South Korean workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home

Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.

Norms and goalposts aside, what’s the value in adopting a formal policy of harassment against non-criminal, non-violent workers?

Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.

Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.

> Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty.

That's because Congress has been promising "measured enforcement" for 60 years, but in that time the foreign-born population has ballooned from 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century. The goal is big, visible enforcement actions that will disincentivize people from immigrating above the limits set forth in the law.

I fail to see how the percentage of foreign born citizens is a problem in any way.

You're welcome to your belief, but that puts you in an extreme minority not only among Americans, but among people anywhere in the world. It's simply a fact that culture is real, that it shapes the society, and that immigrants bring foreign culture with them in ways that change the destination society. https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.").

I'm a foreigner myself. Even though I grew up in the U.S. since age 5, the cultural difference between me and my wife (whose family immigrated here from Britain before the American Revolution) are stark. I think most Americans have a hard time understanding just how foreign their foreign-born acquaintances are, because many of the differences are below the surface: https://opengecko.com/geckoview/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/C....