US to target more businesses after Hyundai raid
reuters.com
reuters.com
When US companies first started outsourcing their factories to Korea, China, and other countries, they were doing the exact same thing. They were just flying engineers over on business and tourist visas to jump start factories and train the workers. Typically only long term workers bothered getting bona fide employee visas abroad.
Open any Steve Jobs biography. "Jobs told me to fly to China tonight and deal with the problem"
You think he got a Chinese work visa in one day?
This is hubris-driven rule by law. As Americans we can't fathom a foreign company knowing something we don't. The shoe is on the other foot now. Foreign conglomerates have knowledge and processes and expertise that we dont have. There's literally no pragmatic way for Hyundai to get 300 employees here on short notice. They moved fast and broke things. They did what they thought they had to do to survive in a kafkaesque system.
On the Jobs example - do you expect the US government to enforce Chinese law there? Does Jobs violating Chinese law affect what laws the USA can enforce decades later? This makes no sense.
I believe the point is that it's often impossible to build a factory without sending your experts on site to supervise it. And sometimes you need to send people on a short notice, if something unexpected happens or if the people assigned to that site are not available. Then the people will go in with whatever visas are available on such a short notice, hoping that it's not in the destination country's interests to stop them.
This is fundamentally not about immigration or laws but whether you want to make your country an attractive place to invest in.
For the purposes of "was it a reasonable action" yes it is important to understand how the US has acted in the past.
It's true that what counts as 'business' and not 'work' has always been an ambiguous line, but given that the arrestees include executives who generally haven't been historically subject to this kind of treatment, I'm sure the lawyers could make a very good argument in their favor.
I was merely using a steelman argument to attack the actions taken as inappropriate regardless of legality.
Source for everyone being put in jail?
The article this discussion is about?
China wanted high-tech manufacturing, Apple provided that, violating a few Chinese laws here and there.
The US now wants high-tech manufacturing, Hyundai wants to provide that, violating a few US laws here and there. Only the US can't decide what it really wants, so starts enforcing laws that are in conflict with Hyundai suppliers quickly flying their staff in to set up the factory. In the end the investment is too high so Hyundai most probably will finish this factory, but what message does this send to other potential investors?
If I were in a Thucidian power struggle and trying to re-shore industry and all the new manufacturing processes developed abroad in the past 40 years I would consider making it easier for allies who want to invest in the US to do the same.
edit: A cynic would argue that the system is in place is working exactly as designed.
Or did they just gut their workforce and claim that was "enough of a penalty".
Historically the US has implicitly condoned these illegal actions by employers by refusing to ever take action against them.
There has only ever been action taken against employees, who sometimes aren't even meaningfully informed that they are breaking the law. (Certainly they often know but the employer always knows)
There are levels of plausible deniability that need to be pierced for actions to stand up in a court of law. Hyundai has already claimed these workers were not employees and were subcontractors or sub-subcontractors. Just the negative press and pressure from the SK govt may do a lot in the future for Korean carmakers to try and do better checking on workers working in their factories.
I responded to someone claiming a difference in action was taken.
You responded with "well that is hard" as if to reclassify action to include previous actions.
We instead took the much cheaper option of asking them to stop and in most cases they complied to avoid legal action.
This also created bad publicity and interruption.
The raid serves no purpose but to have video of people.
Labour cost is one thing, total useful production volume is another.
The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.
And then the labor cost of food would no longer be near the bottom of the price factors.
Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits.
Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.
I too would like to see farm laborers have more comfortable lives
If farm laborer wages just went up and nothing else changed, it would probably be fine. If wages could stay the same but there was a small decrease in productivity from less experienced workers filling in, it would probably be fine too. But if the lack of workers is what is causing both production shortages and sharp labor cost increases at the same time, the only people with any power to wield in this situation are the large corporate middlemen who hold tons of supply contracts with legally binding guarantees for product and an entire logistical network developed over decades to transport and sell these goods that can't just be spun up in a few weeks by other people.
If manual labor is required for agriculture, let the market absorb the real cost and pay the workers the correct wage instead of exploiting them.
Consider this vague hypothetical, because I'm not American and don't care about the specifics:
Country A, average wage X; country B, minimum wage for legal residents 2X. People from A can on average get a pay rise by working in B while undercutting legal residents of B. Citizens of B then get the stuff cheaper than they otherwise would have, but also might not be as easy to employ.
Are current employment stats accurate? As in do they tell the right picture or is this a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? Lots of people say it's the later, and unfortunately I'm not qualified to explore anyone's arguments.
All things being equal, people will generally choose to follow the law. So figure out why the migrants and their employers are choosing not to follow the law and fix that.
Loads of people do it in Australia and it helps tremendously. It's not perfect for sure, but it's something.
As with tariffs, I can imagine this situation being less orderly or predictable now. But I've seen both theory and practice work as intended.
If I'm allowed to fret a bit for my fellow countrymen, I confess I am saddened that they will have to decide between food or rent in the coming months/years. When my single mom raised my sister and I she had to make that same choice at times.
Most ag workers are here on... ag work visas. There are processes in place to facilitate this seasonal work.
"No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened?
Turns out assuming all the brown farm workers are here illegally is not only extremely racist but fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the system works.
It's even more puzzling that people are cheering on the false premise of keeping people here in the shadow of the law as indentured servants so they can save 10 cents on tomatoes at the market.
That seems like enough to have a measurable impact on food prices if they stop showing up?
To be clear, not arguing for or against enforcement, just pointing out that the data seems to suggest this as a factor to be taken into consideration.
Nobody is hiring illegal workers to save 10¢. They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.
Which is bad for everyone except business owners who vacuum up all the profits from exploiting below minimum wage labor, and then socialize the cost of taxless under the table work of illegals to the state and by extension to the taxpayer.
Britain enters the room...
Short-term farm labourers like fruit pickers weren't deported as such after Brexit (I think), and they were earning roughly double the minimum wage, but the jobs were seasonal so many workers spent the winter in their home countries.
After Brexit:
> A shortage of farm workers created by Brexit led to 8,000 tonnes of berries going unpicked last year.
The EU citizens have been replaced by labourers (with the appropriate visas etc) from Asia, but the wages have gone up and the costs of travel.
(I don't know how this affected fruit/vegetable prices. There were other causes of inflation at the same time.)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/14/why-uk-farms... (NB 2022.)
Why would it have happened? "All the illegals" have not been kicked out, so what are you basing this statement on?
Bad faith framing.
That article puts forth the tired trope that "crops are rotting in the fields". If that was true or so extensive as they portray, the shelves would be empty, not simply more expensive. They're not.
When chickens were being culled because of the bird flu, the supply of eggs dropped significantly. Prices of eggs also rose significantly. As a result, shelves were often full of eggs that were priced so high that they weren’t being bought as often. Production dropped, prices rose, demand dropped, surplus remained fairly constant.
Have you noticed anything different between this year and the last few years?
For instance the carrot harvester that can harvest tons of carrots each hour: you could pay the driver $126k per year and the carrot price per pound would not even move 2 pennies at retail.
Asparagus for example is harvested in less than 20 seconds per bunch. Even at $50/hour that is a cost of less than 30 cents per bunch; which sells for how much in the store?
1000s of workers harvest over 9 billion pounds of apples every year-again the labor component is smaller than you’d think.
Asparagus harvesting may be fast, but you have to do it every day. You have to keep people employed throughout the entire season. There isn't just a few-week harvesting period.
You can't just mechanize everything.
Maybe that farm is selling in an area where consumers are less choosey? I certainly prefer hand-harvested blueberries (and can tell the difference)...
Certainly machine harvesting is an increasing share of the market, but it is still predominantly hand-harvested.
Perhaps our priorities as a society are misplaced.
It’s also a lot harder. Blowjobs are comparatively simple, even with cloud-connected VR headsets.
It wouldn't simply be higher prices, it would be shortages.
I think there's about 50m or so documented migrants, but as many of the targets at Hyundai were documented but apparently wrong somehow, the USA may find its economy and workforce suffering catastrophic reductions in this term of office, even just from people asking "should I leave on my own terms or risk being thrown out?"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agricu...
I knew a guy whose family had a tree nursery in Texas and they stopped hiring citizens and eventually white people outside of blood relatives completely. They tried for quite a long time, including raising prices, long training periods and safety equipment purchases, etc.
Eventually after several dozen people "accidentally" shear off a tiny piece of their pinky to seek a Workers Compensation claim only weeks into the job trying to claim permanent disability, you either stop putting yourself at risk or you go out of business.
They even won most of the cases, largely because they would usually catch these dummies on camera doing it intentionally, but the legal defense itself is still quite expensive and draining...
Like, because the economy is so fucked it's okay to fuck over anyone who has the nerve to have a business that generates employment opportunities?
Maybe it's more accurate that labor and the value of labor are a product of culture.
It's the same story everywhere in Europe. When people say they want less migrants or illegal people in their country, the-pro immigration parties come out and ask the same sort of questions: who is going to care for the elderly, clean the toilets, take care of the kids, pick up the rubbish and so on?
As if, the only purpose of these migrants was to to do all the shit jobs nobody else wants to do. If it wasn't so vile and despicable, it would be laughable.
Here is a tip, if you want more people to do bad/hard jobs then the solution is not to encourage illegal immigration so that these people can be exploited, it is to raise the wage of these jobs so that people would actually consider doing them in the first place.
"I don't care about higher grocery prices. I don't care about economic efficiency. I just want them gone."
I don't believe you understand their value system.
EDIT: In particular, an appeal to economic prosperity will not win an argument with someone who isn't basing their decisions on economics.
The goal is not human flourishing. The goal isn't even flourishing for the groups that they care about. The goal is suffering for the people they hate.
Then why do you immediately shift into questions of moral judgement, and your moral judgement of how "welcoming" people should be? This politics is garbled.
New immigrants lower the leverage of domestic workers, and the leverage of previous immigrants, by intention. The myth that they move on to become mandarins that are too good for those jobs comes from people who never had to work those jobs. Black people didn't move anywhere except to even worse, less secure work.
I watched a South filled with black servants serving everyone's food and doing all the hard work, turned into a South filled with black people who have $0 worth outside of the equity in their cars, and all of that (horrible shit-)work being completely closed to them because they didn't speak a foreign language.
At the same time, especially in the north, I watched tons of terrible jobs filled by the barely English speaking Indian "relatives" of the people who opened franchises, and who kick back half of their checks to these "uncles", another quarter of that check goes back in remittances, and they get to live like kefala Emerati slaves.
It is dystopic to consider this the compassionate choice. It's purely a matter of trend following when the people who profit from this stuff also do the media work to set the trends. The "left" were against all of this in the 90s as a central principle.
Cesar Chavez gave speeches about the "wetbacks" being brought in to undercut striking workers. As a Black person born in Chicago, I was part of the Great Migration that was brought in to undercut European immigrants who were fighting for their labor rights. It doesn't make me "bad," or my family "bad." The accusation that people who object to it are demonizing immigrants is an intentional distortion and a marketing strategy for consistent hypercapitalist laissez-faire politics.
I miss when "liberals" didn't have Reagan's policies. But they're a natural consequence of their having become extraordinarily wealthy from them.
Data says immigration is generally good for the economy but certainly within some parameters. I don't think any data says immigrants hurt black Americans but please cite something besides your personal observation. It does seem pretty specious to blame the least powerful people in society for the downfall of the next least powerful and not the massive wealth concentration at the top. The fact that immigration is being demonized by the same crew who want to ban discussion of racism or diversity is not a coincidence.
Most lines are. It is a line we agreed on as a society. Just for a quick comparison, 21 is a legal drinking age in US ( going after less incendiary example just to prove a point ). But, and here is my subtle point, either those are real lines or there are not. If they are real, they should be enforced and if they are not, they should be nulled.
<< We can and should welcome far more people than we do.
Before I offer a reflexive response, I think it is worth to task a simple question:
why?
<< Deporting people who are not violent and contributing to the economy because they have incorrect paperwork isn't a win for anyone but politicians and racists.
That is amusingly neat way oh framing it, but if it only it was that simple. I want to argue against this framework, but not before you give me an idea about how you justify the why in previous section. I struggle to understand this particular perspective.
Because without immigration, the population of the US will objectively shrink over time, and that's bad for both the country in the abstract and the personal welfare of the average middle class person as they reach old age.
If it is social services and social safety net, then why the same does not apply to the immigrant population ( legal or illegal )? Again, I know what I am thinking, but you have to give me a little more so that I model your world perspective a little more clearly.
We haven't had a serious discussion about actual immigration policy for a while and a lot of agreed upon rules are being tossed out. Trump's enforcement includes summary dissolution of refugee status, summary revocation of visas and green cards, arrests at court houses and a general disregard for due process. There is a big headline strategic objective of fighting crime and the current enforcement is not even pretending that this is a serious goal.
I just think of the money wasn't collected/handed out to them in the first place we wouldn't be in this situation.
And your tax contribution to would be %.0001. There are MANY things about the government to be infuriated at but this isn't one of them.