‘I Was A Little Shocked’: Victor Davis Hanson Says South Korea Forgot Who Defended Their Freedom

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson said on Fox News Tuesday that South Korea’s government appeared to forget the heavy price Americans paid to secure its freedom.

Hanson said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that South Korea’s reaction to U.S. immigration enforcement efforts exposed a “larger problem” in how the world, and many Americans, view the country’s role as a defender of freedom.

“I was a little shocked at the reaction of the South Korean government,” Hanson said. “For 75 years, the United States, at the cost of 36,000 lives, created South Korea’s freedom and protected it. I thought they wouldn’t jump the gun and would restrain themselves a little bit, but they didn’t.”

Hanson’s comments followed criticism from South Korea over visa-related immigration enforcement involving a Korean battery plant.

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“And it’s a larger problem, Laura, that it’s very easy to destroy the border and let in 10 to 12 million people and say it’s moral to break the law. But it’s very hard when you have to find them, and you’ve got to do something with them and deport them,” Hanson told host Laura Ingraham. “And people say it’s amoral to enforce the law. And that’s the dilemma that we’re having. And we used to have E-Verify under previous administrations that the Obama and Biden administration watered down.”

Hanson credited President Donald Trump for trying to revive E-Verify but warned that enforcement mechanisms have been unfairly turned against federal agents rather than employers.

“Trump’s trying to resurrect it. But it made it very clear that the employer would be the ultimate person responsible for hiring people that they knowingly did not fit or could not verify their immigration status. And that’s kind of inert now,” Hanson said. “But that’s really the best way to handle the whole thing, at least in a public relations way, because every time ICE tries to do the right thing and enforce a law, they get all of this criticism while these employers sit back and say, ‘We’re not culpable.’”

U.S. immigration authorities detained about 475 workers, most of them South Korean nationals, during a raid Thursday at a Hyundai car battery plant under construction in Georgia. The operation halted work on one of the automaker’s largest U.S. investments and marked the biggest single-site enforcement action in U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s history. (RELATED: ‘You’re Going To Stew In Your Own Juices’: Victor Davis Hanson Breaks Down How Trump’s Strategy Made Iran Collapse)

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung praised Trump’s foreign policy in August, saying he trusts Trump more than any other world leader to broker peace between North and South Korea.

During the meeting, Lee said he wants a Trump Tower built in South Korea. He also said that North Korea expanded its nuclear and missile capabilities under former President Joe Biden’s leadership.

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