South Korea Will Bring Home 300 Workers Detained in Hyundai Plant Raid

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.

It is your fellow foundational Americans who are screwing you over, as always

Maybe Korean companies are used to getting away with that kind of thing? Seems fairly short sighted given the current focus on immigration.

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.

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

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."

I'm aware that there are people with specialized knowledge who travel internationally for that kind of work. What I'm unclear about is the scale.

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.

> 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.

https://es.usembassy.gov/visas/commercial-industrial-workers...

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.