Executive Order 13769 (the so-called "Muslim Ban") actually was effective immediately, resulting in a similar race to the airport during its chaotic implementation. Hundreds of people with previously lawful immigration status were denied entry or detained, including dozens with green cards despite those being excluded by the EO.
In any case this new order was not ambiguous. It plainly said the restriction was on "entry", not the issuance of new visas. Nobody reading the text of the order claimed otherwise. The Trump administration just changed their position, in informal guidance rather than a formal executive order but with similar practical and legal effect.
Anyone who returned early was effectively hedging, paying the airline change fee and some inconvenience to avoid a potential $100k fee or worse, with downsides including job loss--potentially leading to forced repatriation--if your employer doesn't pay, and indefinite detention under harsh conditions. That hedge currently seems likely to expire worthless; but with such an imbalanced payoff, are you really saying you wouldn't have paid it yourself?
In other guidance, "construction" is specifically excluded from the permission to "install equipment". That's not a very clear distinction, especially for large industrial machines, though I do see their general intent, to permit work requiring equipment-specific skills but exclude work that a locally-hired employee could do about as easily.
But what is "construction"? If it means "building walls", sure.
But what about assembling and installing the battery presses? Or maybe setting up the electrical connections for them?
It is a genuinely ambiguous area, and I won't be surprised if Korean companies tried to push it a bit too far. This still doesn't excuse the ICE behavior a bit. They could have just revoked the visas and asked employees to leave.
It's also quite clear that the Korean companies were not flying engineers here to save on wages.
The press coverage has mostly focused on the pointless show of physical force, the shackles and the prison-like detention. That should be criticized, but it sometimes feels like a tacit acknowledgement that all the workers were unlawfully present, or at least in some kind of "grey zone" (and thus did need to leave, just more humanely).
I'm not sure that's true. The B-1 forbids most work, including "construction", but there's a special set of rules for installing equipment sold by your foreign employer:
Many of those detained were employees of Hyundai's equipment vendors. A lawyer for some of those employees is alleging they were in fact compliant for that reason:
If the DHS has evidence to the contrary, then it's had a week to disclose that and save some face. That they haven't may imply a significant fraction of those detained in these harsh conditions were in fact lawfully present.
If DHS had evidence to the contrary maybe in the many many steps between soliciting investment, campaigning on it, confirming the factory, and breaking ground on that factory, the elected officials should have said something.
> and maybe some light training/setup/integration.
What do you mean by "maybe" or "light"? That's an explicitly permitted activity:
> A B-1 visa may be granted to specialized workers going to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside of the United States, or to train U.S. workers to perform such services.
Modern factories are filled with machines the size of buildings, making that installation sometimes hard to distinguish from the forbidden "construction". It's possible that some of those Koreans were unequivocally on the bad side of the line, but I see zero possibility that the agents could have meaningfully assessed that in the time between beginning the raid and taking the workers away in shackles.
I feel like installing equipment is widely considered to be an illegitimate use of B-1 visas, despite this explicit guidance. I don't understand why. I see from your comment history that you were a US diplomat. Is the internal guidance you received different from what's published?
"If the contract of sale specifically requires the seller to provide these services or training,
and you possess specialized knowledge essential to the seller's contractual obligation to perform the services or training it may be permissible for you to perform these services. In addition, the machinery or equipment must have been manufactured at a location outside of the United States and you may not receive compensation from a U.S. source."
Given how vague the reporting has been, we don't know basic facts like what the workers were doing, what the agents saw, what types of visas they were on, etc.
This PBS article quotes a local labor union leader who claims "unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/attorney-says-detained-k...
Obivously the person quoted has an agenda and didn't actually witness those activities - so we just don't know. That being said, if that description is accurate, in general that kind of activity would not be appropriate on a B-1 visa and wouldn't qualify for an L visa.
But again, it depends on the details. Maybe the cement base is some special blend for certain equipment, maybe "erecting steel" involves highly specialized welding techniques, maybe this pipe fitting involves specialized high-pressure ratings outside the norm.
When I was a diplomat, our internal guidance (at least, what I was privy to) was never different from public information, just more detailed.
I'd be suprised if the corporate immigration departments of Hyundai or LG messed up this badly. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if some no-name subcontractor decided to play fast and loose with the visa rules to win a contract with a low bid.
> But I wouldn't at all be surprised if some no-name subcontractor decided to play fast and loose with the visa rules to win a contract with a low bid.
I feel like "subcontractor" here could mean "staffing agency used by Hyundai to shed liability", but could also mean "equipment vendor". The latter seems much less likely to be noncompliant, since they get the special benefit of the policy we're discussing and since customer-site labor is a smaller share of their cost (since their primary business is building the machines in Korea).
A lawyer for some equipment vendor staff seems to be alleging that their B-1 applications had been drafted specifically to comply with this policy:
> Kuck said letters included with visa applications that he reviewed spelled out the scope of the work and appeared to meet requirements.
> "It was more detailed than some of the letters that I've written for clients in similar situations," he said. "The vast majority of folks, including the ones I represent, should never have been detained."
I guess it's likely that at least one person detained was unlawfully present, and at least one person detained was lawfully present. The actual ratio is still unknown, but the reputational damage is done--"we took you away in chains, imprisoned you for a week, and deported you, but that's okay because a different worker at your site was noncompliant" is not a great message.
I don't find the claims made by an immigration lawyer representing the workers to be particularly persuasive, just like I don't find the claims made by the local union rep about what they "believe" the workers were doing to be persuasive.
People and companies can and do write whatever they want in letters submitted with visa applications. That has no bearing 1) on what you are actually allowed to do given a certain visa type, and 2) what the worker actually ends up doing.
In other words, the visa applications may very well have been valid and approved on that basis, but the applicants might have been engaging in other activities that were not permissible. This is quite common - people will say "I want to go to Disneyworld" when they actually intend to overstay their visa, or "I want to visit family" when they actually intend to work as a nanny or cook for a few months, then return home.
I'm not saying this raid was conducted properly or that all the arrests were justified, but I do think the reporting on it has been almost negligent. In contrast, here is an old article written by an immigration lawyer discussing the complexities of the B-1 business visa: https://blog.cyrusmehta.com/2016/05/the-b-1-visa-trap-for-th...
People and companies can and do write whatever they want in letters submitted with visa applications. That has no bearing 1) on what you are actually allowed to do
Is it really as kafkaesque as you state? You have to enumerate your planned activities in order to get a visa, but receiving said visa is in no way an affirmation that the enumerated activities are legal to perform? That sounds completely dysfunctional to me.
It is the traveler's responsibility to know what activities are permissible given their visa, and to only engage in those activities. That's no different from everyone's general responsibility to abide by the law.
A US visa is simply permission to present yourself at a port of entry for admission, at which time you may questioned further by border control, and in rare cases denied entry.
Most B visas are valid for multiple entries over 10 years. The fact that you wrote a letter and brought it to your original visa interview (which may have been years ago, and likely wasn't even looked at by the officer, who in a busy consulate has less than 2 minutes to complete your interview) does not mean the US government has affirmatively granted you permisison to do everything on that letter.
I think getting taken away in chains and imprisoned is significantly worse than getting denied entry? I understand you're not saying the raid was conducted properly, but you're consistently downplaying the part that did the damage.
Inconsistent policy resulting in unpredictable denial of entry is bad, but a typical working professional may tolerate that risk. Inconsistent policy resulting in arrest at some random point during your stay followed by indefinite detention (how long would that have lasted without the high-level diplomatic response?) is much worse.
> Is the internal guidance you received different from what's published?
Probably, I doubt anyone in the US government has a consistent view of what immigration laws are _and_ how they're actually enforced. Whole thing feels like a giant slapdash of things thrown together and assessed in whatever way feels right that day.
Here's a fun one: do people born in Hong Kong count as being born in China for green card purposes? Used to be no, then Trump 1 said "yes" with an executive order, then as best I can tell no one in government really enforced that, then immigration lawyers tell me they're counted as rest of world instead of China, and now? Who the hell knows, whoever gets your case probably makes up what they feel is the law.
> If PRNG sequence is reused to generate more shuffles, then the next shuffle can be predicted from the previous one.
That's theoretically true by a counting argument, but for a CSPRNG the only way to compute that next shuffle costs about as much computationally as brute force. 128 bits is enough to make that infeasible, though 256 may be preferable for the usual abundance of caution.
The number of permutations doesn't matter here, since an attack becomes computationally infeasible before it becomes counting infeasible. It's also possible for a practical attack to exist even when the output can't be predicted exactly, since statistical information is still valuable.
What makes you confident they were acting illegally? Here's a US embassy:
> A B-1 visa may be granted to specialized workers going to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside of the United States, or to train U.S. workers to perform such services.
Many of those detained have been reported to be employed by Hyundai's equipment vendors. That would be consistent with activities of this nature.
It's probably a coin flip whether a different DHS staffer would agree, though. Interpretation of these rules has always been notoriously inconsistent, and probably explains the problem here.
You weren't necessarily acting unlawfully, and neither were the Koreans. From reports, they seemed to mostly have an ESTA or B-1 visa. This doesn't allow "work", but it does allow many business activities. For example:
> A B-1 visa may be granted to specialized workers going to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside of the United States, or to train U.S. workers to perform such services.
Most other countries have similar policies. The line between those permitted activities and "work" is notoriously blurry. This often results in unexpectedly denied visas, and sometimes results in nasty letters or fines. It almost never results in this kind of show of physical force, even in unfree countries.
"Mostly right" is the most insidious option, because the frequent true statements or implications will lull you into believing the infrequent false ones.
For Fisher-Yates, if the RNG is good then the output permutation is independent of the input permutation. That's not true for your proposed algorithm, and neither you nor the the LLM has analyzed to determine how quickly the sensitivity to the input permutation decays. That sensitivity will have complicated structure, so it's a nontrivial problem in cryptanalysis.
The problem where the low bits of old, not cryptographically secure PRNGs were particularly non-random is real. That would be a problem for any algorithm using it though--imagine if your riffle took rand() % 2. The resolution (use the high bits, not the low bits) is the same for any algorithm. It's possible that your proposed algorithm is less sensitive because the much greater number of RNG calls makes it somehow average out, but neither you nor the LLM has analyzed that, because the residual structure is again a cryptanalysis problem.
Any potentially adversarial application should use a CSPRNG, moving the cryptographic security into that existing, well-studied block. So the problem you're trying to solve doesn't exist in practice. The LLM can probably be prompted to tell you that; but since you stated that the new shuffling algorithm was your idea, it worked to find reasons it was a good one. I don't think this is a good use of LLMs, but if you're going to then you have to avoid any suggestion that the new idea is yours, to avoid triggering the sycophancy.
I believe you're correct. When foreign experts visit temporarily to transfer technology to a new site, there's no bright line between the "non-working" business activities permitted by a B visa or ESTA and those requiring H or L visas. If the DHS thought Hyundai had pushed that line too far, then they could have subpoenaed their records, and perhaps ultimately settled the case with a fine and a promise to comply with the clarified standard in future. That would all have been normal.
They instead chose to lock up random employees "working" in a way their employer had probably assured them (rightly or wrongly) was lawful. That's not normal. The USA is a sovereign country, so it can impose whatever immigration policy it wants. No one should be surprised when foreign multinationals adjust their investment decisions accordingly though, or when American staff abroad face reciprocally unpleasant treatment.
> Do note that peak spending on rail roads eventually amounted to ~20 percent of the US GDP in the 19th century.
Has anyone found the source for that 20%? Here's a paper I found:
> Between 1848 and 1854, railroad investment, in these and in preceding years, contributed to 4.31% of GDP. Overall, the 1850s are the period in which railroad investment had the most substantial contribution to economic conditions, 2.93% of GDP, relative to 2.51% during the 1840s and 2.49% during the 1830s, driven by the much larger investment volumes during the period.
The first sentence isn't clear to me. Is 4.31 > 2.93 because the average was higher from 1848-1854 than from 1850-1859, or because the "preceding years" part means they lumped earlier investment into the former range so it's not actually an average? Regardless, we're nowhere near 20%.
I'm wondering if the claim was actually something like "total investment over x years was 20% of GDP for one year". For example, a paper about the UK says:
> At that time, £170 million was close to 20% of GDP, and most of it was spent in about four years.
By the way it's always nice when somebody actually tries to double check somebody else's research especially when you hear numbers that seemingly just sound crazy. Maybe another factoid, GDP or GNP for all practical purposes wasn't rigorously done by the government until about 1944. I believe a large part of our viewpoints on what happened in the 1800s is primarily based upon census data. But obviously if you're trying to measure a 7 year event Using census that happens every 10 years, there's going to be a lot of gap in the whisker chart.
Is 20% on railroad actually crazy? We spend 20% on make-work for the healthcare industry.
In a majority agrarian economy where a lot of output doesn't go toward GDP (e.g. milking your own damn cow to feed milk to your own damn family won't show up) I would expect "new hotness" booms to look bigger than they actually are.
So we're much closer to the per year spend US saw during the railroad construction era.
At this rate, I hope we get something useful, public, and reasonably priced infrastructure out of these spending in about 5-8 years just like the railroads.
In any case this new order was not ambiguous. It plainly said the restriction was on "entry", not the issuance of new visas. Nobody reading the text of the order claimed otherwise. The Trump administration just changed their position, in informal guidance rather than a formal executive order but with similar practical and legal effect.
Anyone who returned early was effectively hedging, paying the airline change fee and some inconvenience to avoid a potential $100k fee or worse, with downsides including job loss--potentially leading to forced repatriation--if your employer doesn't pay, and indefinite detention under harsh conditions. That hedge currently seems likely to expire worthless; but with such an imbalanced payoff, are you really saying you wouldn't have paid it yourself?