US immigration authorities said on Friday that they had detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided Hyundai’s sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia, where the Korean automaker makes electric vehicles.
The Pew Research Center, citing preliminary Census Bureau data, said the US labour force lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January through July.
I’m just gonna chalk it up to the Samsung keyboard being complete garbage lol, I was joking about the corporate beef.
As for Hyundai, yeah it sounds sketchy because it’s “I heard from someone” which may as well just be made up, but I didn’t add any details because it gets a little too close to disclosing personal info.
But tbf this is lemmy and I would have questioned the same thing, so here goes:
I live <2 hours away from one of Hyundai’s Georgia plants and personally know someone who works for Hyundai at raided plant who gave all the details of what he knows (along with some pictures of helicopters during the raid lol).
According to him, they primarily targeted the LG portion of the facility, which is across the road from the Hyundai section. They had everyone come outside for the lineup and verification of ID, before they took whoever they wanted away. In his own words, it was a “massive operation and totally overkill for whatever they discovered.”
A group of us were discussing the implications, because we always assumed the large Korean immigrant population in our area was primarily here on legal work visas (they are, 500 is nothing compared to the current population). We just didn’t expect Hyundai/LG to be skirting around for cheap foreign labor via visit visas.*
He doesn’t know how DHS/ICE figured them out or how Hyundai was documenting this process, but he did hear people talk about the visit visa process long before this, meaning it wasn’t some huge secret (DHS may already have been aware of this a long time ago). There are other similar visa exploit tricks several companies use that DHS has recently been trying to shutdown or change (stuff like multiple applications for a visa for only one person to increase draw rate).
Anyways, the general concenus was that even though the visit visa was providing jobs, it was technically exploit labor since workers would not have been receiving any US employment benefits or equivalent salary. Hyundai is primarily the one at fault here, but they really didn’t need to do a massive raid for this. They could have just as easily sent a single squad to show up and do ID checks, or even just knock on home addresses of everyone they identified on a non work visa.
Obviously no one wants to give ICE any more ammo for their existence, but I think they’ve been pocketing this and waited for a while so they can get all the clout with some big headlines after a couple of months of desperately detaining anyone even remotely foreign.
You can find details about both the visit visas and LG plant corroborated in the news. Ex: https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff
*fwiw it does seem more like they are dancing around the increasingly stricter visa requirements to get work done, and not just some cheap labor exploit, especially considering the amount of immigrants here on valid work visas for all the other jobs.