP disagrees with LGES about whether the activities these workers engaged in qualify as installing, servicing, or repairing equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company, and decided that the appropriate course of action was to chain these workers up and make a self-congratulatory press release about it, and that we will hear any follow-ups about the outcomes of this raid in terms of findings of actual wrongdoing.

(Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA)

You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.

I've had this idea bouncing in my brain for some time now, what is the purpose of gang identification tattoos/color matched clothes/hand signs. It's ingroup signaling. Ingroup signaling for a criminal organization. Want to go after gangs? Make gang tattoos illegal, make "wearing the gang uniform" illegal. That way you deny one of the primary benefits of being in a gang. Respect.

This is pretty much anti-liberal, though. People should have freedom of association.

Germany kind of did this for an infamous gang called NSDAP. Display their symbols in public, you get a fine. Of course, this also means that we constantly get told by Americans how horribly unfree we are.

And it does not stop the fascists from rallying if they simply pick a different symbol or color. In my opinion, the main benefit was always more symbolic -- victims of the previous iteration of fascism might have to endure similar ideas and rhetoric, but they at least get spared of seeing the swastika banners again.

For gangs, this will simply get you into a cat and mouse game. Gangs will adopt to using more deniable symbols. And what do you do about a Yakuza missing a finger? Tell them that they must wear gloves in public?

In the current political climate, this would also be extended to the opponents political groups the minute it is passed. Neither side will stop at just banning MS-13, either they will want to ban the confederate flag or the trans flag.

This is pretty much anti-liberal, though. People should have freedom of association.

You know, I guess I'm fine with anti-liberal. People shouldn't have freedom of association with a gang.

And what do you do about a Yakuza missing a finger? Tell them that they must wear gloves in public?

Infinite jail time. Yakuza tats? Forced to have them removed or stay in jail, same for the random MS-whatever tats or tears on the face tats. The tats are a costly belonging symbol, tune the cost to infinity. They've already banned the confederate flag and decided it's open season on people wearing trump hats.

And it does not stop the fascists from rallying if they simply pick a different symbol or color.

Please don't tell me none of them came up with the idea to use the Quadruple Progress Flag.

I'm not going to praise Trump for his commitment to equal enforcement of laws. But the problem is not the enforcement here but the lack of enforcement elsewhere. The problem is the past decade of non-enforcement giving the company an expectation that the laws were a formality that they shouldn't take seriously, and giving all of the other companies a free pass so that they all have to skirt the laws to remain competitive.

I agree that this is a problem, but the solution is more enforcement (and more predictable enforcement), not less.

Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.

"Meaningfully" here covers a lot of ground. Doing disallowed work while here on a B-1 is violating the law, whether you think it's meaningful or not. It's fairly obnoxious to arrest bunches of employees who likely had no knowledge that their employer was using the wrong visa, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a violation of the law.

You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.

This does not appear to be a real example, but a reference to Abrego Garcia, who was not here on a visa at all.

Would you put up money on a bet that at least half of the people arrested were unambiguously violating the rules of their visas?

Which side? I'd guess that more than 0 but less than 10% of those arrested were not violating the terms of their visa. It's still obnoxious to do a raid; I'd expect violations like this by a corporation (especially when they were countenanced by the previous administration) to be handled via a warning/demand to the corporation. Of course, if they were warned and just didn't listen... there probably isn't any escalation that isn't obnoxious.

I would not be surprised if half of the workers were arguably violating the terms of their visas, but I expect the modal case here looks like "a worker for one of Hyundai's subcontractors was here on a B1 to suprvise the installation of equipment, and demonstrated to a worker on site how the machine was supposed to be hooked up when they're technically only allowed to describe" not like "Hyundai shipped in 500 Koreans on tourist visas to do unskilled construction work building the factory". In other words, I expect that the majority of detainees were authorized to work in the US, but I would be unsurprised if some were doing types of work they were not authorized to do, though I expect the majority were at least ambiguously authorized to do the sort of work they were doing.

Under my model I would be unsurprised if e.g. DOJ and Korean company disagree about whether work should fall under "contracted after-sales service" or "supervising installation of equipment". But under my model "chain them all up" is not a reasonable response to "people who are not flight risks were doing normal business things but we think they might have technically violated the terms of their visa, we'll find out in court".

I am unsure if there are any good and timely metrics but I would be quite surprised to see e.g. table 42d here showing 475 more (or even half that more) noncitizen enforcement returns to South Korea in 2025 than in 2024 - for reference the current latest data is 713 returns in 2022. (The latest available year here is 2022, so it might be a while before 2025 daya shows up). And my read is that DHS would enforce if they have even a vaguely plausible case of visa violation, so I think absence of this particular evidence would be evidence of absence of such a case.

There might be less janky ways to operationalize this, I'm open if you have ideas.

I was reading a translated Twitter thread by a South Korean experienced in EPCM and while I can't find it now there were a couple of things he said that stood out:

  1. It was difficult to quickly train up workers to operate these newly created factories in an economically feasible timeframe to be profitable
  2. American wages were higher than South Korean wages which made it difficult to turn a profit on the EPCM because of early bidding wars for the tender from Hyundai. On top of that, the factory gets more efficiency out of 'Kimchi warriors' (김치워리어) that are willing to work long hours and 6 days per week over American workers.
  3. Historically SK workers had been able to get in to the US on the ESTA Business/Training visas even though it wasn't appropriate for the factory line work/other labor that the Koreans were doing.
  4. Visa laws suddenly enforced due to new administration and Pika? ensues.

Do we want to live in a country where the government ferociously enforces all laws unconditionally to the letter? Or should the executive have some discretion over how sharply it enforces them?

I can appreciate the argument that if we don't want a law enforced so rigidly we should fix the law, not let the executive be lawless. But I think the failure modes there are probably worse than just allowing the executive some discretion.

Some discretion is okay. But too much creates a lack of feedback. If you have a terrible law that is stupid and leads to bad results and then enforce it 1% of the time, then it becomes a tool of tyranny for corrupt administrations to selectively persecute people they dislike for other reasons and use the law as an excuse. And the average person who keeps their head down won't get targeted, won't complain, and might not even notice. If a terrible law were enforced 90% of the time then people would realize it's terrible and throw a huge fuss and the democratically elected officials would be forced to fix it. If it's almost never enforced it can sit on the books unnoticed until it can be weaponized. There are way too many laws, nobody knows all of them, and the majority of law knowledge comes from word-of-mouth. Congress could have passed a law in 1982 saying "It's illegal to own a rubber chicken" and then literally never enforced it and it's just sitting in a book somewhere waiting to be weaponized. Would you know if they had done that? Or they passed a law saying "It's illegal to own an object with these properties:" and there's some hundred paragraphs of convoluted nonsense which eventually translates to apply only to rubber chickens if you're a legal expert. I suppose if you're a company trying to start a rubber chicken factory and you hire lawyers to go over all the laws the lawyer might notice the law and tell you about it, but they'd also tell you that it's never enforced or interpreted that way and all the other rubber chicken factories ignore it, so you're fine.

But it's a weapon, and it exists because nobody notices or cares because it's not enforced. A principle that laws should be enforced most of the time prevents these weapons from sitting around at the enforcer's convenience. We should not live in a world where everybody breaks laws every day without realizing it, but selective enforcement allows this to persist. The failure modes of too much enforcement are temporarily worse than too little, but it brings transparency and forces the lawmakers to fix it, making a better long term scenario.

Do we want to live in a country where the government ferociously enforces all laws unconditionally to the letter? Or should the executive have some discretion over how sharply it enforces them?

The alternative is living in a country where everyone is guilty, so the government can justify targeted persecutions by saying the persecuted were violating the laws.

Staffing a factory with hundreds of foreign workers on visas which don't allow them to work doesn't seem like an appropriate situation to apply executive discretion. This isn't a confused tourist jaywalking, this is industrial (literally) scale immigration fraud.

Some laws that exist clearly go by the unstated rule that says "for display purposes only." At best when it comes to liberality, laws exist to make you think twice before breaking them; not prevent them from ever being broken. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that when it comes to immigration though, that people don't run afoul of American laws with ease. And actual legal immigrants have it harder than anyone in this regard.

This. Even if one thinks that it’s a good or neutral thing to staff this plant with foreigners, that’s not the scenario and it’s not what tax payers subsidized BILLIONS for.

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