South Korean Workers Detained in Hyundai Plant Raid to Be Freed and Flown Home
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South Korean workers detained in a Hyundai plant raid are to be freed and flown home, sparking debate about visa regulations, corporate practices, and labor laws.
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I interpreted that to mean they may not have permanent US immigration issues vs "being deported".
1. getting those with criminal records depoarted and not allowed back (a fair number of whom have been depoted and have violated the ban on returning)
2. getting those who've wished to settle and work jobs to leave voluntarily by buying them plane tickets and giving them cash stipends and not barring their reentry in the future
These Koreans who came to Georgia on behalf of their company will probably not have their tickets paid for by the US nor get the stipend, so yes, they are treated differently as you suggest.
after the surprise arrests executing the judicial warrant, the Korean company and government stepped forward and expressed a commitment to helping these workers, which occurred without negotiation, although you could call the flurry of phone calls after that negotiations, it was probably more like "Q; what do we need to do" "A: you need to bring them home". neither country nor the companies involved is looking to disturb relations, though perhaps this is adjacent to a tariff negotiation.
If you think the current administration is giving cash stipends to anyone it's been working to deport as part of its dragnet, I have a very large bridge to sell you.
I'll repeat what I said:
> If you think the current administration is giving cash stipends to anyone it's been working to deport as part of its dragnet
What policy or app says "when ICE deports people, give them a stipend" ?
Edit: Here's the ICE manual on how deportations are conducted[1]. There's no mention of cash payouts.
[1] https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/dro_policy_memos/09684drofie...
so if your friends were deported before applying, then it's too late because that deportation already cost the govt money.
the program is only months old, so if your friends got deported before that it wouldn't apply.
you have to apply for the program (I think you just download the app and sign up) in advance, you can't just return home and then apply.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/05/05/dhs-announces-historic-t...
https://www.ice.gov/self-deportation
Relations are disturbed. You can take that to the bank. The SK government just stepped up for their citizens as they should. But US/SK relations just got dinged.
at the ambassaor/embassy/diplomatic level state to state, there will be no effect on relations because neither country wants that. We are important allies and major trading partners, this is a matter of minor corruption.
you're smarter than this, don't read/comment selectively to stay on your hobby horses. this does not bring us closer to the inevitable contradictions of capitalism and the revolution.
> ...
>South Korea will “push forward measures to review and improve the residency status and visa system for personnel travelling to the United States.”
The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
No one ever does, by that standard. In the US, if you're a professional coming in to do some short-term thing, there's no visa process. You just fly in and get the stamp in your passport, which is technically treated as a "waiver of visa". Then you do your job and go home.
Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
Something tells me that working at a factory, even for "training" purposes is very different than attending a conference. Wikipedia confirms this:
>There are restrictions on the type of employment-related activities allowed. Meetings and conferences in relation to the travelers' profession, line of business or employer in their home country are generally acceptable, but most forms of "gainful employment" are not. There are however poorly-classifiable exceptions such as persons performing professional services in the United States for a non-U.S. employer, and persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale.[26] Performers (such as actors and musicians) who plan on performing live or taping scenes for productions in their country of origin, as well as athletes participating in an athletic event, are likewise not allowed to use the VWP for their respective engagements and are instead required to have an O or P visa prior to arrival. Foreign media representatives and journalists on assignment are required to have a nonimmigrant media (I) visa.[27]
I just can't understand how anyone thinks that a "Surprise! You're in jail now!" change of enforcement norms like this is a good thing.
I can't tell whether you actually think the factory was under construction and therefore the exemption you mentioned would apply, or are trying to mislead people with some sneaky wording (ie. that it was under construction at some point). In any case according to wikipedia[1] it was constructed between 2022-2024, and "full production" (of cars, presumably) began in October 2024, almost a year ago. By all accounts it wasn't "under construction".
That said, I'm sure that something as complicated as a car factory would be continually upgraded and repaired, and maybe some of that would fall under "installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale", but at the same time that shouldn't be used as an excuse for multinationals to import arbitrary amount of foreign workers to work there, bypassing the normal visa process. Moreover it's questionable whether that "installing..." excuse would even hold. The OP article mentioned that over 400 workers, mostly south korean nationals were arrested in the raids, but another source[2] suggests the factory's employment is around 400 people. If it was really installing equipment, I'd expect it to be 5-10% of the factory's workforce, not 50-100%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group_Metaplant_...
[2] https://georgia.org/press-release/hyundai-supplier-pha-creat...
As someone who has worked in IT for a few decades, I have had to go 'into production' with services while things still needed to be, and were still being, built out.
Factories are large and complex: just because one part has been deployed doesn't mean another part has. One simple possibility: they went 'into production' being able to produce X units per week, but work was being done to be able to expand to X+30% units.
Which US resident would not have the right to work wherever they want in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
For example, if you live in New Jersey and work in New York you are obligated to file tax returns to both states.
See also the "Jock tax", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_tax, "the jock tax is the colloquially named income tax levied against visitors to a city or state who earn money in that jurisdiction".
It is the same in the US. I do not see how having to pay taxes prevents anyone from working in a place.
Tax policy and the legal right to work somewhere are two different things. As far as I know, no non-federal jurisdiction in the US can officially say people of xyz characteristics cannot work here. At least not yet.
Also, the jock tax is just income tax.
The only reason it has a name is because it is more difficult to audit and prove tax evasion for most other people that work in various locales, but do not pay income tax they are legally required to, whereas the public nature of the work of entertainers and large incomes makes it easy for a government to prove tax was owed. Which the wikipedia link says:
>Since a state cannot afford to track the many individuals who do business on an itinerant basis, the ones targeted are usually high profile and very wealthy, namely professional athletes. Not only are the working schedules of famous sports players public, so are their salaries. The state can compute and collect the amount with very little investment of time and effort.
ghaff's comment - the one you replied to - included "there's been something of a crackdown on out-of-state work from a tax perspective".
As you correctly point out, that's a different thing than the right to work somewhere.
ghaff wrote:
> most people have a right to work out-of-state
Which means some people do not. I was interested in who that would be.
Building a factory as part of a multi-billion investment.
Is the administration serious about re-industrialization? If they are, then if they find visa discrepancies of foreign nationals to that, perhaps they should help the foreigners sort out the discrepancies so they can continue to help the administration achieve its goals.
I flew to an expo where our company had a booth and the US border patrol took me aside and started asking if I'd be selling things there or working at the booth in some other form. I told them that I am a tech going to see other companies' stuff. They then discussed something between themselves for 10 minutes and let me pass. This was 20 years ago, so them being picky is certainly not a new thing.
There is a process, it's usually tedious but it exists. I did it for Singapore, the US and Israel. They mostly took multiple months but I never wanted to take any chances. For the US it was a "B-1 in lieu of H-1B" visa for example.
Attending a conference is something different than what these workers did. There are rules around what a "business trip" is and what is not and what "work" is.
This isn't exactly new territory. A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
Because there is no visa process for short term professional work in the US, and never has been.
> A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
That's just wrong. Virtually the entirety of the professional world travels around between industrial countries on tourist visas. Otherwise anyone going to a trade show is an "illegal" at risk of deportation.
And if you don't come from a preferred part of the world even the former can quickly be quite a process to prove it.
No thanks. I'll stream the conference online.
I'm sure there is more of this than in Europe than I'm aware of (food delivery is one example we're recently had a lot of focus on in the UK) but it's certainly not at the point that it's routine and expected.
How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?
This "Yooz Brok Duh Lah" absolutism is a transparently political excuse for what is very obviously a norm-breaking and unjust enforcement of a law that was working very well.
Also in states like California they let undocumented immigrants get drivers licenses. They can even get bank accounts and mortgages in some states (which is basically impossible here in Canada).
OP was asking how there's huge communities of undocumented people in the US and how they manage to work and live without legal status. Which would be an unusual thing in almost any country. The logistics of doing so is a valid question (how do you drive to work, how do you find housing, how do you get healthcare, etc). The answer is many state and federal policies support having millions of undocumented people in legal limbo indefinitely, by offering them pseudo-legal status or loopholes.
Some jobs are cash jobs, the employer doesn't report the income and the employee likely doesn't either, this isn't legal for the employer or the employee, but enforcement is uneven.
For jobs with proper payroll, income reporting and employment tax withholding, it's common to 'borrow' someone else's tax id. That's not legal either of course, although the employer may be ok if they were reasonably unaware of the borrowing. If the borrowed tax id is only used for work by one person, and the withholding is close to correct (or a tax return is filed for that tax id), then taxes are being paid properly, even if they're attributed incorrectly. If the tax id is used by multiple people, then the combined income might be subject to a larger tax than if earned by multiple tax ids, and withholding is likely to be iffy (withholding tables are built around a single job).
I think I've heard of ways for someone without work authorization to get their own tax idea so they can have make properly attributed tax payments, but I don't remember the details.
To make it worse, they are sending their confidential asylum paperwork to the country directly.
The South Koreans are lucky they are being sent to the correct Korea.
Somebody snitched no doubt.
Chinese workers come in and they barely speak English, and they are kept together at a hotel or at a rental home (compound) with a translator/minder and a local guide to make sure they don't wonder off on their own and get into sticky situations (kidnapped or law enforcement or unsanctioned visits to bars or the local girls).
Is that an euphemism for "the paperwork was not filed AT ALL ON PURPOSE"?
If they want to do business here, then they should be forced to hire here and train as needed and that includes teaching people their preferred ways of communicating.
Ok then they wont do business here.
It’s a chicken and egg situation to put it mildly. If you had the people who could be trained to install and run this plant you wouldn’t be importing the entire factory.
The article also says:
> LG Energy Solution said Saturday that 47 of its employees were detained, 46 of them Korean. Another 250 personnel from “equipment partner companies,” most of them Korean, were also being held, it added.
So it seems there were multiple parent companies involved
When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
A shoddy way and shortsighted to deal with companies which are investing in your country.
Why would you suspect that a company flying in hundreds of laborers can’t afford a lawyer to give the same guidance your HR company gave? It’s tax evasion and cost cutting.
>When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
Were you actually there for "meetings"? or actually doing stuff like writing reports?
On a conference trip to Italy, they basically asked me nothing. "Where are you going? Ok, next." Hardly any security either. You even had to walk through a gift shop to get to the customs area. It was nice.
Trust me, no one in my role thought travelling once a quarter through EWR was a privilege. Haven’t had to visit for ten years and will never have to again, thank goodness.
A group of house reps have been trying to fix this issue since 2012, but have never gotten it through committee.
“Oh, maybe they got mixed up with the visa because language”. No they did not.
“Oh, maybe it’s really difficult to find local talent”. No it isn’t. Not for them.
There are many advantages for them to illegally fly in a whole Workforce. That is why they did it.
“
Even before Trump there were plenty of stories where ICE clearly didn't know their own country's visa rules.
It is somewhat astonishing, but it seems people are baffled when things don’t change even though consequences for corporations and executives are net positive. Why should they care when the c-suite runs off with way more money than before in the end anyways?
Take for example the recent greystar lawsuit by the government for essentially price fixing apartment rents, ie fraud, across the nation. Long story short; estimates are they profited about $2.2 billion every year, the government fined them/agreed to a measly settlement paid to the government; with zero relief or compensation to those they committed their crimes against, nor will the executives that made the illegal decisions suffer any consequences, nor will there be punitive consequences that make executives sit up in attention.
Besides, they haven't been charged with anything so in the US they are considered innocent.
I'm frankly baffled. You have a large capitalist corporation, flouting the laws of the country they're in and exploiting cheap labour. The US are simply enforcing the law like you would expect from any non banana republic. I can't think of in issue where the left should be so aligned with the government. It's a scandal and i hope the executives get held to account.
They were in the country to transfer knowledge and help build a factory to create jobs in the US.
By mistake (maybe?), some visas expired, and then all workers are arrested.
Doesn't that seem like an exaggerated response? It's not like they don't respect the US laws and regulations…
Instead they detained all the Koreans in the building and appear to have used them as a negotiating chip in an upcoming “deal” with the government of South Korea. This is behavior we expect of a banana republic not an allied nation of laws.
It feels weird for HN to be going to bat for a company abusing labor laws, am I missing something here?
People are so both-sides poisoned they come out with these nonsensical takes reflexively just to virtue signal being "above" having a (public) stance.
I also don't think people are "going to bat for a company abusing labor laws" so much as they are highly suspicious of these enforcement actions given the complete lawlessness displayed elsewhere and imagine the possibility that there were more diplomatic solutions that still address the problem appropriately.
At some level stories are told in a way in which there is a good-guy and a bad-guy and the megacorp drew the good-guy straw this time. It was just a few years ago a Hyundai owned subsidiary was caught in the US employing underage people from Guatemala [0].
0. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
But every time one of these busts happen, no executives go to jail. They bust in, grab potentially hundreds of instances of those executives committing felonies, and pretend those working class people are the problem, quietly letting the execs giggle away to the bank. Often with a fee single digits percents of what they saved / made.
If there were 300 people here working illegally, I want to see multiple Hyundai executive charged with 300 counts of the associated felony crime.
Then charge them with the appropriate crime.
> But every time one of these busts happen, no executives go to jail. They bust in, grab potentially hundreds of instances of those executives committing felonies, and pretend those working class people are the problem, quietly letting the execs giggle away to the bank. Often with a fee single digits percents of what they saved / made.
Okay, then fix that instead of deciding to allow a bunch of people who are here illegally to remain because you're upset that other people aren't being charged.
> If there were 300 people here working illegally, I want to see multiple Hyundai executive charged with 300 counts of the associated felony crime.
Fine by me. Not sure why you're ranting at me about this tangent from the question I asked the parent poster.
After Reuters documented the disappearance of the young girl who worked at SMART, a team of state and federal authorities conducted the Aug. 9 inspection at SL, in Alexander City. They discovered seven minors there, including the two Guatemalan brothers, among employees making lights and mirrors for Hyundai and Kia. Alabama’s Department of Labor fined SL and JK USA Inc, a staffing agency, $17,800 each.
It has been really disheartening seeing a generation of, presumably, leftists abandon decades old demands and movements from local worker protections, global environmental causes, or democratic oversight over ivy league institutes by parroting the same bad arguments their opposition did to them over these decades.
As long as I have been alive, very progressive leftists always argued that ivy league institutions need admission reform. They receive billions from our tax dollars, yet their admission policies have always favored the already wealthy and powerful (the rich, alumnus, donors, "elite"). They only pay lip service to "low income families" while straddling most middle class students in insane levels of debt and refuse to publish admission rates. Progressives have always argued that these organizations cannot exist without public (tax payers) funding and as a result should have democratic oversight and should be required to publish their admission rates. We should be withholding that funding or using it as a forcing function for them to do so. The opposition have always argued (in bad faith) to "leave them alone. Education should be independent and they should do whatever they want". Now that a right-wing administration actually put pressure on them (for reasons I disagree with), every "liberal" I know just jumps on the simplest of arguments that "They should be independent. There shouldn't be any oversight required or expected on these educational institutes. That's illegal.". Whats worst is trying to explain how this is a bad argument just gets you yelled at because you must be a "both sides are the same"-person or a secretly republican or "but we're not talking about admission here. We need to unit against the enemy with one argument then we'll figure it out later once education is not under attack" type BS arguments.
Same for tariffs and global trade rules and all the global environmental destruction, human rights violations, and local economy mayhem they caused. The argument isn't that these laws need to be tightened and reconsidered to reduce our dependency on slave labor or funding massive environmental polluters or not incentivizing the biggest consumer base on the plant to consider the diesel emissions cost of shipping massive contains full of plastic trinkets across the pacific only for 99% of them to end up in a landfill. Suddenly the argument from progressives and the left are all about the economy. The cost of TEMU for the poor American consumer and how this is the world we live in. There is nothing we can or should do to change it.
The USA is just a bad place for foreign companies to setup factories: you need an army of immigration lawyers to do it, and be willing spending a lot of time waiting to get the “proper visas” for key personnel. South Korea’s interest in getting those engineers back isn’t just purely empathy based, there are probably only a handful of engineers in Korea that can do what they do (good luck getting that factory going before your term is out, Mr. Trump).
That may well have been the goal in the first place.
> 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...
Many of those detained have been reported to be employed by Hyundai's equipment vendors. That would be consistent with activities of this nature.
It's probably a coin flip whether a different DHS staffer would agree, though. Interpretation of these rules has always been notoriously inconsistent, and probably explains the problem here.
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.
With this logic it would be illegal to have a vacation and also write a code in a free time.
It does not matter who is funding you.
I could be wrong though. I have personally seen companies abuse this. I’m glad it’s be cracked down on.
I've never worked in fab/manufacturing, but I assume if you buy a bunch of gear from ASML (100s of millions of $), they are going to send a team out to help set it up and get it working for you. How else could that work? Some story for advanced batteries.
And a similar story for large (multi-national) tech/software companies. People need to travel back and forth between sites. Getting "work" visas for these short visits would be impractical.
Why are you happy to see a crack down? How do you think this should work?
I totally understand that it is universally abused. I’ve seen it abused in white collar work. Companies need to adjust economically and plan their budgets accordingly.
Honestly, in many parts of the country there is no hope, no jobs, and just drugs. It’s time to invest in the U.S. citizen again.
I’m happy there is a crackdown because I have seen U.S. jobs lost due to this behavior. It’s actually the only reason I voted for trump.
And, FWIW, when I worked for big multi-national tech firms, it was the same thing having people from the EU offices visit. They were not doing jobs that Americans could do. We already hired all the Americans we could, and these people worked 50 weeks a year in the EU.
America is a very large country and I’m sure if you paid enough, and took the time to train the workers you can find people to do the work. If you have planned your budget and timeline around not taking this path then it seems unethical to me.
I’ve witnessed tech jobs done where there are plenty of capable people in the us available to do the work. They just cannot afford to post us wages and train the workers in the us.
I completely understand that some projects are different, and you need a specific skillset. But if you are going to do work on us soil you have to follow the law.
The problem in the topical case, is likely, that it was not a short visit but people being employed in the US illegally.
Similar things happen with stuff like workplace safety. "Shouldn't that guy be strapped into that lift?" No, he's with xxxx, they don't follow any rules. You can turn them in but nobody cares.
thats called _deported_
The battery plant is not up and running :).
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