I still don't really understand this story. I know that ICE invaded the factory and detained a few hundred people. They were vanished away and presumably being speedily sent back to Korea. Sure.
But every article I've read on this makes no statement about whether any of these hundreds of people were actually working without an appropriate visa, or whether they were given the chance to demonstrate their legitimacy, or whether any of these hundreds of people got to defend their case to a judge. Shouting "I'm here legally" while being rounded up by LEOs is not due process.
I'm not particularly sympathetic to Hyundai here, and it wouldn't be surprising if they subcontracted a sublegal operation to cut costs. But in a group of a few hundred people it's quite hard to imagine none of them have cases even worth hearing.
PhantomHour · 3h ago
> But every article I've read on this makes no statement about whether any of these hundreds of people were actually working without an appropriate visa
This is because ICE is being particularly tight lipped about those details.
The New York Times got their hands on the records for 11 detainees.
6 on B1/B2 visas.
4 on 90-day waivers.
1 Unknown.
ICE claims visa violations, but the records do not state what work the detainees were actually doing. This is especially relevant for the B1 visas, which do permit certain business activities (including applicable ones for this situation; Meetings, trainings, "installation, service, and repair of foreign-bought machinery".
Of particular note is that in one case (out of these 11), ICE's records state there was no visa violation. The worker was deported anyway, forced into a "voluntary" departure.
Personal opinion: The degree to which hyundai may or may not have violated the law or operated within previously-tolerated gray areas remains to be seen. But the actions of ICE here are not those of a competent government organisation.
There should be clear records, they should be able to readily answer press questions. And yet they don't.
Worse still is that one person deported despite there being, even by ICE's own admission, no visa violation. Hard to assume good faith in incomplete or withheld records with such shit going on.
And what are other foreign companies to do with this? "Move your manufacturing to America! Oh btw even if you follow all laws to the letter a local chud may deport your workers for being not white enough and ruin the entire project" is an interesting sales pitch.
lazide · 2h ago
The point is not to be effective (at the stated goals), or follow the laws, or be competent at following the laws.
The goal is to ‘look tough’ for the base, demonstrate the power to act without having to follow the laws, and overall - inspire fear. To extract concessions and inspire fear based loyalty.
The weirdest part to me is that people still don’t seem to understand this?
xtiansimon · 1h ago
> “The weirdest part to me is that people still don’t seem to understand this?”
The weirdest part will be any middle class worker who doesn’t later say, _I was a supporter, because I believed he would bring back manufacturing and jobs. I was wrong._ Everyone else is a cultist or wealthy.
lazide · 58m ago
The last couple guys in recent memory who did this kind of thing weren’t (actually) good for wealthy people either. Germany and Italy didn’t exactly do well in the whole ‘preservation of Capital’ angle at the end of the war.
3D30497420 · 3h ago
I imagine their argument will be "Well, they should have hired Americans", even if that is completely infeasible.
Then, when these places stay poor, they'll blame foreign governments, Democrats, "bureaucrats in DC", "woke" policies, etc. Rinse and repeat.
ivan_gammel · 3h ago
Their argument was Trump personally delaying the departure by one day to ask if anyone wants to stay and train American workers. I.e. they understand they messed up, but don’t want to admit any mistake.
nerpderp82 · 2h ago
And arrested at gunpoint with helicopters flying overhead. This is only the start.
ivan_gammel · 2h ago
Yes. I guess I should have phrased it differently so irony would be more noticeable.
sysguest · 2h ago
idk after this fiasco, Hyundai will have a big time trouble finding competitive workers who would want to go to the USA...
I mean, prior to this, just a small possibility of being sent to the US was a big perk (job descriptions often highlighted this in bold fonts)
Hence, companies would rotate people to hush complaints ("that guy gets to go to the US more than me!")
now... if being sent could mean "you could be banned from entering/working in US", it's a big no-no
Anyway, this will mean extra costs + less competitive people going to the USA (they should be forced to go, so... it'll probably be people with career dead-ends, whom americans might not want to 'learn from'...)
the only fix to the issue: officially commit huuuuge working visa quota for s.koreans...
ivan_gammel · 2h ago
Everyone will adapt the same way as businesses adapted to local specifics in other countries. Russia was wild, China was hard, most of Africa is crazy, but if there are money, entrepreneurial energy will channel towards it. The real losers here are American consumers, because extra risks (or privileged access to market premiums for locals) will be included in price.
sysguest · 1h ago
..except no one had to "adapt" -- those workers were supposed to go back after the set-up work is over, and Americans would get the jobs after the set-up work.
this isn't some low-skill burger-flipping workers staying permanently and replacing a whole career of american citizens' jobs...
US just had to turn a blind-eye, wait until those workers are done with the set-up and leave for good
And now... things got ugly too quick -- I doubt even Trump wanted this.
My pet theory is... this is a classic example of an political double-spy (Tori Branum) being "cooperatively passive-aggressive"
(if party a shouts for A, get inside party a, and go to the extreme far-end of A to show A is bad -- though in reality, some middle-ground was what party a was initially aiming for)
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
> "Well, they should have hired Americans", even if that is completely infeasible
Who determined it is infeasible and how was it determined? Show me the data and the process that lead to this conclusion. It's a car assembly plant, not a semiconductor fab that requires niche advanced degrees only available in Taiwan.
Surely the required labor can be found across a country of 300 million people, or easily trained from other adjacent fields that have lost workers due to economic driven redundancies or who want to switch careers for whatever reason.
>Then, when these places stay poor, they'll blame foreign governments, Democrats, "bureaucrats in DC"
Why shouldn't they be blamed? They're the ones telling their voters at election times that there'll be a factory opening where they live and then the voters rejoice and think "woo-hoo, more jobs for us" but then the bureaucrats are like "well, actually, those jobs will go towards imported foreigners, not to you, because you're not qualified enough or some other bullshit reason" and then the voters will clap back with "well I'm a product of YOUR education system mf-er, so it's YOUR fault that I'm not qualified enough". If you were them, wouldn't you be pissed too?
Funny how HN likes to criticize and gaslight people that it should be societally acceptable that foreigners being brough to take manufacturing jobs from locals, but they throw a hissy rage fit when H1Bs are being brough to the US to take their cushy tech jobs. Hypocrisy much?
Edi: love the empty angry downvotes with no explanation and no counter arguments simply because my detailed argument goes against the narrative. Means I'm right.
tzs · 2h ago
> Who determined it determined it is infeasible how was it determined? It's a car assembly plant, not a semiconductor fab that requires niche advanced degrees only available in Taiwan
It's not a car assembly plant. It's a battery factory. There is a car
> Surely the required labor can be found across a country of 300 million people, or easily trained from other adjacent fields that have lost workers due to economic driven redundancies or who want to switch careers for whatever reason.
When it is operational, probably. But right now it is being built and most of the Korean workers were engineers and technicians specializing in installing, testing, and bringing up highly technical specialized battery manufacturing equipment from Korea.
> They're the ones telling their voters there'll be a factory opening where they live and then the voters rejoice and think "woo-hoo, more jobs for us" but then the bureaucrats are like "well, actually, those jobs will go towards imported foreigners, not to you". If you were them, wouldn't you be pissed too?
These were temporary workers to install and bring up the equipment, and train US workers to operate it. Once running it was indeed going to employ mostly US workers, around 3000 directly and maybe another 5000 US jobs would be created in the domestic parts of its supply chain.
There is also a car factory in the same campus. That is running and most of the workers are US citizens. Hyundai has emphasized training local workers.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
>When it is operational, probably. But right now it is being built and most of the Korean workers were engineers and technicians specializing in installing, testing, and bringing up highly technical specialized battery manufacturing equipment from Korea.
OK good point. But then why hasn't Hyundai US management made sure to get their imported workers legal visas or that the people they hired had their visas up to date? Surely when you're running a business visa and immigration laws is another one of the things on your checklist, similar to having to follow OHSA laws, fire safety, fire drills, first aid, diversity and sensitivity training, etc and all the other stuff companies operating in the US have to follow.
Also be aware, my original comment was target that person's comment specifically, not the issues from the article.
pjc50 · 52m ago
You can't do factory bringup without people on site; this is also something people have observed in the other direction when outsourcing to China, you need to send someone from the design team to the production line.
It's not clear to me what visa one is supposed to use for this or even if one is available at all.
orwin · 41m ago
To respond to your edit, my guess people downvote you because you completely misunderstood the situation and did not care to correct you when the situation was explained so many time, and probably think you're disingenuous.
I think you're not, so I'll try to explain:
When the technicians I work with install a new windfarm/gas plant router to connect them to electricity markets (they probably do other stuff but my job is the software part of networking, so I only know about that), we could hire a local contractor with CISCO cert, and it would certainly be cheaper than fly out 20 workers to Argentina, Australia, Romania or Mexico. We don't, because our employees will use the same technique, the same methodology each time, for every client, and we will never have to guess how the installation was done, because we know. You can put a price on trust, but it's really expensive. If we had plants in the US, I guarantee we would do the same, for the same reasons, unless the government bought our trust (which is basically reimbursing our losses if the plant fails because the installation wasn't done as our technicians would have).
Unless we hire permanent workers as we did in Romania because we took a big market share there, training someone to follow our procedure, highly personalized, for a week to a month of work is just not worth it, especially when so many specialties are needed for like one hour on one site. We do hire locals to run the day-to-day operations, but the installation, it's just not worth it. Better to fly a tech team every 5 years, that stay like a month, look around, fix shit, then leave.
For the second part: you misunderstood the situation. The workers were only there for the installation of the assembly line (and probably training for the B1s), not to work full-time.
Note that at least some of the workers have basically the same job as our technicians, network engineers, people I work with a lot and that I really respect. To see that parade, picture and video of them being taken on purpose while in chains (not handcuffed, in literal chains) to humiliate them on purpose, and seeing so many Americans cheer in front of that makes me hate most of you. Sorry, I know 'not all Americans', only a third, but still. Cheered because workers are publicly humiliated. That's what your country looks like from the outside.
aeonfox · 3h ago
> Most of the people detained were South Korean nationals with the wrong kind of visas.
> I'm not particularly sympathetic to Hyundai here, and it wouldn't be surprising if they subcontracted a sublegal operation to cut costs
Often Visa systems are overly complex and it's just a matter of bureaucracy making things impossible within a particular timeline. My cynical lens on this is that someone with a vested interest (like a competing company or a lobbyist from a competing industry) that has the ear of the administration has made this happen.
All the same, I imagine this only worsens the risk assessment for the US as a place of investment and business.
vkou · 3h ago
> My cynical lens on this is that someone with a vested interest (like a competing company or a lobbyist from a competing industry) that has the ear of the administration has made this happen.
You don't need to go that far. Simple incompetence, cruelty, a complete lack of accountability and a need to meet quota is a sufficient explanation.
sandworm101 · 3h ago
Like maybe someone other than Hyundai that makes electric cars? Reports said this raid took months to plan. Who had the president's ear a few months ago?
Though I cannot say it adds much clarity. Apparently, some people caught in the raid may have had valid visas. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing sounds like a poorly planned mess.
pjc50 · 3h ago
> whether any of these hundreds of people got to defend their case to a judge. Shouting "I'm here legally" while being rounded up by LEOs is not due process.
Well, no, but that's not how US immigration works any more, and never did at the border. Everyone very loudly points out that non-citizens don't have constitutional rights.
As a UK employee of a US multinational (+), I think I know what happened here, because it nearly happened to a colleague of mine. He went to visit HQ for a week, and made the mistake of saying at the border that he was coming to "work" rather than "business meetings". Non-visa travel generally allows the latter but not the former, even if the distinction isn't always clear.
It seems ludicrous that someone doing the same job for the same employer on the same IT systems suddenly becomes a criminal if they bring themselves and their laptop to HQ for a few days, and up until now this was always waived, along with simply observing that the person had a return ticket and a hotel. Now there's a much bigger risk if you say the "w" word.
I suspect what happens is that Hyundai sent over a bunch of Hyundai employees to get the Hyundai factory started, as everyone would expect, without going through the difficult and expensive process of securing short term work visas (which catgegory would this be anyway?)
(+) I suppose this makes me the evil offshoring taking all your jobs? Hi guys.
dotnet00 · 2h ago
>Everyone very loudly points out that non-citizens don't have constitutional rights
I'm assuming you mean at the border (crossings/airports), the same thing applies to citizens, under the excuse that their citizenship hasn't been verified until they're through immigration.
ChrisRR · 3h ago
Maybe the news reporters don't actually know whether they were there illegally
nasmorn · 2h ago
If you start enforcing Labour laws for everyone that is sent between multi nationals a lot of economic activity will simply cease. Do you think every American going abroad for their company has all the right paperwork? If you don’t let Mr Kim who is the only guy who knows how to rig some robots together in because he said something naughty about Trump on Facebook once you will have to build your own factories
adrianmsmith · 2h ago
I mean, yes, I would hope they have the right paperwork? E.g. if you're going on a business trip then you're going to need a visa allowing business trips, if you're going to work you're going to need a visa that allows work, etc. I don't see why this is unreasonable.
If it is unreasonable then the rules need to change - no point having rules if they can't be enforced.
ilsubyeega · 3h ago
disclaimer: i'm native korean (living in south korea also)
> whether any of these hundreds of people were actually working without an appropriate visa
IIRC It appears that many of those arrested entered the country using ESTA which is tourism purposes only. They are likely subcontractors of this company.
> It's quite hard to imagine none of them have cases even worth hearing
I think it's due to the related investigation was conducted quickly, as most of them entered the country for the same purpose.
robertlagrant · 3h ago
> ESTA which is tourism purposes only
The ESTA home page says it's business or pleasure. The catch is it's only for trips up to 90 days.
izacus · 3h ago
Just to be clear - "business" doesn't mean "work". As in - you're not allowed to do your primary job function on such a visa.
robertlagrant · 2h ago
I'm not sure - if I were going for business I would be doing my primary job function. E.g. having meetings or workshops. I couldn't get employment in a local company there on an ESTA, I wouldn't say.
rrobukef · 3h ago
An ESTA is not only for Tourism.
Simulacra · 1h ago
It feels like something very shady, is going on with Hyundai, but in order to say face, they keep pointing the finger back at the Americans. Someone on their end made a tremendous mistake, and I think they need to just accept that and admit it.
jrmcauliffe · 3h ago
I mean, it would be surprising. In what world does Hyundai want to build a multi billion dollar plant in a foreign country and subcontract to a 'sublegal operation' which still has to send foreign nationals, presumably experts in their specific fields along with housing them to 'cut costs'...?
uxcolumbo · 2h ago
Tori Branum, a MAGA candidate, was giving the tip off.
They were looking for 4 latinos, but then decided to arrest almost 500 workers, most of them Koreans - highly skilled technicians.
And the pictures of them being shackled in full body chains as if they were dangerous criminals is absolutely insulting and degrading.
This is not how you attract investment.
mayankkaizen · 1h ago
The link you referenced points to error page.
uxcolumbo · 38m ago
HN was breaking it as it was too long I think. Should be fixed now. Wrapped it in brackets <>.
secult · 4h ago
That's quite an insult! I wonder how many foreign workers (or foreigners in general) take the eventuality of getting "randomly" detained into account while travelling into USA.
fjfaase · 2h ago
As someone from Europe (the Netherlands), it is an important reason for me to no longer consider to travel to the USA. The idea of the possibility to be deported to a prison facility in South America or Africa, with no due process is simply terrifying.
I would strongly advice any fellow countrymen not to travel to the USA, especially if they are not 'pure' white. There are many Dutch with Dutch parents that are not 'pure' white, because they have a Chinese, an Indonesian, a Caribbean, an Italian, a Spanish, a Moroccan, or a Turkish ancestor (to mention just some possibilities).
sandworm101 · 3h ago
>> the eventuality of getting "randomly" detained into account while travelling into USA.
Absolutely every canadian crossing at a land border. The steady number of horror stories is keeping them away.
(Air travel is less impacted as canadian pre-clearance proceedures mean anyone rejected by ICE will not also be detained by them.)
krageon · 2h ago
Anyone even remotely educated takes it into account, although most people have a low estimation of the actual risk
eastbound · 3h ago
I do. Never been to US since the Patriot act, a have a several-million dollars small startup and would love to see Colorado and California, why not move there, but I’m just afraid of TSA.
On the other hand, I envy USA for enforcing their visas. Europe follows American criminality stats by 10 years, so when we used to mock USA for George Floyd, we’re now in it; for Korean shop owners, we’re now in it; For random knives in busses, we’re in it, and with school shootings, it’s just a matter of time until it happens.
And European people are much farther away from reaching the conclusion that law must be enforced in multicultural nations.
pjc50 · 3h ago
> mock USA for George Floyd
Crime committed by the police.
> Korean shop owners
What's criminal about Korean shops?
> school shootings
Gun control means no more school shootings. See Dunblane.
> law must be enforced in multicultural nations
Nobody ever said it shouldn't, but it has to be enforced in a fair and even-handed way.
dspillett · 2h ago
> > school shootings
> Gun control means no more school shootings. See Dunblane.
If you are citing Dunblane as an example of gun control not working, perhaps consider the fact that you had to go back to 1996 to find such a bad example in a country with strong controls means that while it doesn't work 100% it does work really rather well. To find a similar example (>20 dead or injured in a school or related environment) in the US you'd to go all the way back into the mists of time to… August. Before that the last large school shooting was Uvale in 2022, still only three years not 29.
pjc50 · 56m ago
> If you are citing Dunblane as an example of gun control not working
No, the opposite. An example of the policy response working. The tragedy was met with universal revulsion and tightening of gun control. There were a few complaints that the tightening was a bit much, but there wasn't a significant faction of people who said that a few dead schoolchildren were a necessary sacrifice for their gun "rights".
(School shootings seem to be a post-cold-war phenomenon. Dunblane was 1996; Columbine was 1999)
happymellon · 2h ago
> If you are citing Dunblane as an example of gun control not working
There was a school shooting, and we restricted gun access.
An example of failure of those laws stopping any and all would have been the 2010 Cumbria shootings. But they are still few and far between.
lesser-shadow · 2h ago
>Crime committed by the police.
He had a lethal dose of fentanyl, you absolute bafoon
MattPalmer1086 · 1h ago
That was just something claimed on social media with no evidence to back it up. The autopsies showed he had fentanyl in his bloodstream, but not a lethal dose.
4ggr0 · 3h ago
> that law must be enforced in multicultural nations
per usual it's the other cultures causing the fuss, right.
But every article I've read on this makes no statement about whether any of these hundreds of people were actually working without an appropriate visa, or whether they were given the chance to demonstrate their legitimacy, or whether any of these hundreds of people got to defend their case to a judge. Shouting "I'm here legally" while being rounded up by LEOs is not due process.
I'm not particularly sympathetic to Hyundai here, and it wouldn't be surprising if they subcontracted a sublegal operation to cut costs. But in a group of a few hundred people it's quite hard to imagine none of them have cases even worth hearing.
This is because ICE is being particularly tight lipped about those details.
The New York Times got their hands on the records for 11 detainees. 6 on B1/B2 visas. 4 on 90-day waivers. 1 Unknown.
ICE claims visa violations, but the records do not state what work the detainees were actually doing. This is especially relevant for the B1 visas, which do permit certain business activities (including applicable ones for this situation; Meetings, trainings, "installation, service, and repair of foreign-bought machinery".
Of particular note is that in one case (out of these 11), ICE's records state there was no visa violation. The worker was deported anyway, forced into a "voluntary" departure.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/economy/hyundai-...)
Personal opinion: The degree to which hyundai may or may not have violated the law or operated within previously-tolerated gray areas remains to be seen. But the actions of ICE here are not those of a competent government organisation.
There should be clear records, they should be able to readily answer press questions. And yet they don't.
Worse still is that one person deported despite there being, even by ICE's own admission, no visa violation. Hard to assume good faith in incomplete or withheld records with such shit going on.
And what are other foreign companies to do with this? "Move your manufacturing to America! Oh btw even if you follow all laws to the letter a local chud may deport your workers for being not white enough and ruin the entire project" is an interesting sales pitch.
The goal is to ‘look tough’ for the base, demonstrate the power to act without having to follow the laws, and overall - inspire fear. To extract concessions and inspire fear based loyalty.
The weirdest part to me is that people still don’t seem to understand this?
The weirdest part will be any middle class worker who doesn’t later say, _I was a supporter, because I believed he would bring back manufacturing and jobs. I was wrong._ Everyone else is a cultist or wealthy.
Then, when these places stay poor, they'll blame foreign governments, Democrats, "bureaucrats in DC", "woke" policies, etc. Rinse and repeat.
I mean, prior to this, just a small possibility of being sent to the US was a big perk (job descriptions often highlighted this in bold fonts) Hence, companies would rotate people to hush complaints ("that guy gets to go to the US more than me!")
now... if being sent could mean "you could be banned from entering/working in US", it's a big no-no
Anyway, this will mean extra costs + less competitive people going to the USA (they should be forced to go, so... it'll probably be people with career dead-ends, whom americans might not want to 'learn from'...)
the only fix to the issue: officially commit huuuuge working visa quota for s.koreans...
this isn't some low-skill burger-flipping workers staying permanently and replacing a whole career of american citizens' jobs...
US just had to turn a blind-eye, wait until those workers are done with the set-up and leave for good
And now... things got ugly too quick -- I doubt even Trump wanted this.
My pet theory is... this is a classic example of an political double-spy (Tori Branum) being "cooperatively passive-aggressive" (if party a shouts for A, get inside party a, and go to the extreme far-end of A to show A is bad -- though in reality, some middle-ground was what party a was initially aiming for)
Who determined it is infeasible and how was it determined? Show me the data and the process that lead to this conclusion. It's a car assembly plant, not a semiconductor fab that requires niche advanced degrees only available in Taiwan.
Surely the required labor can be found across a country of 300 million people, or easily trained from other adjacent fields that have lost workers due to economic driven redundancies or who want to switch careers for whatever reason.
>Then, when these places stay poor, they'll blame foreign governments, Democrats, "bureaucrats in DC"
Why shouldn't they be blamed? They're the ones telling their voters at election times that there'll be a factory opening where they live and then the voters rejoice and think "woo-hoo, more jobs for us" but then the bureaucrats are like "well, actually, those jobs will go towards imported foreigners, not to you, because you're not qualified enough or some other bullshit reason" and then the voters will clap back with "well I'm a product of YOUR education system mf-er, so it's YOUR fault that I'm not qualified enough". If you were them, wouldn't you be pissed too?
Funny how HN likes to criticize and gaslight people that it should be societally acceptable that foreigners being brough to take manufacturing jobs from locals, but they throw a hissy rage fit when H1Bs are being brough to the US to take their cushy tech jobs. Hypocrisy much?
Edi: love the empty angry downvotes with no explanation and no counter arguments simply because my detailed argument goes against the narrative. Means I'm right.
It's not a car assembly plant. It's a battery factory. There is a car
> Surely the required labor can be found across a country of 300 million people, or easily trained from other adjacent fields that have lost workers due to economic driven redundancies or who want to switch careers for whatever reason.
When it is operational, probably. But right now it is being built and most of the Korean workers were engineers and technicians specializing in installing, testing, and bringing up highly technical specialized battery manufacturing equipment from Korea.
> They're the ones telling their voters there'll be a factory opening where they live and then the voters rejoice and think "woo-hoo, more jobs for us" but then the bureaucrats are like "well, actually, those jobs will go towards imported foreigners, not to you". If you were them, wouldn't you be pissed too?
These were temporary workers to install and bring up the equipment, and train US workers to operate it. Once running it was indeed going to employ mostly US workers, around 3000 directly and maybe another 5000 US jobs would be created in the domestic parts of its supply chain.
There is also a car factory in the same campus. That is running and most of the workers are US citizens. Hyundai has emphasized training local workers.
OK good point. But then why hasn't Hyundai US management made sure to get their imported workers legal visas or that the people they hired had their visas up to date? Surely when you're running a business visa and immigration laws is another one of the things on your checklist, similar to having to follow OHSA laws, fire safety, fire drills, first aid, diversity and sensitivity training, etc and all the other stuff companies operating in the US have to follow.
Also be aware, my original comment was target that person's comment specifically, not the issues from the article.
It's not clear to me what visa one is supposed to use for this or even if one is available at all.
I think you're not, so I'll try to explain:
When the technicians I work with install a new windfarm/gas plant router to connect them to electricity markets (they probably do other stuff but my job is the software part of networking, so I only know about that), we could hire a local contractor with CISCO cert, and it would certainly be cheaper than fly out 20 workers to Argentina, Australia, Romania or Mexico. We don't, because our employees will use the same technique, the same methodology each time, for every client, and we will never have to guess how the installation was done, because we know. You can put a price on trust, but it's really expensive. If we had plants in the US, I guarantee we would do the same, for the same reasons, unless the government bought our trust (which is basically reimbursing our losses if the plant fails because the installation wasn't done as our technicians would have).
Unless we hire permanent workers as we did in Romania because we took a big market share there, training someone to follow our procedure, highly personalized, for a week to a month of work is just not worth it, especially when so many specialties are needed for like one hour on one site. We do hire locals to run the day-to-day operations, but the installation, it's just not worth it. Better to fly a tech team every 5 years, that stay like a month, look around, fix shit, then leave.
For the second part: you misunderstood the situation. The workers were only there for the installation of the assembly line (and probably training for the B1s), not to work full-time.
Note that at least some of the workers have basically the same job as our technicians, network engineers, people I work with a lot and that I really respect. To see that parade, picture and video of them being taken on purpose while in chains (not handcuffed, in literal chains) to humiliate them on purpose, and seeing so many Americans cheer in front of that makes me hate most of you. Sorry, I know 'not all Americans', only a third, but still. Cheered because workers are publicly humiliated. That's what your country looks like from the outside.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/09/10/the-ice-r...
> I'm not particularly sympathetic to Hyundai here, and it wouldn't be surprising if they subcontracted a sublegal operation to cut costs
Often Visa systems are overly complex and it's just a matter of bureaucracy making things impossible within a particular timeline. My cynical lens on this is that someone with a vested interest (like a competing company or a lobbyist from a competing industry) that has the ear of the administration has made this happen.
All the same, I imagine this only worsens the risk assessment for the US as a place of investment and business.
You don't need to go that far. Simple incompetence, cruelty, a complete lack of accountability and a need to meet quota is a sufficient explanation.
Though I cannot say it adds much clarity. Apparently, some people caught in the raid may have had valid visas. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing sounds like a poorly planned mess.
Well, no, but that's not how US immigration works any more, and never did at the border. Everyone very loudly points out that non-citizens don't have constitutional rights.
As a UK employee of a US multinational (+), I think I know what happened here, because it nearly happened to a colleague of mine. He went to visit HQ for a week, and made the mistake of saying at the border that he was coming to "work" rather than "business meetings". Non-visa travel generally allows the latter but not the former, even if the distinction isn't always clear.
It seems ludicrous that someone doing the same job for the same employer on the same IT systems suddenly becomes a criminal if they bring themselves and their laptop to HQ for a few days, and up until now this was always waived, along with simply observing that the person had a return ticket and a hotel. Now there's a much bigger risk if you say the "w" word.
I suspect what happens is that Hyundai sent over a bunch of Hyundai employees to get the Hyundai factory started, as everyone would expect, without going through the difficult and expensive process of securing short term work visas (which catgegory would this be anyway?)
(+) I suppose this makes me the evil offshoring taking all your jobs? Hi guys.
I'm assuming you mean at the border (crossings/airports), the same thing applies to citizens, under the excuse that their citizenship hasn't been verified until they're through immigration.
If it is unreasonable then the rules need to change - no point having rules if they can't be enforced.
> whether any of these hundreds of people were actually working without an appropriate visa
IIRC It appears that many of those arrested entered the country using ESTA which is tourism purposes only. They are likely subcontractors of this company.
> It's quite hard to imagine none of them have cases even worth hearing
I think it's due to the related investigation was conducted quickly, as most of them entered the country for the same purpose.
The ESTA home page says it's business or pleasure. The catch is it's only for trips up to 90 days.
Totally hurting her community.
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-the-woman-claiming-to...>
They were looking for 4 latinos, but then decided to arrest almost 500 workers, most of them Koreans - highly skilled technicians.
And the pictures of them being shackled in full body chains as if they were dangerous criminals is absolutely insulting and degrading.
This is not how you attract investment.
I would strongly advice any fellow countrymen not to travel to the USA, especially if they are not 'pure' white. There are many Dutch with Dutch parents that are not 'pure' white, because they have a Chinese, an Indonesian, a Caribbean, an Italian, a Spanish, a Moroccan, or a Turkish ancestor (to mention just some possibilities).
Absolutely every canadian crossing at a land border. The steady number of horror stories is keeping them away.
(Air travel is less impacted as canadian pre-clearance proceedures mean anyone rejected by ICE will not also be detained by them.)
On the other hand, I envy USA for enforcing their visas. Europe follows American criminality stats by 10 years, so when we used to mock USA for George Floyd, we’re now in it; for Korean shop owners, we’re now in it; For random knives in busses, we’re in it, and with school shootings, it’s just a matter of time until it happens.
And European people are much farther away from reaching the conclusion that law must be enforced in multicultural nations.
Crime committed by the police.
> Korean shop owners
What's criminal about Korean shops?
> school shootings
Gun control means no more school shootings. See Dunblane.
> law must be enforced in multicultural nations
Nobody ever said it shouldn't, but it has to be enforced in a fair and even-handed way.
> Gun control means no more school shootings. See Dunblane.
If you are citing Dunblane as an example of gun control not working, perhaps consider the fact that you had to go back to 1996 to find such a bad example in a country with strong controls means that while it doesn't work 100% it does work really rather well. To find a similar example (>20 dead or injured in a school or related environment) in the US you'd to go all the way back into the mists of time to… August. Before that the last large school shooting was Uvale in 2022, still only three years not 29.
No, the opposite. An example of the policy response working. The tragedy was met with universal revulsion and tightening of gun control. There were a few complaints that the tightening was a bit much, but there wasn't a significant faction of people who said that a few dead schoolchildren were a necessary sacrifice for their gun "rights".
(School shootings seem to be a post-cold-war phenomenon. Dunblane was 1996; Columbine was 1999)
I don't see how you read that at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre
There was a school shooting, and we restricted gun access.
An example of failure of those laws stopping any and all would have been the 2010 Cumbria shootings. But they are still few and far between.
He had a lethal dose of fentanyl, you absolute bafoon
per usual it's the other cultures causing the fuss, right.
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