QOTD: Shithole Country

In his Substack column, Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman looks at the outrageous ICE raid on the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia and notes that potential foreign investors are thinking twice about building plants in the U.S.  Krugman's conclusion:

"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." (our emphasis)

Krugman asks us to imagine if American workers at an American plant in Mexico had been treated identically, and how we would react: no more investments there.  That's what's going through the minds of foreign companies, even those being extorted by the Trump regime to invest here to avoid trade penalties. 

(photo: ICE detaining South Korean workers at Hyundai plant. Corey Bullard / U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement / AP)