The essence of President Donald Trump’s pitch to the American people last year was simple: they could have it both ways. They could have a powerful, revitalised economy and “mass deportations now”. They could build new factories and take manufacturing jobs back from foreign competitors as well as expel every person who, in their view, didn’t belong in the United States. They could live in a “golden age” of plenty – and seal it away from others outside the country with a closed, hardened border.
Trump told Americans there were no trade-offs. As the saying goes, they could have their cake and eat it, too. Even better, eating the cake would, on its own, produce more cake – no need for new ingredients or the skill, time and labour necessary to make something new.
Donald Trump reviews the guard of honour during his ceremonial welcome in Windsor, England, on Wednesday.Credit: Jonathan Brady/WPA Pool/Getty Images
In reality, this was a fantasy. Americans could have a strong, growing economy, which requires immigration to bring in new people and fill demand for labour, or they could finance a deportation force and close the border to everyone but a small, select few. It was a binary choice. Theirs could be an open society or a closed one, but there was no way to get the benefits of the former with the methods of the latter.
Millions of Americans embraced the fantasy. Now, about eight months into Trump’s second term, the reality of the situation is inescapable. As promised, Trump began a campaign of mass deportation. Our cities are crawling with masked federal agents, snatching anyone who looks “illegal” to them – a bit of racial profiling that has, for now, been sanctioned by the Supreme Court. The jobs, however, haven’t arrived. There are fewer manufacturing jobs than there were in 2024, thanks in part to the president’s tariffs and, well, his immigration policies.
We got a vivid glimpse of what it looks like for harsh immigration policies to undermine growth and investment this month, in Georgia, when immigration officials detained hundreds of South Korean nationals working at a battery plant in a small town outside Savannah. On September 4, a large detachment of federal, state and local law enforcement descended on an electric vehicle battery plant operated by Hyundai and LG Electronics. The raid, which the administration described as one of the largest-ever single-location enforcement operations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at just four people. Officials detained nearly 500, the large majority of whom were South Korean workers brought to the plant to assist with its construction.
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While it appears that some workers had entered the US illegally or were present on expired visas, lawyers for others say their clients had the legal right to work in America. The workers, who were held for more than a week, described terrible conditions.
“Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink,” The Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper in South Korea, reported. “The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours.”
The consequences of this raid go beyond the trauma inflicted on the workers. The South Korean public is furious, not the least because it came just weeks after the country’s government promised to pour billions of dollars into new investments in the US. “If US authorities detain hundreds of Koreans in this manner, almost like a military operation, how can South Korean companies investing in the US continue to invest properly in the future?” asked Cho Jeongsik, a lawmaker from the liberal governing Democratic Party.
