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South Koreans feel betrayed by workforce detentions at Georgia Hyundai plant

105 points by paulpauper 1y ago

helqn 1y ago
[flagged]
nashashmi 1y ago
The full story is: Specialized foreign workers were brought in for repair and specialized work. Korean immigrants are able to come in on ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Labor union claimed the workers were doing union non-specialized work and this broke their visa grants. Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. I don't criticize anyone but this administration is a hot mess. And too arrogant to admit it.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  > Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. Your boss telling you to violate the terms of your visa doesn't mean you get to do that. They violated their visas, so they get kicked out.
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    The visa was procured by the business under the auspices of doing business. The business holds responsibility that the worker performs operation for the business in the parameters that the business visa works in. The same goes for H2B visas.
  - pavlov 1y ago
    If only it were that simple. An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. - - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501
    - CPLX 1y ago
      > An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? This is a construction site. Do you have a tool in your hand? Then you’re not in a fucking meeting. This isn’t that complicated. > A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? How are you supposed to know the laws of any country you visit? Do you have some kind of universal rule you’re applying here? If I don’t know what kilometers are can I get away with speeding in Switzerland? > That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. The details here seem to be in short supply but if they were acting as construction workers or even foreman on tourist or B1 visas what they were doing is clearly illegal. Hyundai is a multi billion dollar company they’re well capable of knowing and following US labor laws. If they can’t they have no business building a factory in the US obviously.
      - pavlov 1y ago
        What evidence do you have that the Korean Hyundai employees were construction workers or foremen? Why would Hyundai fly that kind of workers from across the world?
        CPLX 1y ago
        The fact that many were wearing hard hats and hi-vis vests in the photos of the raid seems relevant right? They raided a construction site, not an office building. What do you think they were doing there?
        pavlov 1y ago
        An architect would wear a hard hat and vest to a construction site. Does that make them a construction worker?
        1y ago
  - fragmede 1y ago
    That's incredibly shortsighted. Hyundai invested a shit ton of time and money and effort into making a plant in a shit hole of a state to make it less of a shit hole. Now, there's a group of South Koreans who have first hand experience of America being shit. They're gonna go home and tell everyone that will listen, that Americans are all shitheads, and fuck those people, and never come back. Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated? Have you been arrested? It's humiliating. It's not that they broke the rules, it's how they're being enforced. That visa has always been fine for that. If we wanted to change how things work, a competent state department would have telegraphed changes coming down the pipeline months in advance, and spared everyone the humiliation of being abducted by ICE.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      This is an insightful comment on what is apparently a multi-billion dollar charity known as Hyundai, and their desire to improve the state of Georgia. I had mistakenly confused them with the multi-national Chaebol of the same name that is known for ruthless business competition and making decisions to maximize their own profits and shareholder wealth.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        You are forgiven. It's pretty confusing, I know. Those people with the different skin and hair color have emotions and families, even though they don't speak English.
        CPLX 1y ago
        What do you suppose the answer to this question is: > Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated?
        komali2 1y ago
        I've followed you through this thread and I'm really curious about your political ideology. On the one hand you've been making the stark, cynical observations I expect from leftist: analyzing the company's behavior from a lens of profit motive, discussing how corporations will outsource to other countries to skirt labor law and pay slave wages, defending unions, discussing how immigrant labor is just another form of outsourcing; on the other hand you've engaged in hard-line liberal defense of law for the sake of law: never mind that a bunch of non citizens were just subjected to violence at the hands of the state, perhaps they violated the law and therefore they're subject to whatever degredation the legal apparatus throws at them! Finally, you, perhaps inadvertently, are defending the actions of America's most right wing government it possibly has ever had, continually pulling out their own propaganda lines: "they were violating the terms of their visa and have to go!" I like meeting people like that, if you were open to sharing how you arrived at this more-complicated-than-normal political ideology, I'd be interested to know more.
- argomo 1y ago
  It's extremely easy to perform union with without realizing it. I was working a software deployment at a plant site where we had uncomfortable chairs, so we brought in chairs from the conference room next door. That turned out to be a union job, so we had to return the chairs and suffer until some union folks could do the same thing. And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it. While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.
  - conradev 1y ago
    Rippling moved into an old Spotify office in NYC and they were required to use union labor to remove the old signage. They decided to leave the signage up rather than pay the union tax.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      When they give lavish amounts of money to executives or VCs do you also call that a tax?
      - conradev 1y ago
        Nope. I was using tax in the sense of "mandatory cost enforced by the government" even though in this case the revenue goes to private entities.
        CPLX 1y ago
        Is there any cost not enforced by the government? What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?
        conradev 1y ago
        For you in particular, likely some moral precepts? or are you arguing that the deterrent effect of government punishment is the only thing stopping you? I don't really understand the line of argument.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  > Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. So if hookers are working the streets, the hammer does not fall on them and will fall on their pimp instead? The cops will just let them go? The law does not work the way you think it does.
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    That depends on the writing of the law. If the law forbids a person to sell an illegal service, then the seller is at fault. If the law forbids buying a service, then the buyer is at fault. It is easier to go after the seller/broker (pimp) then it is to go after the service worker, legally speaking, because the transfer of money is through the broker. Same thing happened with Trump in the hush money scandal. The guy who transferred the money (the lawyer) was at fault. The only reason by which they came after trump was that the books did not record the transfer truthfully, and did so falsely.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Having your lawyer do something illegal on your behalf is also a crime.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU
  - Paratoner 1y ago
    And it works the way things are unfolding since the start of this year, highly knowledgeable person sir?
- CPLX 1y ago
  That’s not the full story at all. No argument that this administration is a disaster on hundreds of metrics but it’s not clear what’s going on here. At a glance it’s at least possible that this was a pro-US worker policy. The Asian high tech companies have a history of falsely claiming US workers just aren’t smart enough to do the job when in fact what they really want is to have their own workers come in and work triple overtime at slave wages. It was a huge issue with the TSMC build in Arizona. If they brought people in to do construction work on either tourist visas or B1 meeting type visas that’s illegal and should be and what happened here makes perfect sense. Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    > Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know. It is pretty obvious now that the Korean sub-contractors thought they were above board on the proper visas for the consulting work that was being contracted. Now, whether that was actually true or not will take a few years of litigation to figure out, since visa law is complicated. If they were doing custom specialized work (that is definitely allowed by ESTA/B1), then the visas were correct. If they were hammering nails into wood, then the visas were incorrect. See https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyund...
    - CPLX 1y ago
      That's not obvious at all. The image in the article you're linking to shows people with hardhats and vests that say "mechanic" on them. Not only that there's a long history of asian high tech conglomerates taking shortcuts on these kinds of projects: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-factory-phoenix-accidents/ https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-fac... Including this specific one: https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-at-hyundais-76b-metaplant-in-georgia https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a... So maybe, maybe not. The fact that the attorneys for the accused deny it isn't exactly dispositive.
- GeoAtreides 1y ago
  >ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Wrong. ESTA is not a visa, it's a requirement for all travelers to US. The visa-waiver program (VWP) doesn't include the right to work. You need to have an appropriate visa if you're being paid (or given material benefits) while travelling in US. Things like interviews or conferences or workshops are not included in the right to work requirement.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
phendrenad2 1y ago
Understandable. I feel sorry for the Korean workers who were caught up in this. Hyundai should be held responsible for illegally importing/trafficking them, they should keep their jobs, as it's not really their fault. They were probably lied to by Hyundai. They're the victims here (as well as the American people, but that's another story).
- mrexroad 1y ago
  Sorry, can you clarify where it’s stated they were illegally imported / trafficked?
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    They were brought here under false pretenses.
Simulacra 1y ago
I don't understand, did they or did they not have invalid visas? I don't understand why they would feel betrayed, it's the law. Why is this so different?
- lupusreal 1y ago
  [flagged]
- jerlam 1y ago
  Some probably did not, but it was common to ignore the law. There does not seem to be a process for getting valid visas for this kind of project: https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3674 https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3... And they would feel betrayed because their bosses probably told them it was ok.
  - Simulacra 1y ago
    But that raise is a very important question: are we at the point where we don't follow certain laws because we disagree with them, or do we follow all laws and try to change the ones we disagree with? I'm certain mistakes were made, by everyone, but how do we draw the line between breaking the law and not breaking the law? That last part is a very, very good point. It's possible nobody ever told them. Which means the managers and the people who run the plant should be the ones in handcuffs.
    - loandbehold 1y ago
      It's quite common for some laws to be broken on a regular basis to the point where it becomes expected behavior. Going 70 mph when speed limit is 65 mph is one example.
      - jerlam 1y ago
        If everyone is breaking the law, but it is only enforced on a specific group of people, it basically kills the entire rule of law.
catigula 1y ago
Creating factories in America as a tariff loophole, likely using American taxpayer dollars and infrastructure, and then taking advantage of this to employ foreign labor and claim they have "special guy who welds together a car door skills", is pretty disturbing and emblematic of how stark a failure it is to pour public funding into/for private companies and demand no state stake. If Google, or Hyundai, get special privileges and resource investment from the state, the state should have an ownership stake in these companies. This is known to most countries and isn't particularly controversial.
- taylodl 1y ago
  Construction began in early-2023. Unless Hyundai has a crystal ball allowing them to see the future then this wasn't a tariff loophole.
  - catigula 1y ago
    Protectionist measures existed in the US economy well prior Trump's recent term as president.
axus 1y ago
> A Savannah labor union leader said local unions have complained that Hyundai and its contractors were improperly using South Korean workers for basic construction that falls outside the visa waiver rules. I'm glad there's some small way the US people benefitted from this action. Overall it's insane; did they try an ultimatum with lawyers, and an agreement to send everyone home, before sending in the helicopters?
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  I think the problem is, by the nature of being undocumented, it's hard to prove that these people are working illegally. I guess you could send in the FBI and put spy cams all over the facility, use facial recognition to identify improperly documented workers, tail them to their homes, and pick them up there. In fact, I'm probably more in favor of that kind of thing. Big sloppy raids on brand-name companies just looks heavy-handed.
  - axus 1y ago
    According to the article they are documented, have B-1 temporary business visas. The employees don't know US law and are following the companies instructions. The company directed them to perform work outside the scope of the visas. It's the company that's at fault and should be the target of enforcement; do that and the employees have no reason or desire to stay in the US.
    - phendrenad2 1y ago
      The article is wrong. Some have B-1 visas, and some are on ESTA. The ones on B-1 are not Korean. The ones on ESTA are. The rules for ESTA are tricky, and it seems like there might be a loophole where these workers were working legally.
- rconti 1y ago
  Of course not; that would be a measured approach that would attempt to address the actual problem, rather than an insane shock and awe move designed to get headlines.
wmeredith 1y ago
Reading the article it looks like the workers in question were here legally with visas and they were getting the plant online to train US workers. Isn't this exactly what was asked for? WTF is this administration doing literally putting these people in chains?
- scotty79 1y ago
  Also the deal they get is to leave the country now and be banned for extended period or stay in detention (a prison basically) and await a hearing that will happen no sooner than in months. They have few days to decide which option they choose.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - ActorNightly 1y ago
    Lets say that was true On one hand, you could work with Hyundai to address the issue, let the plant be built, knowing that eventually the plant is going to brig a lot more jobs for Americans, and bring economic activity to the area. On the other hand, you could make this a political spectacle, cause Hyundai to abandon the plant, further destroying relations, and now no jobs are going to come as a result of this as they abandon construction. Makes perfect sense.
    - some_guy_nobel 1y ago
      The world isn't black and white, but your scenario makes no sense regardless. - If Hyundai is using illegal labor to build the plant, what would stop them from operating the plant with labor from the same illegal pool? The motivation for labor selection here is not type-of-work, it's cost. - If Hyundai is allowed to employ illegal immigrants in that way, what precedent does that set for other similar plants? - Of course tradesmen are going to advocate for their trade. They don't care about some second-order effects on employment that doesn't effect them. (I'll save you some typing, they don't care about the imaginary third-order externalities that plant workers will use their services later, either). I think what the administration did is stupid as hell, but if those are truly jobs meant to go to Americans, why shouldn't locals be upset?
StefanBatory 1y ago
My take from it is, why the workers are punished for their leadership? One ought go after them, but instead it's the workers that will take the blame, and leadership will go business as usual. You can't say that higher-ups didn't know what was going on, getting them there.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  I'm not 100% sure that Hyundai (and/or the bosses who "oopsied" the paperwork) won't face consequences for this. The law is (famously) slow, ICE is fast. Give it time. As a sidenote, the fact that this happened in the middle of tariff negotiations with South Korea probably was used as leverage to get more for the US, so Hyundai is probably going to get heat from the South Korean government over this gaff.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I don't think they were there illegally. But to determine that they'd now need to spend months in prison awaiting a hearing. They are being punished for the leadership of US.
orwin 1y ago
I knew there were pictures of that, but it was intentional? You tell me your police put foreign people in chains, took pictures without blurring anything, and posted them? It wasn't a leak? Everything is dumb, but i think this is the worst. Who thought it was a good idea? And the US union workers agree with this? Even if they were doing illegal work, they cheer seeing fellow workers getting in chains and publicly humiliated i guess? Because of course that's the workers fault their company told them to go work there? Are they dumb? Sorry i really like your country (well, The Appalachians and the Sierras) but wtf are you doing?
- Exoristos 1y ago
  Yes, it's true, Americans prefer to be employed.
  - fhdkweig 1y ago
    Now that management are pulling all their Korean workers out and not finishing the plant, how did that work out for the Americans who preferred to be employed? ICE fucked that whole small town. That town was going to have that one industry and now it doesn't.
  - orwin 1y ago
    So you agree that if an employer might be breaking the law, we have to publicly humiliate its workers so that USians can have the jobs (maybe)? Why is the public humiliation necessary? The cuffing and even detainment is already too much for people with clean papers imho, but you also have to post their picture on social media to make the world understand how you treat workers in your country, that's the reason? "Your company is foreign and do bad things, if you come here, you'll be cuffed detained and shown to the world as an example" do not seems very USian, Statue of liberty and all, all the lines about justice and "fair punishment", but i'm updating my priors seeing that most of you seems to agree with that.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  The American union workers probably view the people who were detained as stealing jobs from them. They were (allegedly) only allowed to do certain work with their visas, and they were doing other work that was supposed to be for the union.
OGEnthusiast 1y ago
Interesting to see the tacit endorsement of these ICE raids by a local union leader: > Christi Hulme, president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council, said unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes. “Basically our labor was being given to illegal immigrants,” Hulme said. So far in the US, most labor unions have generally been fairly left-wing, including being pro-immigration. Wonder how long that will last.
- Molitor5901 1y ago
  That makes a lot of sense actually. Unions prefer union workers. Many of the unions are major pushers of higher minimum wage laws because it makes it more feasible to pay a little more for a union worker, than a non-union worker.
- Exoristos 1y ago
  This is the kind of thing unions are for.
- tokai 1y ago
  Defending the quality of ones labour market against social dumping is pretty left-wing. Internationalism is not a prerequisite for the left, especially with trades unions that won out against industrial unionism and the internationalist idea of One Big Union a hundred years ago. Being pro-immigration is a liberal stance.
- empath75 1y ago
  Labor unions have never been especially pro-immigration as a group -- it's highly dependent on their membership and whether it is growing or shrinking and how and why it is growing or shrinking. If you're a union that is largely concerned with preserving jobs and privileges in a shrinking industry, then there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be quite opposed to non-union immigrants coming in and "taking your jobs." If you're a farm-worker union with a growing membership of immigrants, more concerned about adding new members and organizing than with preserving previous wins, you may be quite in favor of more immigration.
- 1y ago
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
[flagged]
- gleenn 1y ago
  Did it actually say they were violating terms of their visas?
- csbrooks 1y ago
  I think that's an exaggeration. Here's an example I found of a British person in China who did this. Seems like he got a week in jail, then deported. https://www.newsweek.com/english-teacher-overstayed-visa-describes-ordeal-chinese-prison-1737264 https://www.newsweek.com/english-teacher-overstayed-visa-des...
- mapt 1y ago
  This is just totally untrue about how China deals with foreign nationals. They're tracked, they have significant disadvantages in civil courts, there are a bunch of other restrictions on their presence... but just disappearing Americans or South Koreans is not the sort of issue China has. They have an intense bureaucracy and foreign workers are comparatively rare & their existence geopolitically sensitive; Court cases involving foreigners are expedited and jail stays are short before deportation. Outside of very specific campaigns (eg Xinjiang) or internal Party processes, it's generally not even a problem that China has with Chinese nationals; Most people who cross over the line into something the government cannot stomach get a scary visit, or get obvious monitoring, or get a couple weeks confinement for investigation. Dissident status can have significant consequences for one's career. On the off chance it leads to adjudication (there are far lower rates of use of the justice system than the US, and arguably far lower crime rates, but we could say that about most countries), there is a public facing justice system just like we have. The people "disappearing" into a shadow justice system are those who voluntarily sign up for Party membership, a selective process more like enlisting in the military than listing your affiliation on a voter card. Turning against the Party in a significant way after joining the Party, typically ends up with some limited term of "rehabilitation", but a lot more earnest use of that terminology than our justice system uses. The fact is that the American system in 2025 is far more brutal, deliberately so. We literally stole children from families over immigration violations, and then "lost" them. We're setting up internment camps. We have court dates for legitimate immigration processes like asylum that are years or decades out.
pmdulaney 1y ago
I don't understand why Trump wants to poke our best allies in the eye over minor issues. The South Koreans are world leaders in heavy industries, including ship building. We should be currying their favor, not alienating them.
- mrexroad 1y ago
  Headlines, not just single ethnicity (“see, we’re applying rules equally to all countries!”), and bargaining chip.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  Agree. They should have worked this out privately instead of causing humiliation and losing the trust of South Korea’s own population. Trump made a similar mistake (arguably a much larger scale one) with India recently.
  - Sammi 1y ago
    And Canada. And Mexico. And Denmark (and by extension the rest of Europe). Trump is speed running alienating all US allies.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
I'm disappointed the union didn't bring out the giant inflatable rat.
lvl155 1y ago
I think many Asian companies underestimate how bad labor is in red states. It’s really a deal breaker for high skilled labor. You cannot teach or train these people. It’s cultural more than anything. There is a reason why they had to bring in their own labor for something not so high tech.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  It could also be a jobs program for Koreans. If the issue really was "we have to bring in our own labor", why couldn't they do it in the legally correct manner?
esjeon 1y ago
This one is where ICE’s operation is completely fair. Koreans have systemically abused ESTA on a massive scale for a long time. Korean companies treat ESTA as the de-facto business visa. US Homeland Security did tighten up the screening last year because of that, but the Korean government chose to do absolute nothing about it. No mention of ESTA & VISA issues was made during the recent US-SK summit meeting. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I say all this as a Korean. This article is politically biased rather severely.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > This one is where ICE’s operation is completely fair. The "completely" is going quite far given the treatment of them. They could be sent a notice ordering to stop work and leave. Or the employer could be told to start applying for visa updates or else. It's not like a skilled Hyundai worker on a temporary international work assignment is likely to run away and start an undocumented life in the US instead. It was a completely unnecessary show of force that also cost more than sending a few letters.
- komali2 1y ago
  Do you believe it's fair to the Korean workers that they are arrested and detained for what they thought was just doing their jobs, whereas their bosses who brought them in with the explicit purpose of skirting visa rules will walk scott free?
  - eska 1y ago
    As neither Korean nor American I wonder: how is this the US government’s problem? Koreans should complain about their bosses to the Korean government.
    - komali2 1y ago
      The USA government was the one that chose to arrest them for a political hooplah rather than go after their bosses.
squarefoot 1y ago
Wondering if Hyundai being a Tesla competitor plays a role here.
agnosticmantis 1y ago
The ingroup circle of "we're not them (the outgroup), so we're safe" keeps getting smaller and smaller.
xnx 1y ago
This raid was probably a bad idea and not in the US interest, but how much of this work could be done remotely? I'm sure it's much faster to have someone on site, but couldn't someone in Korea (or even someone from Korea in Canada) supervise someone on site via high fidelity video feed? This would be clumsy, but would ensure some knowledge sharing.

105 points by paulpauper 1y ago

[flagged]

The full story is: Specialized foreign workers were brought in for repair and specialized work. Korean immigrants are able to come in on ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Labor union claimed the workers were doing union non-specialized work and this broke their visa grants. Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. I don't criticize anyone but this administration is a hot mess. And too arrogant to admit it.

lupusreal 1y ago
> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. Your boss telling you to violate the terms of your visa doesn't mean you get to do that. They violated their visas, so they get kicked out.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  The visa was procured by the business under the auspices of doing business. The business holds responsibility that the worker performs operation for the business in the parameters that the business visa works in. The same goes for H2B visas.
- pavlov 1y ago
  If only it were that simple. An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. - - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501
  - CPLX 1y ago
    > An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”? This is a construction site. Do you have a tool in your hand? Then you’re not in a fucking meeting. This isn’t that complicated. > A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa? How are you supposed to know the laws of any country you visit? Do you have some kind of universal rule you’re applying here? If I don’t know what kilometers are can I get away with speeding in Switzerland? > That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted. The details here seem to be in short supply but if they were acting as construction workers or even foreman on tourist or B1 visas what they were doing is clearly illegal. Hyundai is a multi billion dollar company they’re well capable of knowing and following US labor laws. If they can’t they have no business building a factory in the US obviously.
    - pavlov 1y ago
      What evidence do you have that the Korean Hyundai employees were construction workers or foremen? Why would Hyundai fly that kind of workers from across the world?
      - CPLX 1y ago
        The fact that many were wearing hard hats and hi-vis vests in the photos of the raid seems relevant right? They raided a construction site, not an office building. What do you think they were doing there?
        pavlov 1y ago
        An architect would wear a hard hat and vest to a construction site. Does that make them a construction worker?
        1y ago
- fragmede 1y ago
  That's incredibly shortsighted. Hyundai invested a shit ton of time and money and effort into making a plant in a shit hole of a state to make it less of a shit hole. Now, there's a group of South Koreans who have first hand experience of America being shit. They're gonna go home and tell everyone that will listen, that Americans are all shitheads, and fuck those people, and never come back. Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated? Have you been arrested? It's humiliating. It's not that they broke the rules, it's how they're being enforced. That visa has always been fine for that. If we wanted to change how things work, a competent state department would have telegraphed changes coming down the pipeline months in advance, and spared everyone the humiliation of being abducted by ICE.
  - CPLX 1y ago
    This is an insightful comment on what is apparently a multi-billion dollar charity known as Hyundai, and their desire to improve the state of Georgia. I had mistakenly confused them with the multi-national Chaebol of the same name that is known for ruthless business competition and making decisions to maximize their own profits and shareholder wealth.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      You are forgiven. It's pretty confusing, I know. Those people with the different skin and hair color have emotions and families, even though they don't speak English.
      - CPLX 1y ago
        What do you suppose the answer to this question is: > Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated?
        komali2 1y ago
        I've followed you through this thread and I'm really curious about your political ideology. On the one hand you've been making the stark, cynical observations I expect from leftist: analyzing the company's behavior from a lens of profit motive, discussing how corporations will outsource to other countries to skirt labor law and pay slave wages, defending unions, discussing how immigrant labor is just another form of outsourcing; on the other hand you've engaged in hard-line liberal defense of law for the sake of law: never mind that a bunch of non citizens were just subjected to violence at the hands of the state, perhaps they violated the law and therefore they're subject to whatever degredation the legal apparatus throws at them! Finally, you, perhaps inadvertently, are defending the actions of America's most right wing government it possibly has ever had, continually pulling out their own propaganda lines: "they were violating the terms of their visa and have to go!" I like meeting people like that, if you were open to sharing how you arrived at this more-complicated-than-normal political ideology, I'd be interested to know more.
argomo 1y ago
It's extremely easy to perform union with without realizing it. I was working a software deployment at a plant site where we had uncomfortable chairs, so we brought in chairs from the conference room next door. That turned out to be a union job, so we had to return the chairs and suffer until some union folks could do the same thing. And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it. While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.
- conradev 1y ago
  Rippling moved into an old Spotify office in NYC and they were required to use union labor to remove the old signage. They decided to leave the signage up rather than pay the union tax.
  - CPLX 1y ago
    When they give lavish amounts of money to executives or VCs do you also call that a tax?
    - conradev 1y ago
      Nope. I was using tax in the sense of "mandatory cost enforced by the government" even though in this case the revenue goes to private entities.
      - CPLX 1y ago
        Is there any cost not enforced by the government? What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?
        conradev 1y ago
        For you in particular, likely some moral precepts? or are you arguing that the deterrent effect of government punishment is the only thing stopping you? I don't really understand the line of argument.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department. So if hookers are working the streets, the hammer does not fall on them and will fall on their pimp instead? The cops will just let them go? The law does not work the way you think it does.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  That depends on the writing of the law. If the law forbids a person to sell an illegal service, then the seller is at fault. If the law forbids buying a service, then the buyer is at fault. It is easier to go after the seller/broker (pimp) then it is to go after the service worker, legally speaking, because the transfer of money is through the broker. Same thing happened with Trump in the hush money scandal. The guy who transferred the money (the lawyer) was at fault. The only reason by which they came after trump was that the books did not record the transfer truthfully, and did so falsely.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    Having your lawyer do something illegal on your behalf is also a crime.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU https://m.youtube.com/shorts/p80ACpPKTHU
- Paratoner 1y ago
  And it works the way things are unfolding since the start of this year, highly knowledgeable person sir?
CPLX 1y ago
That’s not the full story at all. No argument that this administration is a disaster on hundreds of metrics but it’s not clear what’s going on here. At a glance it’s at least possible that this was a pro-US worker policy. The Asian high tech companies have a history of falsely claiming US workers just aren’t smart enough to do the job when in fact what they really want is to have their own workers come in and work triple overtime at slave wages. It was a huge issue with the TSMC build in Arizona. If they brought people in to do construction work on either tourist visas or B1 meeting type visas that’s illegal and should be and what happened here makes perfect sense. Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know. It is pretty obvious now that the Korean sub-contractors thought they were above board on the proper visas for the consulting work that was being contracted. Now, whether that was actually true or not will take a few years of litigation to figure out, since visa law is complicated. If they were doing custom specialized work (that is definitely allowed by ESTA/B1), then the visas were correct. If they were hammering nails into wood, then the visas were incorrect. See https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyund...
  - CPLX 1y ago
    That's not obvious at all. The image in the article you're linking to shows people with hardhats and vests that say "mechanic" on them. Not only that there's a long history of asian high tech conglomerates taking shortcuts on these kinds of projects: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-factory-phoenix-accidents/ https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-fac... Including this specific one: https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-at-hyundais-76b-metaplant-in-georgia https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a... So maybe, maybe not. The fact that the attorneys for the accused deny it isn't exactly dispositive.
GeoAtreides 1y ago
>ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Wrong. ESTA is not a visa, it's a requirement for all travelers to US. The visa-waiver program (VWP) doesn't include the right to work. You need to have an appropriate visa if you're being paid (or given material benefits) while travelling in US. Things like interviews or conferences or workshops are not included in the right to work requirement.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

phendrenad2 1y ago

Understandable. I feel sorry for the Korean workers who were caught up in this. Hyundai should be held responsible for illegally importing/trafficking them, they should keep their jobs, as it's not really their fault. They were probably lied to by Hyundai. They're the victims here (as well as the American people, but that's another story).

mrexroad 1y ago
Sorry, can you clarify where it’s stated they were illegally imported / trafficked?
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  They were brought here under false pretenses.

Simulacra 1y ago

I don't understand, did they or did they not have invalid visas? I don't understand why they would feel betrayed, it's the law. Why is this so different?

lupusreal 1y ago
[flagged]
jerlam 1y ago
Some probably did not, but it was common to ignore the law. There does not seem to be a process for getting valid visas for this kind of project: https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3674 https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3... And they would feel betrayed because their bosses probably told them it was ok.
- Simulacra 1y ago
  But that raise is a very important question: are we at the point where we don't follow certain laws because we disagree with them, or do we follow all laws and try to change the ones we disagree with? I'm certain mistakes were made, by everyone, but how do we draw the line between breaking the law and not breaking the law? That last part is a very, very good point. It's possible nobody ever told them. Which means the managers and the people who run the plant should be the ones in handcuffs.
  - loandbehold 1y ago
    It's quite common for some laws to be broken on a regular basis to the point where it becomes expected behavior. Going 70 mph when speed limit is 65 mph is one example.
    - jerlam 1y ago
      If everyone is breaking the law, but it is only enforced on a specific group of people, it basically kills the entire rule of law.

catigula 1y ago

Creating factories in America as a tariff loophole, likely using American taxpayer dollars and infrastructure, and then taking advantage of this to employ foreign labor and claim they have "special guy who welds together a car door skills", is pretty disturbing and emblematic of how stark a failure it is to pour public funding into/for private companies and demand no state stake. If Google, or Hyundai, get special privileges and resource investment from the state, the state should have an ownership stake in these companies. This is known to most countries and isn't particularly controversial.

taylodl 1y ago
Construction began in early-2023. Unless Hyundai has a crystal ball allowing them to see the future then this wasn't a tariff loophole.
- catigula 1y ago
  Protectionist measures existed in the US economy well prior Trump's recent term as president.

axus 1y ago

> A Savannah labor union leader said local unions have complained that Hyundai and its contractors were improperly using South Korean workers for basic construction that falls outside the visa waiver rules. I'm glad there's some small way the US people benefitted from this action. Overall it's insane; did they try an ultimatum with lawyers, and an agreement to send everyone home, before sending in the helicopters?

phendrenad2 1y ago
I think the problem is, by the nature of being undocumented, it's hard to prove that these people are working illegally. I guess you could send in the FBI and put spy cams all over the facility, use facial recognition to identify improperly documented workers, tail them to their homes, and pick them up there. In fact, I'm probably more in favor of that kind of thing. Big sloppy raids on brand-name companies just looks heavy-handed.
- axus 1y ago
  According to the article they are documented, have B-1 temporary business visas. The employees don't know US law and are following the companies instructions. The company directed them to perform work outside the scope of the visas. It's the company that's at fault and should be the target of enforcement; do that and the employees have no reason or desire to stay in the US.
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    The article is wrong. Some have B-1 visas, and some are on ESTA. The ones on B-1 are not Korean. The ones on ESTA are. The rules for ESTA are tricky, and it seems like there might be a loophole where these workers were working legally.
rconti 1y ago
Of course not; that would be a measured approach that would attempt to address the actual problem, rather than an insane shock and awe move designed to get headlines.

wmeredith 1y ago

Reading the article it looks like the workers in question were here legally with visas and they were getting the plant online to train US workers. Isn't this exactly what was asked for? WTF is this administration doing literally putting these people in chains?

scotty79 1y ago
Also the deal they get is to leave the country now and be banned for extended period or stay in detention (a prison basically) and await a hearing that will happen no sooner than in months. They have few days to decide which option they choose.
lupusreal 1y ago
[flagged]
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  Lets say that was true On one hand, you could work with Hyundai to address the issue, let the plant be built, knowing that eventually the plant is going to brig a lot more jobs for Americans, and bring economic activity to the area. On the other hand, you could make this a political spectacle, cause Hyundai to abandon the plant, further destroying relations, and now no jobs are going to come as a result of this as they abandon construction. Makes perfect sense.
  - some_guy_nobel 1y ago
    The world isn't black and white, but your scenario makes no sense regardless. - If Hyundai is using illegal labor to build the plant, what would stop them from operating the plant with labor from the same illegal pool? The motivation for labor selection here is not type-of-work, it's cost. - If Hyundai is allowed to employ illegal immigrants in that way, what precedent does that set for other similar plants? - Of course tradesmen are going to advocate for their trade. They don't care about some second-order effects on employment that doesn't effect them. (I'll save you some typing, they don't care about the imaginary third-order externalities that plant workers will use their services later, either). I think what the administration did is stupid as hell, but if those are truly jobs meant to go to Americans, why shouldn't locals be upset?

StefanBatory 1y ago

My take from it is, why the workers are punished for their leadership? One ought go after them, but instead it's the workers that will take the blame, and leadership will go business as usual. You can't say that higher-ups didn't know what was going on, getting them there.

phendrenad2 1y ago
I'm not 100% sure that Hyundai (and/or the bosses who "oopsied" the paperwork) won't face consequences for this. The law is (famously) slow, ICE is fast. Give it time. As a sidenote, the fact that this happened in the middle of tariff negotiations with South Korea probably was used as leverage to get more for the US, so Hyundai is probably going to get heat from the South Korean government over this gaff.
scotty79 1y ago
I don't think they were there illegally. But to determine that they'd now need to spend months in prison awaiting a hearing. They are being punished for the leadership of US.

orwin 1y ago

I knew there were pictures of that, but it was intentional? You tell me your police put foreign people in chains, took pictures without blurring anything, and posted them? It wasn't a leak? Everything is dumb, but i think this is the worst. Who thought it was a good idea? And the US union workers agree with this? Even if they were doing illegal work, they cheer seeing fellow workers getting in chains and publicly humiliated i guess? Because of course that's the workers fault their company told them to go work there? Are they dumb? Sorry i really like your country (well, The Appalachians and the Sierras) but wtf are you doing?

Exoristos 1y ago
Yes, it's true, Americans prefer to be employed.
- fhdkweig 1y ago
  Now that management are pulling all their Korean workers out and not finishing the plant, how did that work out for the Americans who preferred to be employed? ICE fucked that whole small town. That town was going to have that one industry and now it doesn't.
- orwin 1y ago
  So you agree that if an employer might be breaking the law, we have to publicly humiliate its workers so that USians can have the jobs (maybe)? Why is the public humiliation necessary? The cuffing and even detainment is already too much for people with clean papers imho, but you also have to post their picture on social media to make the world understand how you treat workers in your country, that's the reason? "Your company is foreign and do bad things, if you come here, you'll be cuffed detained and shown to the world as an example" do not seems very USian, Statue of liberty and all, all the lines about justice and "fair punishment", but i'm updating my priors seeing that most of you seems to agree with that.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
The American union workers probably view the people who were detained as stealing jobs from them. They were (allegedly) only allowed to do certain work with their visas, and they were doing other work that was supposed to be for the union.

OGEnthusiast 1y ago

Interesting to see the tacit endorsement of these ICE raids by a local union leader: > Christi Hulme, president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council, said unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes. “Basically our labor was being given to illegal immigrants,” Hulme said. So far in the US, most labor unions have generally been fairly left-wing, including being pro-immigration. Wonder how long that will last.

Molitor5901 1y ago
That makes a lot of sense actually. Unions prefer union workers. Many of the unions are major pushers of higher minimum wage laws because it makes it more feasible to pay a little more for a union worker, than a non-union worker.
Exoristos 1y ago
This is the kind of thing unions are for.
tokai 1y ago
Defending the quality of ones labour market against social dumping is pretty left-wing. Internationalism is not a prerequisite for the left, especially with trades unions that won out against industrial unionism and the internationalist idea of One Big Union a hundred years ago. Being pro-immigration is a liberal stance.
empath75 1y ago
Labor unions have never been especially pro-immigration as a group -- it's highly dependent on their membership and whether it is growing or shrinking and how and why it is growing or shrinking. If you're a union that is largely concerned with preserving jobs and privileges in a shrinking industry, then there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be quite opposed to non-union immigrants coming in and "taking your jobs." If you're a farm-worker union with a growing membership of immigrants, more concerned about adding new members and organizing than with preserving previous wins, you may be quite in favor of more immigration.
1y ago

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

[flagged]

gleenn 1y ago
Did it actually say they were violating terms of their visas?
csbrooks 1y ago
I think that's an exaggeration. Here's an example I found of a British person in China who did this. Seems like he got a week in jail, then deported. https://www.newsweek.com/english-teacher-overstayed-visa-describes-ordeal-chinese-prison-1737264 https://www.newsweek.com/english-teacher-overstayed-visa-des...
mapt 1y ago
This is just totally untrue about how China deals with foreign nationals. They're tracked, they have significant disadvantages in civil courts, there are a bunch of other restrictions on their presence... but just disappearing Americans or South Koreans is not the sort of issue China has. They have an intense bureaucracy and foreign workers are comparatively rare & their existence geopolitically sensitive; Court cases involving foreigners are expedited and jail stays are short before deportation. Outside of very specific campaigns (eg Xinjiang) or internal Party processes, it's generally not even a problem that China has with Chinese nationals; Most people who cross over the line into something the government cannot stomach get a scary visit, or get obvious monitoring, or get a couple weeks confinement for investigation. Dissident status can have significant consequences for one's career. On the off chance it leads to adjudication (there are far lower rates of use of the justice system than the US, and arguably far lower crime rates, but we could say that about most countries), there is a public facing justice system just like we have. The people "disappearing" into a shadow justice system are those who voluntarily sign up for Party membership, a selective process more like enlisting in the military than listing your affiliation on a voter card. Turning against the Party in a significant way after joining the Party, typically ends up with some limited term of "rehabilitation", but a lot more earnest use of that terminology than our justice system uses. The fact is that the American system in 2025 is far more brutal, deliberately so. We literally stole children from families over immigration violations, and then "lost" them. We're setting up internment camps. We have court dates for legitimate immigration processes like asylum that are years or decades out.

pmdulaney 1y ago

I don't understand why Trump wants to poke our best allies in the eye over minor issues. The South Koreans are world leaders in heavy industries, including ship building. We should be currying their favor, not alienating them.

mrexroad 1y ago
Headlines, not just single ethnicity (“see, we’re applying rules equally to all countries!”), and bargaining chip.
SilverElfin 1y ago
Agree. They should have worked this out privately instead of causing humiliation and losing the trust of South Korea’s own population. Trump made a similar mistake (arguably a much larger scale one) with India recently.
- Sammi 1y ago
  And Canada. And Mexico. And Denmark (and by extension the rest of Europe). Trump is speed running alienating all US allies.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

I'm disappointed the union didn't bring out the giant inflatable rat.

lvl155 1y ago

I think many Asian companies underestimate how bad labor is in red states. It’s really a deal breaker for high skilled labor. You cannot teach or train these people. It’s cultural more than anything. There is a reason why they had to bring in their own labor for something not so high tech.

IncreasePosts 1y ago
It could also be a jobs program for Koreans. If the issue really was "we have to bring in our own labor", why couldn't they do it in the legally correct manner?

esjeon 1y ago

This one is where ICE’s operation is completely fair. Koreans have systemically abused ESTA on a massive scale for a long time. Korean companies treat ESTA as the de-facto business visa. US Homeland Security did tighten up the screening last year because of that, but the Korean government chose to do absolute nothing about it. No mention of ESTA & VISA issues was made during the recent US-SK summit meeting. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I say all this as a Korean. This article is politically biased rather severely.

viraptor 1y ago
> This one is where ICE’s operation is completely fair. The "completely" is going quite far given the treatment of them. They could be sent a notice ordering to stop work and leave. Or the employer could be told to start applying for visa updates or else. It's not like a skilled Hyundai worker on a temporary international work assignment is likely to run away and start an undocumented life in the US instead. It was a completely unnecessary show of force that also cost more than sending a few letters.
komali2 1y ago
Do you believe it's fair to the Korean workers that they are arrested and detained for what they thought was just doing their jobs, whereas their bosses who brought them in with the explicit purpose of skirting visa rules will walk scott free?
- eska 1y ago
  As neither Korean nor American I wonder: how is this the US government’s problem? Koreans should complain about their bosses to the Korean government.
  - komali2 1y ago
    The USA government was the one that chose to arrest them for a political hooplah rather than go after their bosses.

squarefoot 1y ago

Wondering if Hyundai being a Tesla competitor plays a role here.

agnosticmantis 1y ago

The ingroup circle of "we're not them (the outgroup), so we're safe" keeps getting smaller and smaller.

xnx 1y ago

This raid was probably a bad idea and not in the US interest, but how much of this work could be done remotely? I'm sure it's much faster to have someone on site, but couldn't someone in Korea (or even someone from Korea in Canada) supervise someone on site via high fidelity video feed? This would be clumsy, but would ensure some knowledge sharing.