I wasn’t going to write about the Hyundai drama again in The Morning Dump this week, but I can’t help it. There’s just so much there to think about in the context of the larger policy goals of this administration.
The last time a White House disrupted this many norms, it was actually another wealthy New Yorker in the White House. The biggest difference might be that FDR inherited urgent twin emergencies (the rise of Germany and the Great Depression), and President Trump, arguably, is making emergencies out of some very real (immigration, manufacturing decline), but probably less exigent issues.
What the Hyundai raid revealed was that trying all of your policies simultaneously can have negative consequences. Initially, the “success” of the raid in finding individuals violating immigration rules was heralded as a big achievement for the administration.
Now, with the plant being delayed, it seems to be butting up against the President’s goal to bring more production and investment here. The bigger risk might be beyond our borders. The President has long held the position that we need to counter China, which is fairly bipartisan as positions go, but what if this pushes more of the country’s allies into deals with Chinese companies?
I usually end the week on an up note, but I’m going to end it on an icky one. Be prepared.
Maybe Building Advanced Plants In The United States Isn’t A Great Idea For Everyone
The Hyundai Metaplant battery facility outside of Savannah, Georgia, was supposed to be a huge win for local politicians–mostly Republican ones–even though it had its roots in a policy from a Democratic President.
I think when we look at what the Biden White House did and compare it to the Trump White House, the ambition wasn’t that much different in scale, but the timing was. For all the talk of ICE bans and the like, the Inflation Reduction Act was relatively gradual, offering both incentives for construction and penalties for avoidance, but both over a long scale.
The Trump Administration is, constitutionally, limited to a single term, and seems to be doing the full Michelle Yeoh. Sometimes, this works. Our institutions are sclerotic at best and incapable of making change at worst. Being able to ignore norms to try everything isn’t always bad, and there’s an argument to be made that FDR also pushed as far as he could within the then-contemporary understanding of executive branch power.
And sometimes priorities clash. This is what happened at the Hyundai-LGES Metaplant site last week. The goal of restricting immigration (both illegal and, in some parts of the Republican Party, legal immigration) and arresting enough people to fulfill a quota crashed headfirst into the goal of encouraging advanced production in the United States.
It’s important to point out that this raid didn’t wasn’t focused on people who crossed a border illegally with the intention to stay, but workers who were essentially invited here by Georgia’s leadership (which is Republican, btw) to help set up this plant, as NBC points out:
Most of the detained South Koreans either were engineers or they worked in after-sales services and installation, said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who is representing at least seven of them. He said they were in the U.S. under various visa programs that South Koreans and other foreign nationals have long used to do business in the country in the face of U.S. bureaucratic delays and murky regulations.
Sarah Park, president of the Korean American Coalition, said Monday that the detained workers should not be blamed for the challenges companies face trying to secure the proper U.S. visas for employees who are key to getting new facilities up and running.]
What’s somewhat curious here is that the President’s own environmental policies were making an already flattening EV adoption curve that much flatter. America, at some level, wants battery plants, but if you’re not actively encouraging EV adoption, the investment is a bit more questionable.
This raid made it that much more of a tough sell (not to mention increased steel and aluminum costs and other tariff-related cost challenges). The White House has been in backtrack mode, and there is a move from South Korea to get Congress to approve more of the kinds of visas necessary to get these plants built.
But that’s its own problem. These types of advanced plants require specialized workers to install certain equipment, and few of those workers exist here. The goal from the Biden White House was to encourage more battery production here so Americans can get the training, but that doesn’t work as well if you’re arresting the people doing the training .
That’s the point The Washington Post is making in a story about how this threatens to derail President Trump’s industrial policy:
Building plants to manufacture the batteries and related computing chips for electric cars requires very specific technical knowledge, according to Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, former chief global economist at Ford Motor Co.
“You have certain positions that are very, very technical,” said Hughes-Cromwick, now a senior visiting fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way. “These are people who have installed the equipment before. … It’s really ludicrous to think that we’re not going to have foreign-born workers as part of our workforce as we get manufacturing back on our soil.”
Battery plants require electromechanical processes that are far more complex than those at traditional car assembly plants, with proprietary industrial systems that most U.S. workers are not trained to operate. The engineers designing and building the plant need to have deep experience controlling potential contaminants, mixing volatile chemicals, and installing equipment that can handle voltage loads exponentially higher than those at legacy factories.
If you were curious, Hyundai CEO Jose Muñoz is saying that this will delay the plant by months. This isn’t necessarily going to discourage Hyundai, which is already too far along, but it’s a warning to anyone else who wants to build a plant like this here.
Congress is capable of correcting this issue by issuing more visas, but not all of the Republican Party is currently on board with this idea.
The United States Has A Friend In Mexico, Maybe
I generally think that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has done a decent job of handling the back-and-forth with the Trump White House, and that includes siding with the United States on tariffs with Asian nations.
How is China taking that news? They’re not super pumped about it, according to Bloomberg:
China urged Mexico to “think twice” before levying tariffs, a warning that could signal Beijing’s willingness to retaliate over a move it sees as giving into demands from the US.
“Any unilateral tariff increase by Mexico, even within the framework of WTO rules, would be seen as appeasement and compromise toward unilateral bullying,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Thursday. “We urge the Mexican side to exercise extreme caution and consider carefully before taking any actions.”
If you’re between a rock and a hard place, and that hard place is thousands of miles across an ocean and the rock defines your northern border, I think you go with the rock.
There’s something that Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa said this week that also makes me believe Mexico is on the right track here:
The company, which has a large manufacturing footprint in the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Canada, is holding a “very productive exchange of ideas” with President Donald Trump’s administration, Filosa said in a Sept. 11 interview during the Kepler Cheuvreux Autumn Conference.
The CEO said the tariff environment was not yet 100 percent defined, but it is “getting clearer and clearer and we are ready to act.”
“Our capacity in the United States can accommodate important industrial moves. So we are still working with the administration to create the final scenario and very soon we’ll be able to communicate around that,” Filosa said.
Stellantis (and GM and Ford) need some relief on production in Canada and Mexico in order to survive, even if a lot of production shifts back to the United States. My guess here, and it’s just a guess, is that in the run-up to a USMCA II, Back In The Habit Of Being Normal Trading Partners, that manufacturers will get some sort of reprieve, and that this will benefit Mexico to a degree.
China Is Waiting In The Wings
While Chinese automakers are likely not going to expand in Mexico immediately, suppliers were all over the IAA show in Munich this week, as Nikkei Asia reports:
IAA Mobility 2025, which runs in Munich until Sunday, is notable not just for the record 116 Chinese auto exhibitors, but for the many parts makers and technology suppliers that aim to set up or expand production and partnerships in the European Union.
After showing the sensors, Jason Ji, research and development director at Zhejiang Wodeer Technology Group, told Nikkei about the workings of oil pumps that are essential for lubricating traction motors and gearboxes in electric vehicles.
While the sensors and pumps are already in mass production in China, Wodeer is preparing to open assembly lines to build them locally at a newly acquired plant and office building in the small German town of Adelberg near Stuttgart.
Alliances are shifting, and it means countries will have to decide if they’re better off sticking with traditional partners like the United States or inviting in more Chinese manufacturing.
GM Shuts Down Building After Employees Contract Legionnaires’ Disease
One of my weird fears is contracting Legionnaires’ disease from walking under a window A/C unit in New York City. If you walk around the city long enough, some errant moisture will fall on you. When it happens, I scream out: “I just got Legionnaires’ Disease” and cover my body in hand sanitizer.
I was reminded of this phobia by a recent report in the Detroit Free Press about GM closing one of its Warren buildings after two people tested positive for the pneumonia-like bacterial condition:
“GM was notified late Wednesday, Sept. 10, by the Macomb County Health Department that two Cole residents had tested positive for Legionnaires’ disease,” Kuhnen said. “Out of an abundance of caution, GM took immediate action to close the building and has ordered comprehensive third-party testing for the site.”
She said GM’s regular bacteria testing at Cole has revealed there are no issues, and, at this time, the building has not been confirmed as the source.
“The health and safety of our employees is our continued priority,” Kuhnen said.
Gross.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
What’s a good song for this Friday? Why not “What The Hell” from Canadian treasure Avril Lavigne… if only for the sweet Panther burnout.
The Big Question
What are you afraid of?
Top photo: Hyundai
Counterpoint: Yes it is, at least in the context of government. “Move fast and break things” is a shit policy when peoples’ lives are at stake. One reason it takes forever for the government to do things is that when it screws up, it screws up at a scale most people can’t comprehend. The government is an order of magnitude larger than any corporation in the US. Mistakes are also an order of magnitude worse (at least, maybe more given the critical nature of many government functions).
Government policy should be designed and enacted with the greatest care, not the whim of a “leader” with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old. Which is also why our government was designed to prevent any one person from holding too much power. Shame SCOTUS took a giant dump on checks and balances lately.
Oh, forgot this:
Whereas Trump is both of those emergencies. Whatever similarities there might be in their methods, their ideologies are polar opposites.
This is what drives me so effing crazy when people talk about government in business terms. The primary purpose of a business is to maximize profit while following the law (although here in the US we seem to have either made the laws irrelevant for businesses or not care when they break them) whereas the primary purpose of a functional government should be providing the most good to the most people.
Exactly. NASA doesn’t show a profit. DOD doesn’t show a profit. Bureau of Indian Affairs doesn’t show a profit. Why should USPS or any other part of government?
I am afraid my late-career collection of freelance gigs is going to fall apart before I am ready to retire. I am getting close to my original retirement savings number, but with inflation I think I need to increase it by 30%. Then I also need things to do if I am not working for money – I will not be a good retired person… so much to stress about!
I also worry about my family – especially the extended family that is in or recently graduated from college – it is a jobs desert out there.
Similar situation with me and my wife. I’m in my late 40’s, aiming to either retire or semi-retire when I’m 55. We are fortunate in that our house is paid for, we have been saving and investing for years and live cheap. But I have no doubt that if I lose the job I have that I will not be able to find another one in this field. ALL of the people I know ranging from my friends to former colleagues who have been laid off are not even getting responses. And on top of it all, as my career has been in the creative industry, AI will likely take more and more of a role in that area.
My backup plan is that I work on a lot of vintage stereo systems and even though I don’t advertise stay pretty busy. If I got serious about it I could probably do ok there. But I just need to somehow make it at the current job until I turn 55- if I can hold on.
Its bad out there. Really bad.
I am afraid that midterms go his way thanks to all the gerrymandering.
I don’t really trust the media anymore, but there have been suggestions that the point source that the ICE raid on the Hyundai plant was triggered by a (R) candidate for some Georgia state legislature position. She wanted to make a big stink about the ~500 jobs that were held by people who looked different from her holding jobs that she felt should be held by people who looked more like her.
How much money did these 500 short term jobs bring to her district? Hotels, restaurants, rental cars…. likely all on Hyundai’s dime.
If Republicans weren’t able to only think 5 minutes into the future they wouldn’t be able to think at all.
It was candidate for Representative Tori Branum that was outed by multiple sources as the instigator. She later came out and admitted she made the calls.
What am I afraid of? Airplanes, cars, elevators, bugs, cancer, everything in the ocean, trains, quicksand, my teeth all falling out at once for no reason, guns, knives, power tools, literally everything bad that could possibly happen to my kids (especially the things I haven’t even thought of yet). Etc., etc., etc.
Anxiety is annoying and mine gets worse every year. Hooray!
I’m afraid of this major life change decision I’m about to make. The dice have been rolled…
God speed, Parkso!
Pray to Nuffle.
Good Luck!
Third Way is a “better things aren’t possible” think tank. They are not center-left.
Getting rid of all the immigrants he isn’t married to, killing EVs and renewable energy, looks pretty consistent to me.
I am afraid of how quickly so many people buy into the idea that the reason Korean engineers were at the plant was due to a lack of skilled workers in the US. While it is theoretically possible, the fact that Korean engineers are typically paid less than half their US counterparts does seem to both relevant and ignored.
That is both true on the face of it and tangential to the current issue. For rapid scaling, Hyundai wants to do things the Hyundai way, with people they know. If the US wants to have an industrial policy that states they must hire US citizens for whatever percentage of jobs (even up to 100%), that’s fine. But you can’t just round up everybody like this without warning.
My company is pursuing an overseas investment. Damn straight US engineers (likely me included) will be on site during construction and startup. Add in specialized machinery, chemistries and training needs…
It’s a plant being brought up from nothing, with all of the design work done primarily in Korea, 299/300 detained Koreans left the US after being asked to stay by the administration should tell everyone that they were here on a temporary work assignment, and had no intentions of staying the US long term. If they really wanted to be here and to supplant US engineers long term, they would have taken that offer.
You arrest me at work and then ask a favor?
Pull the other one, it plays Jingle Bells.
Probably, it has more to do with being able to read Korean documentation to install Korean machinery in the same way as the factories in Korea, and communicating with Korean engineers and suppliers when their Korean managers issue a change order.
The total bill for the Korean workers is likely much more than if they could find local staffing. But the thing is you cannot find local staffing with the required skills and experiences with this equipment, so Hyundai likely was paying more to accelerate the construction and startup by a couple or more years required to train local workers. And these Korean workers are less than 5% of the fully-staffed factory employment, so it makes sense for Georgia / the U.S. to bring them in to get lots of permanent factory workers rolling. Automotive engineers are some of the lowest paid engineers in the country, and I can only imagine that the pay rate for Georgia is on the low-end of automotive jobs – so very likely the Koreans are much better paid than American alternatives.
Since the US offshored much of the semiconductor industry, we indeed do not have the skilled workers in this country to set up a new factory. Biden’s CHIPs Act was meant to address this shortcoming, for the sake of both employment and domestic security. Guess who meddled with the plans?
Nice try fishing for ways to punk us, Matt. I’m not taking this bait. No, sir.
I’m afraid the transition away from Boomer-led politics, which is a statistical certainty, will take a lot longer than it should.
Yeah, but for it to take a positive direction, we needed Harris to win in 2024. Even if you didn’t like her or her positions or her technocratic solutions, we had to get past Trump to have a chance to avoid a hard ditch into fascism. Now it’s gonna be Trumpian podcast bros all the way down. For the rest of our lives. Just look at everyone glorifying that bigot who loved gun violence who just became a victim of gun violence.
It’s also a case of “you can’t do everything at once” since the FBI had nothing 36 hours into the search. It was gutted with the regional director having been “DEI” purged and those that weren’t headhunted into ICE. If they hadn’t gotten lucky with the suspect basically turning himself in with extra steps…
Those guys will lose a lot of support by around… 2033 or so.
Is this the same White House currently occupied by the renowned pedophile and convicted rapist who sent a birthday card to the equally renowned pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein wherein he described the secret they both share and told him how much he loved him? Or is that a different White House?
Now, now, he was never convicted. He’s an adjudicated rapist.
The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is bitch-slapping the administration. Will the person in charge learn from this? History says no.
Didn’t FDR say “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?
True, but FDR didn’t see DJT coming in the future…
FDR dealt with Nazis and other fascists quite effectively. It’s why we won the war.
Being that the government is (I’m sure) working hard to set up the Early Sharknado Warning System, all your fears are unnecessary…
This government’s policies show the same level of understanding as “All bumpers should be magnets so cars repel each other and don’t crash.”
It’s a child’s understanding of the world (although magnets still managed to confuse ICP, who are adults).
I mean really, how do they work?!?!? 😉
Magic, duh.
I believe the conclusion of the esteemed scientists in protective face paint was ‘Miracles.’
Explain gyroscopes while you’re at it.
I’m afraid the coming Republican economic collapse is going to fuck my retirement so hard that I’ll be working until I’m 85, when I die.
If they lose the next election, the electorate will shift the blame of the failures here to the next party, or blame foreigners.
It won’t be labeled as “Republican” collapse, it’ll be the Spanish Flu instead.
I disagree. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, immortalized in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by conservative think tank member and economist Ben Stein, made it quite clear. A Republican led administration and Congress created it, which led to the Great Depression. How pissed was the American public? They didn’t let another Republican anywhere near the White House for almost a generation. They remembered who caused the misery.
It was shocking how many retired machinists started looking for work in 08. The 401K’s got destroyed and the retirement just couldn’t cut it. There were guys who were over 70 constantly coming in for work.
Also, I just bought a replacement part for my CNC from Korea, and I got stuck with a 40% tariff charge. People need to realize that the US citizen is paying for the tariff, not the exporter. No new tax my ass.
There was a big problem in my industry where promotions stalled because people just stopped retiring so there weren’t job openings at the bottom anymore. entry level became 3-5 years of experience and a license.
That’s where tech work is now in the valley. Good luck with a Computer Science degree fresh out of college.
Some of that you can chalk up to HR, which always wants 5 years of experience. I used to get in email arguments with HR when we would be trying to hire someone to work on a software project and HR would post a job listing that required 5 years of experience in something that had only existed for 8 months.
I’m retired, but from what I understand, the current practice is to keep adding useless requirements until the number of job applicants is manageable.
He got people to believe that Mexico would pay for the wall.
If you’re audience is that gullible / uninformed, why bother saying anything true?
All healthcare will be illegal unless administered by un-vaccinated workers educated only in the science of creationism.
Good luck making it to 85.
Pass the lance, I need to let some blood.
Rub some ivermectin on that and drink this glass of Lysol.
You’ll be fine.
Can we start a betting pool over which previous Republican economic collapse this one will most resemble?
Numbers 3 and 4 combined.
I’ve actually never seen them tank it so hard, so early in the term.
Well, yeah, those were regular old Republicans. This one, not so much.
Herbert Hoover. 1929. The Great Depression.
As much as I’d like to hand it all to the current administration, things have been propped up and manipulated for a long time.
The economy contracted by like 30% during Covid. Housing prices continued to rise – at near record pace in a lot of markets. Talking heads on TV said it was because of people moving from cities to suburbs. For that to be true, property values in the cities would have to be falling, but they rose right along with suburban properties.
I don’t know what’s propping up the housing market this time, but this fall will be deeper and more rapid than 08 simply because the market has been manipulated more drastically this time around.
Housing prices once you are about 150 miles away from a major city seem to be dropping like a rock, but they are still going up in the cities, I’m shopping and there are amazing houses for dirt cheap but they are all out in the boondocks. Which is fine if you can work from home, which was jumpstarting rural economies, but the current administration hates working from home. Apparently getting stuff done is incidental to wasting time and energy commuting so the boss can gaze upon his vassals.
It’s almost like the nation is being run by someone with deep ties to urban commercial real estate values.
Also, this is a way for companies to reduce workforce without having to admit they’re shrinking.
I don’t find that to be true at 163 miles from Charlotte/75 from Winston-Salem (which is not major). Our real estate is rising here too.
Winston-Salem is pretty major, it has lots of tech, lots of academia and arts, it’s in the top 100 cities by population, its in the research triangle, all things that would predict an influx of people who can afford expensive housing. 75 miles is commuting distance. People commute 90 miles to San Jose, that’s what drives house prices here.
It’s not just the US. Housing prices across the world, in large cities and metro areas, are considered out of control. Why? Same universal reasons. Those cities and large metro areas are where all the good, high paying jobs are. They have the best educational clusters of universities and research labs, the best hospitals, the best cultural perks, and they tend to be in highly desirable coastal areas. People simply want to live there. That drives the run-up costs in real estate.
To claim that the failure is doing too many things at once is just blatant hot garbage.
This is a very simple case of not understanding that actions have consequences, attempting to shift blame, and new evidence that they’re not actually “fixing” things.
Perhaps, sadly, that’s all intentional to score political football points.
It also minimizes the fact that most? a lot? many? of the things they are trying to do are just straight up dumb, corrupt, illegal, and flat out bad policies. Doing them all at once isn’t the problem, the policies themselves are.
It’s funny listening to the farmers this year, lamenting the state of crop prices, apparently oblivious to the fact that they voted for it.
And those farmers sit there blaming it all on everyone and everything except trump. Same with the people in Florida whining about the drops in tourism: State everything but the obvious- that this is all the result of what they chose.
Yeah, when shit just kind of objectively sucks it’s okay to say as much. It doesn’t make you a partisan shill.
How is a failure? They shut down a key part of the hated EV supply chain when it was dangerously close to completion. They were able to flex their police-state zero-tolerance anti-immigrant mojo. The only people they care about love this stuff.
Plus, it’s a distraction from somebody’s signature looking like pubic hair.
So much winning!
By “one of”, we’re, of course, talking about the largest one by far. The Cole building consists of the engineering center and the large tower. It is gigantic.
Based on my recurring nightmares I am afraid of: being in a car with no brakes and finding out there is a test/assignment I wasn’t prepared for.
The makeup-encrusted, costumed people in leadership positions in our government right now appear incapable of learning. So the beatings will continue.
I’m afraid I’m not pessimistic enough for how bad economic conditions in this country will be in a year.
Dump truck drivers, they don’t give a single fuck on the roads, run red lights around here all the damn time, pull out in front of traffic at the worst times, and rarely have properly secured loads.
It’s all truck drivers that get paid by the load. When I lived near a port it was container trucks. Living near logging operations its logging trucks. Knew a union concrete truck driver that was more than happy to chill in Seattle traffic collecting overtime.
When I was in 6th grade I was waiting at the end of our long driveway for the bus. There was a rock quarry 2 miles from our house and the dump trucks were constantly flying up and down our road, which had no shoulders. One day another dump truck decided to pass another dump truck and the one being passed ran one of its wheels into the ditch, over corrected and landed on its side, skidding down the road right in the direction I was standing. I ran down the driveway as it skid right over where I had been just a second ago. Scared me to death. And the driver? He got out of the door now facing up and said” You see what that sombitch did?!”
If there are any readers of Jalopnik here, they’re reporting that Canada is bypassing the US for automobile purchases, now directly importing many from Mexico. I think Trump’s stupid tariffs and human rights violations (Korean workers) are going to lead to some deep financial troubles for US auto manufacturers.
This has been happening for a while. Nissan announced they stopped exporting from the US a few months back.
Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota have done similar.
Mexico was a recent announcement by one of their finance ministers.
My wife’s company brings in large expensive equipment from Japan and ships it out from US warehouses.
They are no longer doing that. The freight either goes direct from Japan or sits in bonded warehouses where it never technically enters the US. Bonded warehouses are expensive, but much less expensive than six figure tariffs.
There are a huge number of bonded warehouses five miles away. A few weeks ago, the roads were packed with trucks moving goods from bonded warehouses to regular warehouses to beat the new tariffs, or just putting stuff in containers in the parking lot.
It’s a lot more effort to achieve less actual work.
I guess this administration has the same disdain for the people in the US dealing with imported goods as they do for foreign manufacturers who dare to sell in the US.
(X) Doubt
Same doubt. Literally the most unqualified individuals, from top to bottom, are running the place.
Trump drained the swamp, found all the garbage that had sunk to the bottom and gave them positions in his cabinet.
Well, only until they need to report a fact that he doesn’t like.
What am I afraid of? Bees. Definitely bees.