I used to build factories. We'd design and install the robots and machines of the assembly line. Final install took months. We never got work visas in those countries. We'd just say we were there for engineering meetings. Which we did have, but mainly we were installing, calibrating, and testing the machines we designed. I wonder if it's something like that. We did however hire local subcontractor labor for the generic work. If we sent 300 Americans over I suspect it might have set off some alarms.
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.
The BBC said they were all subcontractors and as you suggest, mechanics involved in setting up the factory in some way. Seems like it's exactly that, a contract house not wanting to go through the process of getting proper visas and getting folks in in any way.
As with a lot of things, I'm not so opposed to enforcing visa rules for something like this but maybe the shackles and method of detention weren't all that necessary. Also worth looking at fixing the reasons why companies are skipping the proper visa process, because nobody at all should be (or is?) opposed to LG/Hyundai setting up a factory in the US. Things we should be doing with a helping hand are being done with guns drawn instead.
But we all know they're doing it this way for the populist theater, there's folks out there that want to watch fascist police state theater on the evening news.
> He said that some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working.
How many of the 300+ South Korean workers does this describe?
In practice, Korean staff are essential for the initial setup of Korean companies’ factories. But even though Korea has an FTA with the US, it’s not allocated short-term work visa quotas (unlike Singapore, Chile, or Australia). For various political reasons, Korean firms have instead relied on ESTA short-term visas, and the US had tacitly allowed it. This time, however, a Republican filed a complaint saying these companies weren’t hiring Americans, which left ICE with little choice but to step in.
If there were actually any systemic visa problems then a few discreet phone calls and discussions between governments and executives could have cleared this up without putting anyone in cuffs. If it had desired, the US government could have bulk granted visas to any warmup worker trying to get this US plant online. Doing a raid publicly and loudly puts a lot of current and future investment at risk for very little gain.
>Doing a raid publicly and loudly puts a lot of current and future investment at risk for very little gain.
The "gain" is the armchair nazis' watching it on the news approval rating and the rest of the population getting acclimatized to the environment. These things are being done for show, to systematically test the boundaries and build consent for future actions by normalizing this kind of activity.
Yeah, one or two sneaky Koreans to help the cultural divide sounds plausibly okay, but an entire factory of undocumented workers? Seems hard to wash this one any way but clean.
> spell out for me how that makes it ok to use undocumented labor
The same way it is ok to go 1-5 mph over the speed limit on the freeway. Both are illegal on paper, but in practice, law enforcement turns a blind eye and actual enforcement would entangle a lot of people and interfere with the status quo. The juice is probably not worth the squeeze, as Arizona and Florida found out.
Because it's necessary for the plant to function and the government has never seen fit to provide a different arrangement for the work to happen and tacitly approved it as a way for this sort of short-term work to happen. They have quotas to meet, these workers helped them fit the quota, so who cares what effects it has.
It probably requires a lot of work and effort to lay it out explicitly, so they don't. It would be better for workers to figure it out, but that's not the administration's style either.
Hopefully the plant doesn't have to shutdown because of this.
Because the documentation is intentionally obtuse and difficult, meaning that it is nearly impossible to get approval for these kinds of things even though they benefit the US immensely.
It's like if a neighbor fixes your fence without asking you first. Wrong? Maybe. Harmful? Definitely not.
No excuse! The neighbor clearly should have paid to train a local worker in fence-fixing for a year or two, and then paid the local worker's wages while fixing the fence, and then let the worker go as they don't need to fix a fence again for some time. Granted that would take two years and tens of thousands of dollars more than the neighbor fixing it themselves, but that's the neighbor's problem. (well, and now the problem of the homeowner with the fence that has to wait 2 more years to get their fence fixed)
Sorry but as a legal immigrant (O1b then Green Card) -- they can easily apply for legal status if there were no possible skilled workers available legally, and locally. My personal barometer calls this unacceptable after.... 10? 20 examples? Almost 500!
I'm completely baffled by that. It would be preferable for the ICE to turn a blind eye to a huge corporation that is breaking the law in a large and systemic manner? It sounds like Hyundai has been dealing with the us in bad faith. Or the standing practice has been to choose not to enforce the law based on political considerations. That sounds awfully like end stage capitalism to me...
Haven't you ever turned a blind eye to somebody breaking corporate policy when you know its dumb and helps nobody? This is basically that. This kind of "immigration" is solely helpful but US immigration laws are intentionally obtuse and broken. The only "harm" here is that Hyundai didn't follow the right paperwork while helping build American manufacturing.
I don’t know the full story, but a couple of things seem likely. One is political pressure—ICE needed to show they were “doing something,” which explains the 500 agents and helicopters. The other is that it works as a signal from Trump: if you’re a foreign company, invest all you want, but make sure the jobs and know-how go to Americans from the start.
Your analysis makes sense. It's 100% justified and a win for the ICE- they certainly "did something". Given the size of the operation all those resources makes sense.
There was a political aspect to this story. It's odd that trump hasn't yet gone scorched earth on SK but he wanted to put them and everyone else on notice. He wants to negotiate from a position of strength.
According to their agreements with Georgia's state govt, factories like this are set to employ 8000+ locals once they're up and running. Given that scale, requiring 1/20 as many specialists working on site to set everything up doesn't seem too farfetched.
The World Cup next year is going to be a shit show. My first world cup was 1994 and I watched every one of them on TV live. This would be the first time it'll happen in a city where I live (LA). This will also be the first world cup my son will watch. But I'm apprehensive of getting tickets for my family due to fear of harassment.
Th authorities are very vague in their statements, on purpose.
According to the article, 450 were arrested, over 300 are South Korean, but the article makes it impossible to tell who entered illegally, and who had incorrect visas or expired ones, and their various nationalities.
What is clear is that this has escalated to a diplomatic crisis at the highest levels on the Korean side. Definitely bodes well for future interest in investing in advanced manufacturing in the US.
It seems to me Hyundai is at fault here, or they just outright organized this.
Koreans can come to US without visa, but that visa doesn’t allow you to work. That means no hands on work at the site. Considering the raids happening at the factory itself, I would really be surprised if they are only there to receive training by their US counterparts, which seems pretty unlikely.
As immigrants, our visa status has been tracked by day one, and constantly validated. It boggles my mind why Hyundai didn’t just pay to apply for H2B visa, to invite those workers to come here legally. Yeah it takes time and money but it is the correct thing to do
Yes, they all lacked work visas. Allegedly Hyundai subcontracted out the work to third parties who didn't bother to get work visas for their employees.
Maybe Korean companies are used to getting away with that kind of thing? Seems fairly short sighted given the current focus on immigration.
I don’t doubt that some Americans are deported each year from South Korea but I was unable to find any examples in the news other than this one in 2017. I wonder how regular it really is, or maybe it doesn’t get reported by any news source?
I mean, I understand public humiliation is something Usians like, but was it necessary here? To me, punishing the workers is so unimaginably cruel and pointless...
Assuming that they are in illegally, the U.S. is the party that should be upset. If you are going to do business in the U.S. then you need to follow us laws.
You can say you're (rightfully) upset, without throwing employees of a major investor onto a jail without functioning toilets.
The problem is that the US is sending deeply conflicting messages. Does it want Hyundai's investment or not? It's not that Hyundai needs to build a factory in the middle of nowhere in Georgia.
It wants Hyundai's investment and it wants to create American jobs and also have Hyundai follow the laws. The extremity of the right is fueled by an apparently prevalent reluctance to enforce any rules.
It sounds weirdly like you’re saying that one of the conditions of Hyundai doing business in the US is that we turn a blind eye to them breaking our labor laws, but I’m sure you couldn’t really mean that.
The meaning of the comment of the person you're replying to doesn't significantly change if you replace "employees of" to "contractors of". You're picking at nits.
> It's not that Hyundai needs to build a factory in the middle of nowhere in Georgia.
Then why is it doing so? I'm lost.
Are you implying that it's an act of charity towards the US with zero expectation of or potential for profit? Then why doesn't Hyundai just save the management trouble and donate to a charity?
But if you take things at face value, this isn’t a case where ICE is going berserker mode. They went through investigation and obtained search warrants.
Regardless how they handle detention, the only conclusion is to send them back. Thankfully it seems swift so the workers won’t endure long uncertainty.
Last but not least. One of the arguments of said investment, is to boost local employment, in exchange of other benefits, mostly tax reduction. It is a two way door
> 5:10 "475 were illegally present in the United States"
Not quite; The figure includes those with visa.
"Illegally present in the United States or in violation of their presence in the united states, working unlawfully"
This also leaves open the question of what "violation of the visa" entails here. They may well have been working within their visas, only for ICE to arbitrarily rule otherwise.
It gets a little confusing because ESTA(which South Koreans are eligible for) is valid for both tourist and business use, and is a visa waiver.
As this comment[1] states with an official source:
> 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.
Maybe the business use of ESTA also covers the above use cases?
In the mid-2000s I was doing some consulting in middle America and noticed a bunch of Indian IT workers staying at the same hotel I was staying at. Since, I was Indian-origin, we engaged in some small-chat. They were working for a now defunct telecom giant (but contracted by one of the big Indian consultancies) on various software projects. There were there on not, H1Bs, but another class of short-term business-meeting only visas. They told me every 3 months a whole new team would cycle onto the project with a fresh set of business visas and the rest would cycle back home, rinse-repeat. They weren't allowed to "work" per say, and some of their colleagues got rejected at the border by more savvy border agents. But for every 1 rejection, 20 of them would get through.
Disclaimer: I’m a South Korean, so I’m gonna be hugely biased.
But with the disclaimer, the whole raid is stupid – I thought the US govt was trying to bring jobs to the states, encourage foreign investments, and move manufacturing over there? And then the very next thing they do is detaining and deporting people who are there to literally do that?
Even if you’re gonna complain about not having the correct visas, at least treat the people who are helping your country in good faith, not like people who got caught while trying to smuggle in across the border.
About the visa situation – quoting a comment from the past article since it explains it more clearly than what I could possible do:
> For people saying "they should have had the right visa", no one does this.
> Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
> And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
> Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
> In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
I think the issue is that building factories in the US and then filling them with foreign workers is the opposite of bringing jobs to the US - those 300 jobs should be US jobs, not South Korean jobs. That said, I think what ICE has been doing is very wrong.
The factory isn't even being "filled with foreign workers", it's being set up by foreign workers so they can start employing 10x as many locals to actually staff it long term.
At the time it was actually filled with foreign workers, who were likely here illegally. Look, I am no fan of trump or any of what ICE is doing, but the fact is there were 300 foreign workers here illegally inside that factory. That's completely stupid of the company to do considering the current political climate.
> those 300 jobs should be US jobs, not South Korean jobs
it's the same thing when a US company sets up a facility abroad -- it brings in US specialists who are knowledgeable of the equipment and processes; US contractors go abroad all the time, and no, they usually don't have long-term work visas
And if as a requirement for allowing foreign workers into the US they had to train 1-2 US workers to their own level of expertise, would that be a fair trade?
These Korean engineers and contractors were literally there to oversee the installation of new machinery at the battery plant under construction and train US staff on its operation, lol.
And who is going to set those milestones and hand-offs?
Sure, yeah, the USG can try that, but for the millions(?) of contracts you'd need over years of hand-off with red-tape and poorly paid 'refs' with no experience in the field and some dubious enforcement mechanism of fines or jail time?
It's a totally unworkable system prima face that just ties things up for no reason.
This is one of those weird edge cases that comes from us having an incoherent immigration policy.
We know that fitting out and commissioning these kinds of factories takes foreign workers who have the subject matter expertise on how the parent company does it. But we have a history of not providing proper work visas for it and looking the other way.
On the other hand, if you don't let these people in, it's not clear how Hyundai gets a functional battery factory that's built like their other ones.
The old policy of looking the other way was broken. But suddenly "fixing it" with enforcement isn't too smart, either.
Visa abuse has always been a serious issue. Are you sure we have been looking the other way, or just not looking? With the latter, the crackdown we are seeing makes sense.
Yah-- there's been no desire to enforce ESTA/B-1 visa restrictions for ordinary abuses, because we don't have a workable short term productive work regime. We don't really have a mechanism where Hyundai can bring over labor that can read engineering drawings and manuals in Korean to set up a factory and train local workers.
Most countries have a short term, productive work permit. We don't-- closest thing you can do is L-1 (and often this doesn't work: you can't hire workers for the purpose or use contractors).
Lottery based and slow systems like H-1B/H-2B don't work, and H-2B is intended for low skill labor. If we expect Korean and Taiwanese companies to establish factories, we must either provide a viable legal pathway for their technicians or accept the reality of ongoing B-1 visa violations. (I prefer the former).
(Oddly enough, ESTA/B-1 allow receiving training but not giving it).
> Oddly enough, ESTA/B-1 allow receiving training but not giving it
Does this mean there is an equivalent in South Korea where the US could send workers on this Visa to receive training on how to build their (Hyundai) factories?
Hyundai absolutely does a lot of training of US-based employees in Korea.
But sometimes you have a shorter-term need for some setup talent (especially when language skills and understanding local engineering conventions is important). This is much more common during plant construction.
I don't think you're going to quickly train US workers on how to decipher Korean documentation.
Show me any evidence your Republican party cares about educating Americans. Are they supporting better pay for teachers? Are they supporting more resources to schools? Are they pushing for tuition free college?
The solution here is to work with South Korea to follow actual procedure, not arrest everybody and deport them. These people were objectively good for the American economy.
I'm totally fine with these crackdowns and I hope H1Bs get a polite boot out the door next. It's the only way US citizens are ever getting tech work again.
Go look into Trump's 2017 tax law and how it led to the mass tech layoffs. Maybe instead of blaming immigrants you will start realizing who actually created the layoffs.
What nobody is discussing is why hyundai was apparently employing 500 illegal workers [edit: i see some HNers have commented on it. The news sites and reddit have all somehow completely overlooked this significant angle]. I think it's reasonable to question if they got full employment rights as if they had been legal residents. Frankly i'm amazed the white house hasn't yet made a huge fuss about it and why hyundai isn't being held to account.
You can tell me that i've got it all wrong, and the workers were completely legal and they weren't exploiting cheap labour and this isn't a huge scandal, but please back up your claims. As far as i can tell hyundai is getting away scott free with breaking the law because they are a big corporation.
It's stated clearly that the factory in question is under construction. There are multiple such factories being constructed by Hyundai in Georgia, each under an agreement with the state to employ several thousand locals once they get it running, in exchange for incentives to build on US soil in the first place. (ex/ 8,100 local jobs under this plan, for example https://georgia.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/hyundai_moto... )
These people were brought there for one-off, short-term, specialized work to get the factory ready, to start employing those thousands of locals, as per Hyundai's agreement with Georgia's state govt. They abused temporary / non-work visas to do so, but not to displace local labor (which wouldn't know how to do the job) - rather, to help build a new source of local labor.
As such, it's likely that there isn't a single person in the world who "wins" because of this deportation, except maybe some harangued ICE official with quotas to fill. Maybe that's why "the white house hasn't yet made a huge fuss about it and why hyundai isn't being held to account."
Its been discussed. Iiuc, Currently unlike other countries in a similar economic relationship as it, south Korea does not have access to a quota for short term business consultative employees, and Korean firms have been in the habit of misclassifying short term immigrant employees to get them in the door, doing the subcontracting trick to shield the supercontractor (in this case LG/Hyundai) from liability... In case it goes south, as it did this time.
They may come to see it more like a mercenary does. Some may be jailed, hurt, tortured in Central America, etc but if the pay is high enough it is worth the risks. If they offer high enough more than they can get in South Korea, people will come.
And every auto company who was considering putting a plant in the US to avoid Trumpty Dumpty's tariffs will now have to consider Trumpty Dumpty's harassment of workers.
Hyundai is notorious for shitty dealers and service, to the point that people hesitate to purchase from their luxury brand, Genesis, to avoid these dealers. Meanwhile, I've heard of Koreans who confirm that the company's branches in Korea have much better dealers. Something seems off, then. Could it be the corporate greed and lousy US regulations that have allowed Hyundai to keep their shady tactics for decades in America?
Genesis barely had any "dealerships" and most times people could not get service much of anywhere for those cars, which is a major turnoff. Also, having to walk into a Hyundai dealership is like taking the train from Philly to Camden.
I have an Ioniq 5 and I have had nothing but perfect experiences with my Hyundai dealer. Both for sales, and service. Not that service has been much of a thing, since EVs require so little service.
It's also clearly not just me, as the Ioniq 5 has been rated the EV of the year several years running by multiple publications.
