US Migrant Raid Jolts South Korea, Stirs Investor Anxiety
The immigrant pressure on a Georgian home battery facility carried out by two South Korean firms shook Seoul with Donald Trump, which President Lee Jae Myung’s White House promised to invest hundreds of billions of Korean companies in the United States.
Korean officials during the weekend Hyundai Motor Co.-LG Energy Solotion Ltd. He worked to ensure the release of 300 citizens detained at a construction site for his joint venture. It remains unclear what visas of the workers or whether they allow them to be on the site. Korea said he would send a rented plane to take them home after the administrative procedures were completed.
It comes shortly after a summit to exhibit Lee and Trump’s alliances and to consolidate a new trade agreement. The agreement contained a fund of $ 350 billion to support South Korean companies expanding in the USA. Private companies promised $ 150 billion in direct US investment.
Raid puts Lee’s government under home and threatens to be a major diplomatic glare point with one of Washington’s closest allies. On Saturday, the preliminary page news for most of South Korea’s daily newspapers, the images of the workers were chained to the wrists, waist and ankles and marched to buses that cause anger.
The country’s most circulating newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, carried a photo where the prisoners raised their hands against a bus on Saturday, and claimed that they had detention facilities in Georgia, and claimed that they were “worse than prisons”.
Kim Tae-Hyung, a professor and president of the Department of Political Science at the University of Soongsil in Seoul, said from RAID, “It sounds like a knife in the back.” Kim, Korean cannot help, but cannot feel out of infurius ”and Korean companies will have the courage to“ inevitably ”from continuing their investment plans in the USA.
The raid is now shadowing South Korea’s millions of dollars of US investment driving. The detention of workers affiliated to an flagship Korean investment can be seen by companies as an indication that the political and adaptation risks of the building in the US are more than expected.
While the Maeil Business newspaper operated a cartoon showing Trump using a club, a figure offers a box of money to finance US factories – only the US was stunned to detain dozens of Korean employees.
The Georgian Facility was a concrete symbol of Seoul’s commitment to increasing US production. Chang Sang-Sik, President of the International Trade and Trade Research Center of Korea International Trade Association, said that Korean enterprises will face more difficulties in building new plants or operating in the USA, or continue to implement solid migration laws without continuous visa problems.
Local media reports, many Korean companies, employees, when they need to send immediately to 90 days of short -term business trips for the visa waiver of the visa waiver, he said.
“The US demands investment from South Korea, but wants us to use the Americans to build factories there. “They need local technicians during the construction period.”
US officials detained a total of 475 workers, describing this as the only site executive action of the National Security Department.
While maintaining the raid, the optics cannot be denied, although the result of a month of investigation in illegal recruitment and not politically motivated. The incident draws a fundamental principle of the aggressive migration policy of the Trump administration against the other great priority of attracting foreign investments and replying the American coast.
South Korea is the sixth largest trade partner in the USA and its companies are integrated in the global home battery supply chain. Investments in US factories were clearly encouraged by Washington to reduce dependence on China. A pressure that sweeps such projects potentially complicates trade relations.
RAID has already led to urgent reactions. The construction in the Georgian factory was temporarily paused, which is a stop that can have fluctuation effects on the timeline for Hyundai’s larger home production plans in the United States. The Georgia industrial site is designed to produce up to 500,000 hybrid and electric vehicles per year and to employ 12,500 workers in the beginning of the next decade.
Hyundai, one of the leading foreign investors in US manufacturing, did not interfere with the US legal problems with employment problems. In 2022, the US Department of Labor found child labor violations in companies supplying to the Korean automobile manufacturer in Alabama.
Hyundai said that he was closely watching the situation in Georgia and that he was working to understand certain conditions and that none of his employees were detained.
LG Energy said that he had suspended his business trip to the United States for employees and advised his staff to return home. LG said that 47 were among those who were held – 46. From South Korea and an Indonesia. According to reports, the other South Koreans who were detained were subcontractors.
With the help of Shinhye Kang.
This article was created from an automatic news agency feeding without changing the text.
