With Hyundai Raid, Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Runs Into His Push for International Funding

Ahn Younger-joon

Protesters stage a rally in opposition to the detention of South Korean workers all thru an immigration raid in Georgia, near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. The signs read “A tariff bomb and workers confinement.” (AP Portray/Ahn Younger-joon)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s push to revitalize American manufacturing by luring foreign investment into the U.S. has move smack into one of his other priorities: cracking down on unlawful immigration.

Now not frequently every week after immigration authorities raided a sprawling Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, detained more than 300 South Korean workers and confirmed video of some of them shackled in chains, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung warned that the country’s other firms shall be reluctant to soak up Trump’s invitation to pour cash into the US.

The detained South Koreans were released Thursday and most were flown home.

If the U.S. can’t promptly field visas to the technicians and other expert workers wished to initiate plants, then “organising a neighborhood manufacturing facility within the US will either near with excessive disadvantages or changed into very complicated for our firms,” Lee mentioned Thursday. “They are going to wonder whether they must even fabricate it.”

South Korea is already an infinite investor within the US

Trump’s economic agenda is constructed spherical the usage of hefty tariffs on imports, in conjunction with a 15% levy on South Korean merchandise, as a cudgel to force manufacturing to return to the U.S. He’s all once more and all once more mentioned foreign firms can flee his tariffs within the occasion that they invent in The United States. South Korea, already a high investor, pledged to invest $350 billion within the U.S. when the 2 sides announced a alternate deal in July.

It made more investments in unusual constructing, equivalent to factories, on previously undeveloped land than any other country in 2022. Final one year, it ranked 12th on this planet with $93 billion in entire American investment — in conjunction with acquisitions of unusual firms, based entirely on the U.S. Bureau of Financial Prognosis.

However the dramatic roundup of South Koreans and others working to space up the battery plant threatens to place a sit back on the investment push. Indeed, Trump looks to be to be making an strive to undo the wound.

While demanding that foreign traders “LEGALLY elevate your very trim of us,” Trump also promised to “rep it quick and legally doable for you to fabricate so.”

“President Trump will continue handing over on his promise to rep the US the fully quandary on this planet to fabricate business, while also enforcing federal immigration regulations,” White Residence spokeswoman Abigail Jackson mentioned in a assertion Thursday.

For now, the South Koreans are mad and immigration experts are puzzled. It’s been frequent apply for a protracted time for foreign firms — such because the Eastern and German carmakers which have constructed factories within the American Midwest and South — to send technical experts from their home nations to motivate initiating plants within the US. Most of them educate U.S. workers, then wander home.

“Eastern managers, senior engineers, other technical experts had to near motivate to the US to space this stuff up,” mentioned Lee Branstetter, a professor of economics and public coverage at Carnegie Mellon University who’s studied Eastern auto plants within the U.S.

American firms fabricate the identical thing, sending U.S. workers in a foreign country temporarily to rep operations started.

Some experts call it a baffling, ‘performative’ raid

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched the roundup closing week at a manufacturing quandary that verbalize officials have touted as Georgia’s largest economic pattern venture.

“It’s in actuality baffling to me why this raid would have occurred,” mentioned Ben Armstrong, executive director of the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise’s Industrial Performance Heart. “The existence of these workers wouldn’t were a surprise.”

U.S. immigration officials would possibly well want audited the workers’ paperwork without the drama, retired immigration lawyer Dan Kowalski mentioned, adding that “raiding and arresting and striking them in chains and shackles is 100% performative.”

It had to fabricate with “making an strive to witness complicated — arresting as many foreigners as doable for the describe-op,” mentioned Kowalski, who’s now a writer and editor.

U.S. work visa categories rep it a tell to elevate in foreign workers quick and simply, mentioned Kevin Miner, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta.

Some move on a highly competitive lottery system, are for seasonal workers and have a cap, or are restricted to managers and executives. Utterly different non everlasting visas have strict limits on employment.

After meeting with Secretary of Thunder Marco Rubio this week in Washington, South Korean International Minister Cho Hyun mentioned they agreed to space up a joint working community for discussions on organising a unusual visa class to rep it more easy for South Korean firms to send their workers to work within the US.

Deputy Secretary of Thunder Christopher Landau also plans to focus on with Seoul this weekend.

Calls for fixes to the US visa system

Hyundai’s “wish to rep this thing up and running as quick as doable ran head-on into the basically time-consuming processes that the U.S. executive requires in utter to field business visas,” mentioned Branstetter of Carnegie Mellon.

U.S. authorities roar these detained were “unlawfully working” at the plant. Charles Kuck, a lawyer representing several of the South Koreans who were detained, mentioned the “overwhelming majority” of the workers from South Korea were doing work licensed below a visa program.

Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration coverage program at the Migration Policy Institute, mentioned work visas — admire nearly all other aspects of the U.S. immigration system — want reform.

“Our visa system would not envision this fashion of scenario,” Gelatt mentioned, of bringing in expert foreign workers wished for the preliminary setup of factories. The U.S. has a pair of country-particular visa categories that rep it more easy to elevate in sure foreign workers, admire these from Mexico, Australia or Singapore.

“The aim,” mentioned MIT’s Armstrong, “must be to rep foreign tell investment as streamlined as doable.”

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