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.
