Americans are Afraid of the World

The spectacle of US immigration police handcuffing more than 300 Koreans at a Hyundai plant in Georgia was yet another reminder of America's bewilderingly two-faced attitude toward the rest of the world. 

State governments across the US have offices dedicated to bringing in foreign investment, and you can bet the state of Georgia did a ton of work to land that battery plant. But setting up a factory in a foreign country is no easy task, so companies that do this need to send lots of people into the US. They complain that the US is extremely stingy with the visas they need to do this, so, it seems, they regularly break US law in the course of trying to invest in the US. (According to Hyundai, most of the people detained were in fact complying with US law, but that's just the idiocy of Trump's ICE in action; people quoted in many news stories admit that technical violations happen regularly.)

The problem is that what many Americans seem to want, a vibrant economy with lots of manufacturing jobs but no foreigners, is simply impossible. Pushed by their voters to "create jobs," states court foreign companies, only to be attacked on the other side for bringing in foreigners. It's ludicrous, or would be if it weren't so harmful.

We could, if we really wanted to, greatly decrease our contact with the outside world. But we would pay a very high price in vitality. We would have a poorer, aging, lagging, sagging country. Many things would soar in price, starting with fresh vegetables. Our tech industry would lose its global lead. Social Security will be bankrupt in a decade. Etc.

And yet millions of Americans don't seem to care; they are just in a rage over the number of Koreans and Indians they see around them and seem ready to burn their own house down to drive them out. Polls show that voters are turning against Trump's immigration policies, and the number saying immigration is a good thing is rising, so maybe things will be better in a few years. But the underlying forces that brought us to this sorry state – racism, nativism, fear of globalization, a deep suspicion that the arrival of foreigners is somehow an elite plot against the rest of us – are still out there and will come back.