Several bits.

One, Walter Russell Meade used to blog about the Blue State model, and the decline thereof. Unions, intrusive state and local government, and corrupt dealings as part of the overhead. Hindsight, lots and lots of federal level proposals to invest do not seem to have been uniformly certain to select jurisdictions that were not doing a lot of the de facto slavery. (Full disclosure, my preferred locations are a state that is technically red now, but was crookedly run by Democrats for many decades, and the Republicans here are pretty seriously crooked.)

Two, I don’t think it is particularly easy for American companies to navigate the employee market, and find enough competent, honest people on a given schedule. If we are paying foreign companies to bring in technical arts that they practice, and that American companies are not practicing, well, I expect that our union halls and our schools will not be of great /positive/ service. Look, lots of countries bring in foriegn companies and foreign labor for a time, learn from them, then try to take over with native labor. If we are trying to do supply chain future proofing, that may be an acceptable price. We were not actually trying to do supply chain future proofing, this was probably actually more solyndra.

We basically have a combination of maybe genuine theoretical unknowns, and also a bunch of situations that are clearly hinky. Or at least which could be hinky. Unknowns 1. economic metrics, and accurate models 2. what sorts of deals could be negotiated 3. would we really have buy in for 4. would all parties deliver. Hinky A. University trained ‘educated’ as proxies for ‘uneducated’ poors. B. Union roles in negotiating status quos, and the utility of giving goods to a subset of citizen workers, at the costs of significant unemployment for other citizen workers, and of de facto slavery for criminal alien non-citizen workers. C. Judges and established case law D. the politicians and captured bureaucrats apparently think that they can profit indefinitely.

A bunch of people in this specific case clearly made what they felt was a reasonable compromise between theoretical law and ‘reality’. They may be feeling pretty salty about the ‘chaos’ and ‘uncertainty’ of the current attempts at change.

Where the politics of South Korea are concerned, the current leader social media ‘reported’ the events of the previous leader’s ‘error or insanity’. IE, the current guy looks like he set the previous guy up. Korea has a fairly difficult social history, see, forex, the Nobi. Even before the communist mass murders, Koreans had some stuff that they were not entirely happy about, at the backs of their minds.

Fundamentally, this thing of the elites from various countries colluding together, moving workers between jurisdictions, and those elites are responsible for keeping the locals compliant, was always going to have difficulties.