A Lawless Nation

Friends don’t let friends visit America

A relatively short post today, involving a story you may not have heard about. But it’s a very important story — indeed, arguably it amounts to a significant international crisis.

You see, General Motors has been building a factory complex in Mexico. But last week Mexican government agents descended on the facility, arresting hundreds of U.S. citizens who had been working on the project, claiming that they were in Mexico illegally. Many, probably most, were in fact there legally. But they had trouble explaining this, because the agents didn’t speak English.

So those U.S. citizens were arrested. And not just arrested: they were placed in shackles and imprisoned under terrible conditions. When the Mexican government finally realized that it had made a mistake, it sent the Americans home but kept them shackled until they reached the departure airport. Incredibly, the Mexican president initially backed the raid and has never had the grace to offer a full-throated apology for what happened.

OK, if you don’t recognize this story, it might be because I changed a few facts. This wasn’t a General Motors project, it was a battery factory being built by the Korean auto company Hyundai. The events didn’t take place in Mexico; they took place in America, specifically in Georgia. The arrested employees were South Korean citizens, not Americans, and they were unable to communicate because none of the ICE agents making the raid spoke Korean. But everything else about the story was exactly as I described it.

The reason I pulled the identity switcheroo was to help readers imagine how we would react if something like this happened to Americans trying to do business abroad. There would be a wave of outrage, coupled with demands for retaliation — maybe even demands that we invade Mexico. And you would expect many companies — not just American corporations — to reconsider any plans they might have had to invest in Mexico. Who wants to do business in a lawless country where anyone visiting is at risk of being chained up and imprisoned?

Why imagine that the South Korean reaction is any different? South Korea isn’t what Donald Trump would call a “shithole country.” It is, in fact, one of the greatest economic success stories in history, a nation that was poorer than Haiti in the early 1960s and now has a European-level standard of living. It’s a manufacturing powerhouse: The reason Hyundai was building that factory was that the Koreans are very good at manufacturing, often better than we are.

Oh, and South Korea is or was an important U.S. ally. Not long ago relations between the two nations were good enough that we signed a free trade agreement, although Trump has ripped up that agreement without bothering to explain why solemn U.S. promises apparently don’t matter anymore.

And the South Koreans are, by all accounts, every bit as outraged as you might expect. One editorial, flagged by Daniel Drezner, declared

The sight of our workers being led out in chains resembles images of African slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries being dragged out by their owners.

How did this happen? Even if there had been good reason to believe that a significant number of the South Koreans at the site were violating the terms of their visas — which they weren’t — civilized nations don’t suddenly arrest hundreds of citizens of an allied nation without warning and place them in chains. Why not contact Hyundai about the alleged issue? Why not notify the South Korean government?

As far as we can tell, what happened in Georgia was a symptom of ICE running out of control. The agency has been told by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, to meet a quota of 3,000 arrested immigrants a day. So when its agents raided a facility full of nonwhite people, it just grabbed them, chained them, and locked them up.

The Hyundai raid hasn’t received much attention in the U.S. news media, which is arguably understandable given everything else going on. But the diplomatic and economic fallout will be immense. Trump has been saying that his policies have brought in $17 Musks trillion in foreign investment, which would be an absurd number even if America were behaving like a normal country with rule of law. But it’s even more absurd given the Hyundai incident.

I’m not a business executive, but if I were making decisions for a multinational corporation I’d be really hesitant about making large investments in a nation where foreigners never know whether they will in effect be kidnapped by masked thugs who supposedly work for the government but are clearly running amok. I don’t know about you, but I’d be strongly tempted to consider such a nation a shithole country.

MUSICAL CODA

The same song, two versions: first acoustic, then a vigorous performance on some TV show you can’t watch anymore.