At least 22 other factory sites involving Korean business groups, in autos, shipbuilding, steel and electrical equipment, have been nearly halted, according to people familiar with the matter.
Hyundai Motor is one of the biggest foreign investors in the US and is among Korean companies participating in a pledge of $150 billion in foreign direct investment in the US, which comes on top of a $350 billion fund that Seoul separately pledged.
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.
While neither government has revealed details about all the workers’ visas, it’s not unusual for foreign companies to save time and money by sending workers from abroad to set up U.S. factories, and then train U.S. workers, said Rosemary Coates, executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a nonprofit that encourages U.S. manufacturing.
“We saw the same thing happening in the ‘80s with Japanese carmakers setting up U.S. factories, and in the ‘90s with German carmakers,” she said.
Here is the ignoramus who just deprived Georgians of 8500 jobs.