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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?
Does nobody have respect for the rule of law? This seems related to the concept of incentivizing lying that came up again in the recent ACX review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase
If you have rules and laws and you consistently don't enforce them, then you reward and incentivize rule breakers and liars. We have immigration laws. First and foremost, we should enforce the immigration laws. Then, after doing so, if we find out that we don't have the optimal level of immigration then we should change the number of immigrants we allow.
If foreign manufacturers are forming plans to build facilities in the United States, they should form their plans with the intention of hiring primarily locals, with whatever management or trainers they bring in having legal visas. These plans should involve carefully screening hired laborers to make sure they are legal. If their plans have already factored in plans to hire illegals but are worried about getting raided and choose not to, then good. They should either reformulate their plans to follow the law, or take their business elsewhere.
If we establish a precedent of enforcing immigration laws, then investors will take them into account and the economy will equilibrize accordingly. If we then end up with more American factories, or foreign factories with American workers because a hole was opened up for them to fill, then good, and we have more jobs for Americans. If not, and there ends up being a shortage of factories because we genuinely need the foreign expertise, then we'll be able to observe that and stick some more visas in the immigration budget. And then they'll be legal, and we'll have control over how many there are.
In no world is "make harsh laws and then fail to enforce them because they are too harsh" the correct decision.
Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.
So far, Trump has been less of a Kantian paladin who enforces the laws of the land whatever the consequences may be, and more of a petty tyrant who uses "I am just enforcing the law" as an excuse to punish his enemies.
In some cases, Trump seems to be targeting cities for harsh ICE enforcement simply because they did not vote for him.
Is it possible that Hyundai was blatantly cheating with their visa? Certainly.
But my money is on them being targeted because CW-wise, electrical cars (except for Tesla) are a technology of Trump's opponents, or because South Korea has lately not spread their ass-cheeks to Trump's satisfaction.
The South Koreans now probably wish they had built their factory in a more reliable partner country like China instead.
"Meaningfully" here covers a lot of ground. Doing disallowed work while here on a B-1 is violating the law, whether you think it's meaningful or not. It's fairly obnoxious to arrest bunches of employees who likely had no knowledge that their employer was using the wrong visa, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a violation of the law.
This does not appear to be a real example, but a reference to Abrego Garcia, who was not here on a visa at all.
Would you put up money on a bet that at least half of the people arrested were unambiguously violating the rules of their visas?
Which side? I'd guess that more than 0 but less than 10% of those arrested were not violating the terms of their visa. It's still obnoxious to do a raid; I'd expect violations like this by a corporation (especially when they were countenanced by the previous administration) to be handled via a warning/demand to the corporation. Of course, if they were warned and just didn't listen... there probably isn't any escalation that isn't obnoxious.
I would not be surprised if half of the workers were arguably violating the terms of their visas, but I expect the modal case here looks like "a worker for one of Hyundai's subcontractors was here on a B1 to suprvise the installation of equipment, and demonstrated to a worker on site how the machine was supposed to be hooked up when they're technically only allowed to describe" not like "Hyundai shipped in 500 Koreans on tourist visas to do unskilled construction work building the factory". In other words, I expect that the majority of detainees were authorized to work in the US, but I would be unsurprised if some were doing types of work they were not authorized to do, though I expect the majority were at least ambiguously authorized to do the sort of work they were doing.
Under my model I would be unsurprised if e.g. DOJ and Korean company disagree about whether work should fall under "contracted after-sales service" or "supervising installation of equipment". But under my model "chain them all up" is not a reasonable response to "people who are not flight risks were doing normal business things but we think they might have technically violated the terms of their visa, we'll find out in court".
I am unsure if there are any good and timely metrics but I would be quite surprised to see e.g. table 42d here showing 475 more (or even half that more) noncitizen enforcement returns to South Korea in 2025 than in 2024 - for reference the current latest data is 713 returns in 2022. (The latest available year here is 2022, so it might be a while before 2025 daya shows up). And my read is that DHS would enforce if they have even a vaguely plausible case of visa violation, so I think absence of this particular evidence would be evidence of absence of such a case.
There might be less janky ways to operationalize this, I'm open if you have ideas.
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