Most laws are little more than temporary opinions. If a law doesn't give you the outcome you wanted, you can always change it. Or you can choose to not enforce it when it would be against your interests.

I believe the point is that it's often impossible to build a factory without sending your experts on site to supervise it. And sometimes you need to send people on a short notice, if something unexpected happens or if the people assigned to that site are not available. Then the people will go in with whatever visas are available on such a short notice, hoping that it's not in the destination country's interests to stop them.

This is fundamentally not about immigration or laws but whether you want to make your country an attractive place to invest in.

There is a difference between enforcing the law (you can't bring workers here on a tourist visa) and raiding a factory putting everyone into jail.

For the purposes of "was it a reasonable action" yes it is important to understand how the US has acted in the past.

> On the Jobs example - do you expect the US government to enforce Chinese law there? Does Jobs violating Chinese law affect what laws the USA can enforce decades later? This makes no sense.

China wanted high-tech manufacturing, Apple provided that, violating a few Chinese laws here and there.

The US now wants high-tech manufacturing, Hyundai wants to provide that, violating a few US laws here and there. Only the US can't decide what it really wants, so starts enforcing laws that are in conflict with Hyundai suppliers quickly flying their staff in to set up the factory. In the end the investment is too high so Hyundai most probably will finish this factory, but what message does this send to other potential investors?

What’s the activity?

It sounds like China facilitates foreign direct investment by making it faster and easier for foreign companies to set up factories and fly in talent to train local workers.

If I were in a Thucidian power struggle and trying to re-shore industry and all the new manufacturing processes developed abroad in the past 40 years I would consider making it easier for allies who want to invest in the US to do the same.

Who said anything about excusing crime? At least dozens of valid visa holders were caught in the dragnet, some appear to have been in a gray area as to what they were allowed to do(the "strawman" in question), and some were truly sub-sub contracted illegals. The latter could have been apprehended without all the spectacle, and the grey area could've been dealt with tactfully without offending our ally, like, "hey you're only allowed to attend stakeholder meetings and not actually touch anything. Consider this your warning".

I'm less sympathetic to "the law is the law" because of the historical context of what's happening.

> [paraphrased] What's with this trend on HN ...painting US law enforcement as Nazis who get off on going after innocent people trying to get by?

it's in the newspaper. A lot of us read it

I think what parent is referring to is the simple fact that the management making the decisions to hire illegal immigrants are rarely ( as in effectively never ) brought on any kind of charges despite it being ostensibly against the law. What we end up with a system, where companies get highly malleable ( and replaceable ) workforce afraid to raise a complaint and zero consequences for people making the actual decisions.

edit: A cynic would argue that the system is in place is working exactly as designed.

What specific action did the US government take against Hyundai here?

Or did they just gut their workforce and claim that was "enough of a penalty".

Historically the US has implicitly condoned these illegal actions by employers by refusing to ever take action against them.

There has only ever been action taken against employees, who sometimes aren't even meaningfully informed that they are breaking the law. (Certainly they often know but the employer always knows)

To be clear those business won’t be punished except for having to find more workers.

It hasn't happened because no President has been stupid enough to deport them en-masse. Even the current guy has admitted that he won't focus on agriculture workers because it would be bad for business.

Nobody is hiring illegal workers to save 10¢. They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.

> "No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened?

Why would it have happened? "All the illegals" have not been kicked out, so what are you basing this statement on?

Bad faith framing.

> a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years

Have you noticed anything different between this year and the last few years?

According to the USDA, around 40% are undocumented: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...

That seems like enough to have a measurable impact on food prices if they stop showing up?

To be clear, not arguing for or against enforcement, just pointing out that the data seems to suggest this as a factor to be taken into consideration.

If I understand the case with Hyundai correctly, the problem is not that people work without proper visas, but the interpretation of visa terms by ICE, which means that if they are to meet deportation KPIs, this may impact those who are working legally. The only racist angle to that will be if ICE is using racial profiling to pick the targets (for non-American it’s actually quite uncomfortable to see racism popping out of nowhere in many conversations, just like in your comment; we know that the unscientific and harmful concept of race is somehow important to Americans, but why are you always paying so much attention to it?). Why the only? Because ag workers in many countries are foreigners on ag visas, it is common, it is about cheap labor, labor code violations and sometimes human trafficking, and it has nothing to do with race, just with economic situation in workforce donor countries.

The process can be orderly. I live in a town with a couple of commercial orchardist, and they get their apples picked by workers on temporary work visas every year for decades now. These commercial orchards are apparently economically viable, even though they are smaller than a typical commercial orchard in Washington state, for example.

As with tariffs, I can imagine this situation being less orderly or predictable now. But I've seen both theory and practice work as intended.

A countries agricultural base being dependent on undocumented migrant workers is bad and should be corrected. However simply deporting all the migrants overnight with no further action doesn't fix the underlying problem, doesn't help the industry, and doesn't help the consumers.

All things being equal, people will generally choose to follow the law. So figure out why the migrants and their employers are choosing not to follow the law and fix that.

Comparative advantage.

Consider this vague hypothetical, because I'm not American and don't care about the specifics:

Country A, average wage X; country B, minimum wage for legal residents 2X. People from A can on average get a pay rise by working in B while undercutting legal residents of B. Citizens of B then get the stuff cheaper than they otherwise would have, but also might not be as easy to employ.

Are current employment stats accurate? As in do they tell the right picture or is this a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? Lots of people say it's the later, and unfortunately I'm not qualified to explore anyone's arguments.

I suppose that's fine if that is your solution. It's easy for me to say "things should probably cost more" because I can afford it.

If I'm allowed to fret a bit for my fellow countrymen, I confess I am saddened that they will have to decide between food or rent in the coming months/years. When my single mom raised my sister and I she had to make that same choice at times.

Ah, but you see the thing is here in the land of the free, we consider this type of thinking to be "Communism" and must be purged without any further thought.

There's plenty of food that can't be harvested by machine yet, and probably won't be anytime in the near future.

Not everything can be harvested with big machines. Pretty much all tree fruits, asparagus, peppers, etc are harvested by hand. If you want blueberries or strawberries that look nice enough to be sold to consumers whole, those are hand-harvested every time.

Yeah but you still need people to do it and paying a bit better is not going to get an immediate response of many tens of thousands of workers to quit their jobs to do seasonal and migratory work across multiple states living out of vans and campers with no insurance and increased workload and injury rate. Many crops are just going to rot, output will be lower, and prices will still rise. At some point years down the line sure things might improve and settle out and more US people can fill a larger number of those roles, but it will not happen quickly, especially not for token wage increases, and will likely never gain the workforce numbers that migratory farm workers offer who travel not just across the US but also throughout Central and South America. A US citizen is never going to work in Mexico or Brazil during off seasons for US crops because it basically represents a net-zero or negative wage converting it back into US currency to come live back here.

Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits.

Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.

If UK's experience is anything to go by: the fraction of produce left in the fields to rot, unpicked, will go WAY up.

Labour cost is one thing, total useful production volume is another.

Directly yes but there are knock on effects. What you say is true only when labor is not scarce.

The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.

Don't forget RFK wanting to round up addicts for 'wellness farms'.

The citizenry has to plan for a future in their home economy. That make labor intensive minimum wage jobs a bad option if you need to hold two jobs to get ahead. Migrants can tough it out for a few annual trips and return with more savings than they could generate at home.

No, they would be paying lower net taxes. US citizens are eligible for government services.

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<< The distinction between legal and illegal immigration is essentially arbitrary.

Most lines are. It is a line we agreed on as a society. Just for a quick comparison, 21 is a legal drinking age in US ( going after less incendiary example just to prove a point ). But, and here is my subtle point, either those are real lines or there are not. If they are real, they should be enforced and if they are not, they should be nulled.

<< We can and should welcome far more people than we do.

Before I offer a reflexive response, I think it is worth to task a simple question:

why?

<< Deporting people who are not violent and contributing to the economy because they have incorrect paperwork isn't a win for anyone but politicians and racists.

That is amusingly neat way oh framing it, but if it only it was that simple. I want to argue against this framework, but not before you give me an idea about how you justify the why in previous section. I struggle to understand this particular perspective.

> Illegal immigration is not a crime of morality, it's basically one of economics.

Then why do you immediately shift into questions of moral judgement, and your moral judgement of how "welcoming" people should be? This politics is garbled.

New immigrants lower the leverage of domestic workers, and the leverage of previous immigrants, by intention. The myth that they move on to become mandarins that are too good for those jobs comes from people who never had to work those jobs. Black people didn't move anywhere except to even worse, less secure work.

I watched a South filled with black servants serving everyone's food and doing all the hard work, turned into a South filled with black people who have $0 worth outside of the equity in their cars, and all of that (horrible shit-)work being completely closed to them because they didn't speak a foreign language.

At the same time, especially in the north, I watched tons of terrible jobs filled by the barely English speaking Indian "relatives" of the people who opened franchises, and who kick back half of their checks to these "uncles", another quarter of that check goes back in remittances, and they get to live like kefala Emerati slaves.

It is dystopic to consider this the compassionate choice. It's purely a matter of trend following when the people who profit from this stuff also do the media work to set the trends. The "left" were against all of this in the 90s as a central principle.

Cesar Chavez gave speeches about the "wetbacks" being brought in to undercut striking workers. As a Black person born in Chicago, I was part of the Great Migration that was brought in to undercut European immigrants who were fighting for their labor rights. It doesn't make me "bad," or my family "bad." The accusation that people who object to it are demonizing immigrants is an intentional distortion and a marketing strategy for consistent hypercapitalist laissez-faire politics.

I miss when "liberals" didn't have Reagan's policies. But they're a natural consequence of their having become extraordinarily wealthy from them.

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There are real benefits to power staying with the people and not faceless ( or in this case, as it were, facefull ) government. I get that people discuss this in extremes, but surely there is some middle ground between NJ level craziness and, say, taxless utopia.