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ICE has conducted its largest ever raid targeting... Korean automotive workers at a Georgia Hyundai factory?
We don't have all the details, but from what I can glean most of the Koreans were in the country on B1 buisiness visas, which allows the visa holder to attend business meetings and conduct training, but does not allow for "labor". The factory involved is brand new, having opened less than a year ago, which would explain why they needed so many Koreans (Hyundai is a Korean company) to get operations off the ground.
One defense of these kind of raids is that it doesn't do America any good to have foreign companies build factories in the US if they are going to staff those factories with an imported workforce instead of Americans, but it is far from clear that was happening here. I don't doubt that many of these B1 visaholders were "working the line" and as such technically violating the terms of their visas, but that's how foreign investment works. If you build a brand new specialized factory in an area that doesn't have factories of that kind, the local workforce will inherently be inexperienced and unsuitable for the facility. You can't teach people how to run the factory without, well, running the factory.
The big question is what this means for foreign investment in the United States. If you were in charge of a foreign manufacturing corporarion, would you want to build a facility in the United States if there is a good chance your own employees would be arrested for running the company's facilities?
Hyundai Raid Rattles a Hot Spot of Growth in Georgia
The result was demographic replacement.
What am I missing here is let's assume they want to import a lot of Koreans and put them to work in a factory. Maybe Americans are dumb and can't work or something. I'm not saying it's true but let's assume every reason you can think of is actually true. Why couldn't they make all those workers legal? With all the fanfare about the project it's certain they could make all the papers in order if they wanted to. ICE couldn't do a thing if you have legal workers with proper documentation. I can see only one reason: illegals are cheaper and easier to control. They wanted easier exploitable workers. If that's true, they need to be punished for this, very hard. If they are feeling "betrayed" by the fact they can't violate the laws of the country they're doing business in, maybe some hard and painful reality check is due.
If they are here legally (and working legally), what is the problem with scrutiny? No scrutiny could have done anything to them, if their status is in order, ICE could check it a thousand times and still couldn't do anything.
If ICE has an error rate of 1%, if they check legal workers a thousand times they'll do something the worker won't like 10 times.
And where does this number come from? Given that all records are computerized and South Korea is not some shithole where people are not expected to have documents, 1% error rate would be staggeringly high. I would say one in a million could be, maybe, explained away as a computer glitch or something (though computer glitches don't really work this way, but maybe) but 1% is a horribly high rate of error when all you need to do is to look up a record in the database. Nobody in their sane mind would let a database into production that has lookup error rate of 1%. And these data are duplicated - if you are a legal worker, who signed all necessary forms, and somehow, by some unexplained glitch, your record got erased, you'd still possess your copy of documents, and so would your employer. Who has enough money to hire the best lawyers, it's Hyundai, not some mom-and-pop corner bakery. So even if that error - which can not be as frequent as 1% - happened, it would be easily corrected. And of course, any instance of such error would be immediately published on the frontpage of NYT, WaPo etc. Since I do not observe anything like that on those frontpages - I must conclude it did not happen, and ICE rate of error in this case was effectively zero. I don't claim it is always equal to zero - they are humans and use computers, and those both are always unreliable - but in this particular case, I'd like to see some proof.
From context, it's pretty clearly a guess. However, it lines up with manual data entry error rates for general tasks, so it's probably around correct.
I don't think you can compare the accuracy of database that had to be manually checked at least by three independent sources (the government, the employer and the employee - each one would alert if the name in the work permit, for example, would not match the passport name) to the raw data entry accuracy. Could the typist make an error? Sure. But the error would be corrected way before the ICE raid. And even if it weren't - the employee could easily show the work permit they were issued!
But even easier - if the error rate would be so high, we'd hear by now about legal Korean workers being deported for nothing. Did we hear about that? If not - why not?
I think what happened is that they brought in workers - maybe on legal visas, but without work permits - without bothering with all necessary documentation, because under the previous administration, even people who just walked across the Mexican border without documents were not deported, who would think about deporting actual Korean workers with documents working in highly advertised project? Open borders, baby! Then the administration changed, but the approach to documentation did not. Now, it's time for consequences.
That's probably about right for the application processes. What is it for spot checks, which would (presumably) happen to immigrants with illegal coworkers? Also, it doesn't have to end with deportation. Just fighting through bureaucracy another time is annoying enough to merit mention.
Given that in this case they just came in and deported 300+ people, it's not a "spot check" where you check the papers from random people. They knew this factory uses illegal workers, and they knew exactly who those were. And the reason they knew likely was exactly because all the docs were there, it's not the situation where people sneak over the border and have to be caught when they climb on the river bank - it was an organized effort that was blatantly ignoring immigration law out in the open, because that's how it had been done for the last 4 years. And this raid was a signal it's not how it's done anymore. As Democrats used to say before Trump, nobody is above the law.
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