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South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

apnews.com

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Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#101

Post by comrade1234 »

leptons wrote: post #90
goranmoomin wrote: post #32

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 l…

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.

Yeah they should have hired Georgia hvac engineers to get their highly technical battery production line going.

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#102

Post by blargey »

hyperpape wrote: post #76
sungchi wrote: post #44

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 com…

The obvious followup question is how common it is for a company to bring in hundreds of workers to set up a factory. 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.

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.

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#103

Post by defrost »

pnw wrote: post #45
pavel_lishin wrote: post #16

> 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?

All of them. You can watch the entire press conference at https://www.youtube.com/live/AD7n_nSOorU

A HSI / ICE press conference on the facts carries all the credibility of a RFK Jr press conference on vaccines though . . .

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#104

Post by pnw »

PhantomHour wrote: post #81
pnw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This press conference is the source of all of the articles. https://www.youtube.com/live/AD7n_nSOorU 4:30 Describes the search warrants and arrests. 5:10 "475 were illegally present in the United States" 6:25 "Majority were Korean nationals" No criminal charges yet. It's an ongoing investigation.

> 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.

He specifically mentions illegal entry and visa waiver, neither of which are work visas.

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#105

Post by Ancapistani »

pnw wrote: post #17
pylua wrote: post #15

I’ve been confused by reading the articles and comments on this matter. Are they in the country illegally ? Regardless I am glad the workers get to go home. If it is illegal I’d imagine the company should be at fault.

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.

Hyundai has a history of allowing - either knowingly/intentionally or not - subcontractors to violate US labor law.

Example from 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Alabama_child_labor_al...

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#106

Post by tripletao »

geor9e wrote: post #57

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 gener…

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.

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.

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#107

Post by JKCalhoun »

refurb wrote: post #59
JKCalhoun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone trying to be diplomatic might, for example, allow them a window of time within which to apply to extend their visas.

They never had valid work visas in the first place.

I was speaking with regards to this from the article: "…others had entered the country legally but had expired visas…"

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#108

Post by mlyle »

pylua wrote: post #93
mlyle wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid

#109

Post by xorbax »

overfeed wrote: post #88
binary132 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spell out for me how that makes it ok to use undocumented labor

> 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.

This happened in Alabama.

Arrest the wrong German executive as part of your "immigration crackdown" and suddenly Mercedes is pulling out of your economy.

Alabama has gone down this road, and I'm not seeing how it will be any better for anyone this time around. People tentatively agreeing with it or not.

If there are so many undocumented laborers we need, then the issue is documentation. Trump is [not exactly endearing himself with SK](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-china...).

Aren't we supposed to be encouraging American manufacturing? Or is the plan to run out Hyundai and make Fords?

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