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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #79
cmdli wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by lkois »

mothballed wrote: post #51
pavel_lishin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But if you're just here on a work trip, why would you want to ever come back?

They may come to see it more like a mercenary does. Some may be jailed, hurt, tortured in Central America, etc but if the pay is high enough it is worth the risks. If they offer high enough more than they can get in South Korea, people will come.

Sure they may become mercenaries. Maybe "Hyundai factory worker" is akin to "remote oil rig worker".

Or they could just be regular people with regular, stable jobs because they haven't chased a life of risk.

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

#93

Post by pylua »

mlyle wrote: post #56
behnamoh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your solution is to shut our eyes and let undocumented foreigners take the jobs that a well-educated American society could fulfill?

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.

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

#94

Post by colechristensen »

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…

The BBC said they were all subcontractors and as you suggest, mechanics involved in setting up the factory in some way. Seems like it's exactly that, a contract house not wanting to go through the process of getting proper visas and getting folks in in any way.

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.

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

#96

Post by colechristensen »

dv_dt wrote: post #82
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…

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 ga…

>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.

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

#97

Post by blargey »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #31

What nobody is discussing is why hyundai was apparently employing 500 illegal workers [edit: i see some HNers have commented on it. The news sites and reddit have all somehow completely overlooked this significant angle]. I think it's reasonable to question if they got full employment rights as if they had been legal residents. Frankly i'm amazed the white house hasn't yet made a huge fuss about it and why hyundai is…

It's stated clearly that the factory in question is under construction. There are multiple such factories being constructed by Hyundai in Georgia, each under an agreement with the state to employ several thousand locals once they get it running, in exchange for incentives to build on US soil in the first place. (ex/ 8,100 local jobs under this plan, for example https://georgia.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/hyundai_moto... )

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."

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

#98

Post by sysguest »

geeunits wrote: post #80
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.

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.

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

#99

Post by Cyph0n »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
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.

Th authorities are very vague in their statements, on purpose. 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.

What is clear is that this has escalated to a diplomatic crisis at the highest levels on the Korean side. Definitely bodes well for future interest in investing in advanced manufacturing in the US.

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

#100

Post by blargey »

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.

The factory isn't even being "filled with foreign workers", it's being set up by foreign workers so they can start employing 10x as many locals to actually staff it long term.
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