More than 300 South Korean workers were sent back to South Korea on Thursday after being arrested in an immigration raid on a battery factory next to the Hyundai plant. “This could significantly impact future direct investment in the U.S.,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference. South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making new investments in the U.S. if their workers are liable to end up in detention facilities.
Companies often bring in skilled workers to get factories up and running and to train local staff. “It’s not like these are long-term workers,” Mr. Lee continued. “When you build a facility or install equipment at a plant, you need technicians, but the U.S. doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”
That may be hard for Americans to hear, but it’s true. The U.S. doesn’t have the workforce to do these jobs. The Georgia battery plant is a multibillion investment by LG Energy Solution and Hyundai. South Korea’s tariff rate was modified to 15% in July in exchange for the country’s pledge of $350 billion in investment in the U.S. The U.S. currently caps both H-1B specialty worker and H-2B temporary worker visas.
Even on the revenue question, there are three important notes of caution to give context to the recent massive increases in tariff revenue:
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The revenue effect is lower than reported.
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Most of the taxes are paid by Americans.
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Tariff revenue is still a small part of total federal revenue.
For the presidency the case is crucial because, even though executive power has swelled in the 21st century, one key constraint remains: Congress’s exclusive power to fund the government. The president might control “the sword,” as the Founding Fathers put it, but the people’s elected representatives can always withhold the money he needs to use it. If the president can spontaneously impose tariffs at any level, at any time, to raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year without congressional approval, that fundamental constraint is not holding.
For the Supreme Court the case is crucial because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has vigorously applied a doctrine against the last two Democratic administrations aimed at limiting precisely this kind of executive adventurism. The “major questions doctrine” basically says that executive actions with a huge political and economic impact are legally suspect if they are not clearly authorized by Congress or the Constitution.
Liberal economic policies that have fallen to the court’s major questions buzz saw include some of President Barack Obama’s Clean Air Act regulations (2014), President Joe Biden’s eviction moratorium (2021), Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate (2022), Obama’s Clean Power Plan (2022) and Biden’s cancellation of student loans (2023). In 2020, three conservative justices also opined that the Obama administration’s DACA immigration reprieve conflicted with the major questions doctrine.
Trump’s tariffs, which the Justice Department says could raise “$4 trillion in the coming years,” eclipse any of these policies in economic and political significance. If the justices decline to apply the major questions doctrine here, it will be hard for them to escape the political charge that the Supreme Court is not a check on presidential power in general so much as a check on Democratic presidential power.
