The U.S. government’s raid on a Hyundai battery plant for electric cars in Ellabell, Georgia, last week was the economic policy equivalent of a cluster bomb, one of the dumbest types of military munitions.
When cluster bombs explode, they indiscriminately kill humans within a given radius, regardless of whose side they are on in a conflict or whether they are civilian or soldier. And so it was with the recent raid carried out by the Department of Homeland Security. While its nominal purpose seems to have been to signal the government’s unyielding intolerance of illegal immigration, the potential for collateral damage is remarkably widespread.
The United States trails badly behind China in the competition to build electric vehicles, which most of the world sees as the automobile technology of the future. One of the key reasons for this is China’s head start in commercializing batteries that can be charged quickly and offer enough range to compete with gasoline-powered vehicles.
Regardless of what one thinks of U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, his administration’s decision to make the construction site of a cutting-edge battery factory one of its showiest examples of enforcement resolve seems almost guaranteed to inflict harm on the United States’ ability to hold its own in this critical area of rivalry with China.
Among this cluster-bomb approach’s many other areas of self-harm, a second relates to Trump’s oft-proclaimed plan to “Make America Great Again.” One of the pillars of this strategy has been to use trade policy and tariffs as a coercive tool to oblige other countries to invest in the reindustrialization of the United States. Although the details have often been vague, the Trump administration has touted its triumphs in forcing allies to commit to investment in domestic U.S. production.
Whatever the subtleties of the immigration regulations governing the presence of the South Korean workers, it is hard to imagine that such in-your-face enforcement tactics of relatively minor violations will enhance efforts to bring global industry back to U.S. shores.
“It feels like a stab in the back,” Kim Tae-Hyung, a South Korean political scientist, told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, according to Bloomberg. “Most Koreans can’t help but feel infuriated.” As a result, Kim said that Korean companies will “inevitably” be discouraged from pursuing investment plans in the US. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-07/us-migrant-raid-jolts-south-korea-stirs-investor-anxiety]
This brings us to a third and related consideration. South Korea is a vital and long-standing ally of the United States, and Trump’s brusque and narrowly self-interested treatment of key allies is harmful to U.S. security interests. In a column published within days of the Georgia raid, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi—two senior foreign-policy advisors in the Biden administration—argued that China has already surpassed the United States in several critical dimensions of national power, and that Washington’s only realistic chance of competing with Beijing rests on strengthening its alliances. Their argument was less notable for its prescriptions than it was for the starkness of its language.
“The rise and fall of great powers has often turned on scale—the size, resources and capacity that make a nation formidable. Once countries reach similar levels of economic productivity, those with larger populations and continental size eventually surge ahead,” they wrote. “Today that sense of daunting scale describes China.”
The Trump administration has offered no coherent argument for how antagonizing South Korea and sending messages of unpredictability sometimes bordering on hostility to allies in Japan, Europe, Canada, and Mexico—while singling out India, a crucial near-ally, for punitive tariffs—will pay off sufficiently in the future to offset the damage to the United States’ position in the world vis-à-vis China.
Insofar as the raid on the Hyundai plant is concerned, Trump’s logic seems to be utterly bound up in his view that sharply decreasing immigration to the United States is a critical necessity. If necessity here is interpreted in strictly political terms—meaning that the Republican Party under Trump sees a politics of radical hostility toward immigration as a winning electoral recipe—one might be able to squint and make a narrow, short-term case for it. But in economic terms, cracking down on immigration to this extent amounts to another blundering mistake.
The literature is abundant about the deepening crisis of fertility and aging in the rich world. This is a topic that I have been writing about for many years. If anti-immigration parties have enjoyed an upswing in many affluent democracies in recent years, their looming dearth of workers, combined with bulging numbers of older people dependent on social security and other forms of government assistance, will inevitably force more and more of them to pivot toward pro-immigration policies.
Some may hope for a solution based on advanced robots and artificial intelligence, but this seems like a pipe dream. As long as the world is organized along broadly familiar and conventional capitalist lines, the most likely alternative is fiscal bankruptcy, depressed consumption, and economic decline. That leaves heightened engagement with the rest of the world—a permeability of borders and immigration, not turning inward—as the most intelligent path forward.
As a historically open society by the standards of the rich world, the United States enjoys huge advantages over its foes and most of its friends alike. Because of its historical roots in multiculturalism, it has less of a fixed sense of national identity in racial or ethnic terms compared with European countries—and far less than, say, South Korea or Japan, both of which are aging extremely fast and now face dauntingly rapid population decline.
Most compelling of all, though, is the U.S. contrast with China. As Campbell and Doshi noted, America’s greatest rival has serious problems of its own. The biggest and perhaps most intractable among them is China’s own sharply deteriorating demographic situation, which compares with the aging and fertility crises underway in Japan and South Korea, only on a vastly larger scale because of China’s sheer size.
Unlike the United States, China has no history or tradition of large-scale immigration. By comparison, it is also strikingly lacking in diversity. While English is by far the most widely accepted international language, Chinese—though spoken by around 1.4 billion people—is rightly or wrongly commonly seen by others as difficult or nearly impossible to learn. The United States has long been considered by many an attractive place to immigrate because of its political system based on electoral democracy and freedom of expression, neither of which China possesses.
The immigration raid at a factory in a critical industrial sector comes at a time when the United States is undermining many of these traditional strengths. U.S. officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have publicly argued that diversity should not be considered a source of national strength, and the Trump administration has broadly attacked the promotion of ethnic and racial inclusion in hiring and in education.
While clamping down on immigration broadly—especially from the global south, where the world’s youthful population is increasingly concentrated—Trump has accommodated white South Africans and hinted that the United States would do best if it could attract immigrants from Nordic countries (which are small in size and face aging populations of their own). It is hard to avoid seeing an obsessive racial angle here, one that values an association of Americanness with whiteness above all. And if this approach is perpetuated, it is hard to see how the United States itself can avoid becoming a victim of the cluster-bomb approach to national policy.