When you think the Trump Administration has hit Peak Stoopid, it always manages to outdo itself. Today’s example is the ICE raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions facility in Georgia, in which Korean workers, many of them management types or specialists, were hauled away in wrist and some even in ankle chains, as if they were violent thugs who needed to be restrained. As we’ll explain, if the Administration is to get anywhere with its reindustrialization fantasy, it needs to bring in skilled foreign workers at the technical, supervisory, and managerial levels. Good luck with that now.
Mind you, as we will also explain, this factory had had a bad safety record, including deaths, and there are allegations that some of the construction workers were Koreans brought in on visas that did not permit manual labor. So Hyundai was not doing the best job of running this startup and if Administration charges are borne out, may have been been abusing these low-level workers. However, a significant number of the expats were technicians and seasoned supervisors.
The open question is what this self-sabotage implies about Trump priorities. It’s not hard to surmise that normalizing violent repression is more important than any other aim. And if one is cynical, the reason for targeting a Korean plant is that there would be less of a reaction to hauling off individuals with more social status than, say, workers at meatpacking plants, if they were foreign. In other words, this is moving up the food chain in terms of who the authoritarians are targeting.
Let’s first look at the raid and then its implications. From CNN:
More than 500 federal, state and local agents participated in the operation that ended with the arrest of 475 people in Ellabell, approximately 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. The small community was shaken by what was the largest raid so far in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown on US workplaces.
Let’s stop and point out that this is a huge show of force. CNN focused on Latinos included in the arrests, likely due to the ability to find some family members who could provide more detail. However:
The majority of those held are South Korean nationals, [Steven] Schrank [special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Georgia and Alabama] said, adding he did not have a breakdown of the nationalities of those arrested. Over 300 of the people arrested were South Korean, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Cho Hyun said on Saturday.
The CNN story features Schrank asserting the detainees had overstayed visas or did not have them. One of the CNN interviewees disputed that, as have others. From Associated Press:
A lawyer for several workers detained at a Hyundai factory in Georgia says many of the South Koreans rounded up in the immigration raid are engineers and equipment installers brought in for the highly specialized work of getting an electric battery plant online.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, told The Associated Press on Monday that many were doing work that is authorized under the B-1 business visitor visa program. They had planned to be in the U.S. for just a couple of weeks and “never longer than 75 days,” he said.
“The vast majority of the individuals that were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were South Korean were either there as engineers or were involved in after-sales service and installation,” Kuck said.
And to provide more background, the plant was under construction. These experts were to help it get up and running…so it could employ Americans:
Now it turns out that the raid looks like the result of a MAGA stunt gone bad. Rolling Stone was fast out with the story:
Tori Branum is a Marine Corps veteran, firearms instructor, and Republican candidate for Georgia’s 12th congressional district.
She’s also a proud “America first” supporter of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, as agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security were still carrying out a raid at a Hyundai plant in rural Bryan County, just outside the district Branum is running to serve, she expressed pride in something else: her purported role in causing the raid, which resulted in the arrest of 450 people, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
There had been safety problems, including three deaths, and OSHA had multiple investigations open at the plant. Two of the deaths were forklift accidents. There are also claims from the Administration that some (many?) of the Korean workers bought in on short-term business visas were doing performing manaul labor, which is not allowed on those visa categories.
ICE announced an investigation into “human trafficking” at the site, which sounds like a stretch until you understand that, per labor reporter Mike Elk, that:
During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”
[Labor reporter and South Korea expert] Tim Shorrock says that he doesn’t necessarily trust the Trump Administration’s spin on the raid, but does say there is reason for concern if workers on ESTA visas were illegally forced into dangerous construction work.
“That’s a situation of exploitation,” says Shorrock, who says that unions in both Korea and the United States should be paying close attention to the working conditions at Hyundai’s plant in Savannah, Georgia.
One has to wonder about the concern for the workers at this plant, when as we recounted many years ago, abuse of H1-B visa working as IT contractors is endemic. That is not to say labor abuses at foreign-owned plants are not serious, but that enforcement this selective looks sus.
And of course there is another side to this story:
But even if the ICE version of events is closer to the whole truth than the Hyundai version, the Administration’s apparent keen need to put this plant crackdown as an ICE raid looks to be yet another backfire, in that Team Trump seems to understand only domination, and not calibrated but effective use of power.
If the concern was abuse of relatively short-term work visas, how about calling management and saying, “You have a month to clean this up, otherwise ICE will pay a visit”? Recall I worked extensively with the Japanese in their heyday back in the 1980s. It was well known among the foreign firms operating in Tokyo that the Ministry of Finance could (and would) completely paralyze their operations by sending in a team for a MoF audit (the first step was to blow a whistle loudly; the white-gloved team would run in and slap seals on all the files and halt all work on personal computers). And therefore a threat of a MoF audit did lead to compliance. In other words, there were likely “show of authority” moves available that would have gotten the attention of Hyuandai management that wouldn’t have given Team Trump yet another press clip that could have brought the operation to heel.
And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training.
The Financial Times has as its lead story Workers in shackles, companies in shock: Georgia raid spooks foreign investors in US. From its account:
Multinational companies with foreign employees in the US have sought legal advice and paused some travel after federal authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at an electric-car battery plant in Georgia last week.
The detention of 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, at the Hyundai-LG Energy Solution factory under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, last week represented a new front in the White House’s broad crackdown on illegal immigration.
Video released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed people shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist outside the plant, which forms part of the Trump administration’s push to expand manufacturing in the country. ICE said that in its execution of a federal warrant it found individuals were “fraudulently using visitors’ visas”.
Let’s stop here. Do you seriously think these workers from South Korea got their own visas? The few times I needed a visa to travel for work, my employer got it. Oh, and I was told by McKinsey to lie in one case too, on a four-month assignment to the UK, and claim I was there on holiday. So why weren’t employers read the riot act instead?
Back to the story:
Other immigration lawyers said that they believed many of the arrests were of individuals who entered the US on so-called B-1 visas used by foreigners for business meetings, or had arrived under a related visa waiver programme. Many of those arrested were working for subcontractors….
But the rules around these terms of entry have been somewhat ambiguous. “It may be an aggressive use of the B-1 category for business meetings, or it could be an over-reach by ICE, and they may have taken a more restrictive view of what’s allowed as a business visitor than what’s in the regulations,” said Dan Maranci, a partner at WR Immigration, a law firm.
Charles Kuck, founding partner of Kuck Baxter, an Atlanta-based immigration law firm, said he was representing some of the people arrested in Ellabell. Many of the Korean workers were in the US under a visa provision that allows vendors to a US business to help install equipment, he said….
Tami Overby, an international trade consultant with DGA Group and former president of the US-Korea Business Council, said that big foreign companies had halted some travel to the US as they review the legal ramifications of the Georgia crackdown.
“When this happened, it was so unexpected and so shocking to see hundreds of Korean workers looking like criminals,” she said. “Those videos and those photos have played not just in Korea but in Japan, in Taiwan, in other trading partners of the US who also have large investment going on in the US.”….
DGA Group’s Overby said that the industries most at risk of being swept up in a dragnet over business visitor visas were those that bring in local talent. The need is particularly acute in sectors where US workers lack the technical expertise compared with those in Asia, such as battery manufacturing, shipbuilding and semiconductors…
Taiwanese executives said the raid sent a chill through the foreign business community. “Maybe Trump did it for some political reason, to send a message to the South Korean government,” said one. “The US government has become very different and unpredictable now.”
And this raid happened as US-South Korean negotiations over $350 billion of South Korean investment were already starting to go pear-shaped. From Bloomberg:
Speaking at a forum on Tuesday, Kim Yong-beom, director of national policy at South Korea’s presidential office, said Seoul has been emphasizing to US officials that it cannot accept the same terms as Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge finalized last week, citing the disparity in the size of the two economies and the potential repercussions on the foreign exchange market….
The $350 billion fund is a central pillar of the trade deal that preserved a 15% tariff on imports from South Korea, but the two countries remain divided over how the fund will operate. Kim said last month that the investment pledge would be structured mainly as loan guarantees rather than direct capital injections.
Mind you, there is yet no sign that this agreement won’t get done, but the US and Japan found it difficult to get to a detailed memorandum.
And there are forms of possible backlash:
So yet again, to invoke a saying based on Sun Tsu’s teachings, “Tactics with no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”