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by FridayoLeary 282 days ago
What nobody is discussing is why hyundai was apparently employing 500 illegal workers [edit: i see some HNers have commented on it. The news sites and reddit have all somehow completely overlooked this significant angle]. I think it's reasonable to question if they got full employment rights as if they had been legal residents. Frankly i'm amazed the white house hasn't yet made a huge fuss about it and why hyundai isn't being held to account.

You can tell me that i've got it all wrong, and the workers were completely legal and they weren't exploiting cheap labour and this isn't a huge scandal, but please back up your claims. As far as i can tell hyundai is getting away scott free with breaking the law because they are a big corporation.
2 comments
blargey 282 days ago
It's stated clearly that the factory in question is under construction. There are multiple such factories being constructed by Hyundai in Georgia, each under an agreement with the state to employ several thousand locals once they get it running, in exchange for incentives to build on US soil in the first place. (ex/ 8,100 local jobs under this plan, for example https://georgia.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/hyundai_moto... )

These people were brought there for one-off, short-term, specialized work to get the factory ready, to start employing those thousands of locals, as per Hyundai's agreement with Georgia's state govt. They abused temporary / non-work visas to do so, but not to displace local labor (which wouldn't know how to do the job) - rather, to help build a new source of local labor.

As such, it's likely that there isn't a single person in the world who "wins" because of this deportation, except maybe some harangued ICE official with quotas to fill. Maybe that's why "the white house hasn't yet made a huge fuss about it and why hyundai isn't being held to account."

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throwawaymaths 282 days ago
Its been discussed. Iiuc, Currently unlike other countries in a similar economic relationship as it, south Korea does not have access to a quota for short term business consultative employees, and Korean firms have been in the habit of misclassifying short term immigrant employees to get them in the door, doing the subcontracting trick to shield the supercontractor (in this case LG/Hyundai) from liability... In case it goes south, as it did this time.
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