US immigration authorities said on Friday that they had detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided Hyundai’s sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia, where the Korean automaker makes electric vehicles.
The Pew Research Center, citing preliminary Census Bureau data, said the US labour force lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January through July.
I’ve seen this article a whole bunch now, and I have yet to see anyone day if these SK workers were even here under false visas or something? They say they haven’t been charged, but are they just rounding up “legitimate” immigrant labor now, not even holding to their own flimsy pretense?
from another source
Some of the detainees had entered the country unlawfully, while others arrived on temporary visas or through a waiver program that does not allow employment, according to Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations.
Attorney Charles Kuck, who represents two detained workers, told AP his clients arrived under the visa waiver program and were in the country legally for tourism or business. He said one had been in the U.S. for only two weeks and the other for 45 days, both planning to return home soon.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Lindsay Williams told AP that some individuals were detained due to prior criminal records and added, “Once citizens have identified themselves, we have no authority” to detain them. Hyundai stated Friday that it believed none of its direct employees were among those detained and said it was reviewing its practices to ensure legal compliance by contractors and subcontractors.
Thank you! That’s… not much better, but at least it hasn’t gotten quite as bad as it’s going to…?
sigh. This shit is so fucking exhausting. just. fuck.
Using falsely visas is SK’s fault, but raiding $7.6 billion plant with excessive force is too much. They could have given a warning and time to clear up the visa paperwork beforehand, but they didn’t.
cruelty is the point
It was an EV plant.
The disruptions are by design.
Trump is going to take over the manufacturing plant.
Appreciate the context. Still feels excessive, but at least more warranted than a lot of their other activities. I really hope they just go after corporations, but I doubt they will.
Seems like it. Pretty sure all they care about is being able to report “we arrested 450 illegals” regardless of the actual truth of the situation.
and by ‘illegals’ they mean ‘brown people’ (regardless of origin or nationality or legal status to work here).
or even actual brownness. i have a friend from Ukraine that got called “wetback”. worth noting, she’s a US citizen. so… you know… look. racists aren’t exactly known for their critical thinking skills
Yeah. If you look at what the directives have been from above, it’s very very obvious in retrospect that ICE would be just wandering around arresting people completely at random, because they will literally get in trouble if they do literally anything else.
I know this isn’t a real source but I know someone who works at this plant and he said most were here on 3 month visit visas.
Essentially they’d be paid back in SK for their 3 months of work and would cycle in and out in rotations.
Out of all the insane raids ICE has conducted, this one is actually quite a big find since it’s Hyandai essentially bypassing visa requirements for cheap labor.
Most likely ICE isn’t sure whether to charge the immigrant workers or fine Hyandai since Hyandai is the one that offered them jobs and told them the process of working under a visit visa.
I think they will likely get deported without any criminal charges or individual fines, but will obviously get blacklisted from any future entrance into the US.
So many incorrect spellings of Hyundai, hopefully ice does the same and the case goes nowhere.
Samsung must have corporate beef with them because my autocorrect is set to Hyandai and not Hyundai lmao
I am deeply skeptical of your story. This is the kind of thing that’s super-easy to prove, and I feel like if they were finding real immigration fraud at this plant, they would be half-likely to actually try to enforce against it since that was exactly what they did the raid for and it would have been detected in 2 seconds once they started checking IDs. And even if not, it would be half-likely that that aspect of the story would leak to the press in some form at some point.
The whole thing where your phone autocorrected a real word to a totally nonexistent word makes me further skeptical of the whole thing. I won’t say either is impossible, but they both seem unlikely.
I’m just gonna chalk it up to the Samsung keyboard being complete garbage lol, I was joking about the corporate beef.
As for Hyundai, yeah it sounds sketchy because it’s “I heard from someone” which may as well just be made up, but I didn’t add any details because it gets a little too close to disclosing personal info.
But tbf this is lemmy and I would have questioned the same thing, so here goes:
I live <2 hours away from one of Hyundai’s Georgia plants and personally know someone who works for Hyundai at raided plant who gave all the details of what he knows (along with some pictures of helicopters during the raid lol).
According to him, they primarily targeted the LG portion of the facility, which is across the road from the Hyundai section. They had everyone come outside for the lineup and verification of ID, before they took whoever they wanted away. In his own words, it was a “massive operation and totally overkill for whatever they discovered.”
A group of us were discussing the implications, because we always assumed the large Korean immigrant population in our area was primarily here on legal work visas (they are, 500 is nothing compared to the current population). We just didn’t expect Hyundai/LG to be skirting around for cheap foreign labor via visit visas.*
He doesn’t know how DHS/ICE figured them out or how Hyundai was documenting this process, but he did hear people talk about the visit visa process long before this, meaning it wasn’t some huge secret (DHS may already have been aware of this a long time ago). There are other similar visa exploit tricks several companies use that DHS has recently been trying to shutdown or change (stuff like multiple applications for a visa for only one person to increase draw rate).
Anyways, the general concenus was that even though the visit visa was providing jobs, it was technically exploit labor since workers would not have been receiving any US employment benefits or equivalent salary. Hyundai is primarily the one at fault here, but they really didn’t need to do a massive raid for this. They could have just as easily sent a single squad to show up and do ID checks, or even just knock on home addresses of everyone they identified on a non work visa.
Obviously no one wants to give ICE any more ammo for their existence, but I think they’ve been pocketing this and waited for a while so they can get all the clout with some big headlines after a couple of months of desperately detaining anyone even remotely foreign.
You can find details about both the visit visas and LG plant corroborated in the news. Ex: https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff
As a result, South Korean companies have been relying on short-term visitor visas or the Electronic System for Travel Authorization to send the workers they need to launch manufacturing facilities or handle other setup tasks.
*fwiw it does seem more like they are dancing around the increasingly stricter visa requirements to get work done, and not just some cheap labor exploit, especially considering the amount of immigrants here on valid work visas for all the other jobs.
햔대 ㅋㅋ
하얀 데이
they keep saying “white day” instead of “modern” 현대 lol
… You what
I have yet to see anyone day if these SK workers were even here under false visas or something?
Umm… Trump regime already removed their hoods off about supposedly removing illegal immigrants. It is pogrom towards any foreigners.
Yes.
For those who were curious, “home” means South Korea, not their homes they made in the US.
Also there’s this:
Lee’s government even promised at least $50bn of investments during his recent meeting with Trump, a gesture that resulted only in a “crackdown” against South Korean citizens.
CBS, are you paying attention? Probably not.
Yeah, honestly, Trumpian fascism will only make China look good in the eyes of many. Recent surveys in Europe already showed more favourable view towards China than US as Trump regime unravels. South Korea and Europe might invest on China instead.
I have already said it months ago that China will use the Trump shenanigans as PR coup. Beijing is already offering itself as the more reliable free trade partner than the US.
I would be a little bit surprised if the people in charge of high-level trade are that simple-minded.
China was already a great reliable trade partner. They have other issues as does any nation, but attractiveness for trade wasn’t really one of them, they were already pretty bangin’ in that regard, and the US losing its status as a good investment doesn’t suddenly mean that Chinese markets will become always a safe investment by default. I feel like these narratives like “trade relations = loyalty and friendship, there can be only one favorite nation-crush” are sort of for public consumption.
I would be a little bit surprised if the people in charge of high-level trade are that simple-minded.
Their changing in business patterns shows it’s the very opposite of them being simple-minded:
I business terms, the biggest negative that the Trump Administration added to Trading in and with the US and US-based Suppliers and Customers is uncertainty - you never know when they’re going to do something that fucks up your business: in other words, Trump made the Risk around doing business in America or with US-based companies and customers far higher.
Risk is one of the biggest considerations in evaluating business plans and the more competent and professional a company’s management is the more likely they’ll do thorough evaluations of any business prospects, something which always includes risk considerations. In fact an entire Industry exists dedicated to manage such risks: the Finance Industry.
Only shitty shit little companies rely of the “gut feelings” of the business owner to evaluate business opportunities.
So yeah, in business plan models all over the World, anything which directly or indirectly can be influenced by the actions of the American Administration just got a big chunk of Risk added, whilst no such thing was added to such plans involving other countries, hence doing business with America is now less appealing that doing business with other countries, in a very direct way.
My expectation is that for most countries even the Tariffs themselves (which for most aren’t all that scary) haven’t as much impact in making America less attractive for business than the sheer unpredictability of the US Administration.
time to rescind that 50bn.
This is a way to hurt Teslas competition. Nothing else.
I still wouldn’t buy a tesla. Even if it were the last available vehicle to purchase in North America. I’d rather walk everywhere
I’ve gotten along all my life without driving. There’s disadvantages, of course, but there are also advantages like not having to worry about finding a parking space
If only we could all live in a place where that’s possible
Most of Europe and Asia sans the very rural areas?
Yes, that’s very relevant to everyone in North America
Pretty sure Vancouver is pretty walkable as well.
Well thank fuck, all Americans can move to Vancouver to stop relying on cars.
The point is that America is designed for car dependence, you cannot live in most of America without a car or taxis/Ubers. Pointing out that walkable areas exist in the world doesn’t help anybody living in a non walkable city, and moving is not the solution or an option for most people.
I’m waiting for Hyundai to close the doors while they sort out specialized skilled labour issues.
Wow, they’re not being deported to South Sudan!? Time to give Trump that Nobel Peace prize!
Yeah I would leave dealing with that bs. Boycott the US!
Just like Southpark…
So instead of employing Americans through moving production to the US, they just imported Koreans lol.
Oh. I should really read articles from time to time. I have seen this through headlines and always assumed it was about the country of Georgia, not the state in the USA.
