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

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

#111

Post by xorbax »

binary132 wrote: post #65
Bud wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, they were BUILDING the factory. Which was then going to provide hundreds of jobs to Americans. Seems hard to characterize this in any way other than calling it incredibly stupid.

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

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.

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

#112

Post by Avicebron »

mlyle wrote: post #108
pylua wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

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

#113

Post by geeunits »

sysguest wrote: post #98
geeunits wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> easily apply for ok... of course you can easily apply. But then, when do you get the approval? next day? next week? next month? year? this is just a big example of US not being "institutionally ready" for Trump's "Made in America" vision.

factories aren't built in a day

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

#114

Post by mlyle »

Avicebron wrote: post #112
mlyle wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

#115

Post by bdangubic »

geeunits wrote: post #113
sysguest wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easily apply for ok... of course you can easily apply. But then, when do you get the approval? next day? next week? next month? year? this is just a big example of US not being "institutionally ready" for Trump's "Made in America" vision.

factories aren't built in a day

they are in china

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

#116

Post by Avicebron »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #14
Avicebron wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would you even evaluate that?

fixed milestones with responsibility hand-offs?

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

#118

Post by insane_dreamer »

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.

Who cares! They were building a factory in the US which is what we want other countries to do.

This was done for theatre effect.

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

#119

Post by insane_dreamer »

geeunits wrote: post #55
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…

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.

Sure, if you don't want companies to build factories in your country, this is the way to go about it.

There are dozens of other ways this could have been handled.

America First! (just don't build factories here that boost the American economy)

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

#120

Post by insane_dreamer »

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.

> 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

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