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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25687 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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ICE has conducted its largest ever raid targeting... Korean automotive workers at a Georgia Hyundai factory?

ICE has released a video of its raid on Hyundai–LG's Georgia battery plant site, showing Korean workers chained up and led away. South Korea's foreign ministry has confirmed over 300 of the 457 taken into custody are Korean nationals.

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.

Does nobody have respect for the rule of law?

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.

  • You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.
  • You are employing illegals on your farm or in your hotel? Don't worry, wise king Donald has decided that he is fine with that, nobody will arrest your workers. (Also, as illegals lack social security numbers, I am wondering how you can even pay them without breaking federal labor law.)

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.

Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.

Reuters: Workers say Korea Inc was warned about questionable US visas before Hyundai raid

Many South Korean workers were sent to the U.S. on questionable documents despite their misgivings and warnings about stricter U.S. immigration enforcement before last week's raid on a Hyundai site, according to workers, officials and lawyers.

For years, South Korean companies have said they struggle to obtain short-term work visas for specialists needed in their high-tech plants in the United States, and had come to rely on a grey zone of looser interpretation of visa rules under previous American administrations.

When that changed in the early days of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, some workers were denied entry to the United States under statuses that did not fully allow work, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen workers from various companies, government and company officials, and immigration lawyers.

Many of the people arrested were skilled workers who were sent to the U.S. to install equipment at the near-complete factory on a visa waiver programme, or B-1 business traveller visas, which largely did not allow work, three people said.

"It's extremely difficult to get an H-1B visa, which is needed for the battery engineers. That's why some people got B-1 visas or ESTA," said Park Tae-sung, vice chairman of Korea Battery Industry Association, referring to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.

One person who works at the Georgia site told Reuters that this had long been a routine practice. "There was a red flag ... They bypass the law and come to work," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

LG Energy Solution is working with Hyundai to build the factory.

Officials at LGES were aware of the long-standing issues and some of the companies' employees and contractors were reluctant to travel to the United States for fear of being denied entry, two of the sources said.

@CertainlyWorse @faul_sname @JarJarJedi

B-1 visas do allow some types of work - I bet LGES argues that the workers were there "to install, service, or repair equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company", or "to train U.S. workers to perform these services", both of which are permissible activities under a B-1 visa per CBP's own documentation provided that the workers do not receive compensation from a US source.

If the workers did receive compensation from a US source, that means someone fucked up somewhere, but my guess is what actually happened is that CBP disagrees with LGES about whether the activities these workers engaged in qualify as installing, servicing, or repairing equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company, and decided that the appropriate course of action was to chain these workers up and make a self-congratulatory press release about it, and that we will hear any follow-ups about the outcomes of this raid in terms of findings of actual wrongdoing.

(Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA)

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