The World Cup next year is going to be a shit show. My first world cup was 1994 and I watched every one of them on TV live. This would be the first time it'll happen in a city where I live (LA). This will also be the first world cup my son will watch. But I'm apprehensive of getting tickets for my family due to fear of harassment.
Hyundai is notorious for shitty dealers and service, to the point that people hesitate to purchase from their luxury brand, Genesis, to avoid these dealers. Meanwhile, I've heard of Koreans who confirm that the company's branches in Korea have much better dealers. Something seems off, then. Could it be the corporate greed and lousy US regulations that have allowed Hyundai to keep their shady tactics for decades in America?
> He said that some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working.
How many of the 300+ South Korean workers does this describe?
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.
Disclaimer: I’m a South Korean, so I’m gonna be hugely biased.
But with the disclaimer, the whole raid is stupid – I thought the US govt was trying to bring jobs to the states, encourage foreign investments, and move manufacturing over there? And then the very next thing they do is detaining and deporting people who are there to literally do that?
Even if you’re gonna complain about not having the correct visas, at least treat the people who are helping your country in good faith, not like people who got caught while trying to smuggle in across the border.
About the visa situation – quoting a comment from the past article since it explains it more clearly than what I could possible do:
> For people saying "they should have had the right visa", no one does this.
> Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
> And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
> Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
> In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
In practice, Korean staff are essential for the initial setup of Korean companies’ factories. But even though Korea has an FTA with the US, it’s not allocated short-term work visa quotas (unlike Singapore, Chile, or Australia). For various political reasons, Korean firms have instead relied on ESTA short-term visas, and the US had tacitly allowed it. This time, however, a Republican filed a complaint saying these companies weren’t hiring Americans, which left ICE with little choice but to step in.
I used to build factories. We'd design and install the robots and machines of the assembly line. Final install took months. We never got work visas in those countries. We'd just say we were there for engineering meetings. Which we did have, but mainly we were installing, calibrating, and testing the machines we designed. I wonder if it's something like that. We did however hire local subcontractor labor for the generic work. If we sent 300 Americans over I suspect it might have set off some alarms.
In the mid-2000s I was doing some consulting in middle America and noticed a bunch of Indian IT workers staying at the same hotel I was staying at. Since, I was Indian-origin, we engaged in some small-chat. They were working for a now defunct telecom giant (but contracted by one of the big Indian consultancies) on various software projects. There were there on not, H1Bs, but another class of short-term business-meeting only visas. They told me every 3 months a whole new team would cycle onto the project with a fresh set of business visas and the rest would cycle back home, rinse-repeat. They weren't allowed to "work" per say, and some of their colleagues got rejected at the border by more savvy border agents. But for every 1 rejection, 20 of them would get through.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadRegardless I am glad the workers get to go home. If it is illegal I’d imagine the company should be at fault.
How many of the 300+ South Korean workers does this describe?
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.
But with the disclaimer, the whole raid is stupid – I thought the US govt was trying to bring jobs to the states, encourage foreign investments, and move manufacturing over there? And then the very next thing they do is detaining and deporting people who are there to literally do that?
Even if you’re gonna complain about not having the correct visas, at least treat the people who are helping your country in good faith, not like people who got caught while trying to smuggle in across the border.
About the visa situation – quoting a comment from the past article since it explains it more clearly than what I could possible do:
> For people saying "they should have had the right visa", no one does this.
> Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
> And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
> Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
> In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45159119
also
WE MIGHT JUST RANDOMLY DECIDE TO ARREST AND DEPORT YOUR WORKERS WHO ARE SETTING UP THOSE FACTORIES.