ICE agents detained 450 illegal migrants at a construction site in Georgia, including hundreds of fly-in Koreans who likely misused B-1 tourist visas to take jobs from American construction workers.
The migrants’ detention is presumably welcomed among American construction workers. But the sweep on September 4 has prompted a sharp complaint from South Korea’s government because a giant Korean-owned battery factory is being built at the construction site.
“The economic activities of our companies investing in the U.S. and the rights and interests of our nationals must not be unfairly violated,” ministry spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said in a press briefing, according to a South Korean media report. “We conveyed our concern and regret through the U.S. Embassy in Seoul today,” Lee said.
More than 30o Koreans were arrested in the sweep, Korean news sites said.
The battery factory in Ellabell, Georgia, is being built for two Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution Ltd. More than 1,400 people are working at the site.
Hyundai “is a repeat offender,” Jay Palmer, an immigration expert who works with immigration lawyers, told Breitbart News. Like other companies, including Mercedes, Kia, and Tesla, Hyundai executives use staffing companies to legally shield themselves as they fly airport migrants to job sites, he said.
“They push the people [job applicants] to staffing agencies, and then they hire them from staffing agencies, and then think they’re shielded by the law because they have a master service agreement that states [immigration status] is not their responsibility. This is happening in every industry, especially in meat processing plants …It’s just egregious,” Palmer explained.
The airport migrants are just basic economics for the CEOs, he said. “Why hire an American worker that might be unionized and you have to pay them $20, $25, $30 an hour, when you can hire a foreign worker and pay them $5, $6, $7, $8 an hour, and you don’t have to pay insurance on them?”
The corporate outsourcing strategy clashes with President Donald Trump’s push to hire blue-collar Americans for skilled trades, Palmer said. “There are American youth who are being cheated out of jobs and careers,” he said. Still, the Georgia raid will cost the company a lot of money via construction delays, he added.
In 2020, a Fox News channel reported on the widespread use of B-1/B-2 Koreans in another battery factory for SK Battery America:
“Georgians have gotten the shaft over the SKI battery plant,” complained David Cagle with the Georgia Local Union 72 of plumbers, pipefitters, and HVACR technicians.
Cagle said when his people tried applying for the construction jobs to build the plant itself, they were told nothing was available.
“We’ve got about 500 people out of work right now who could come up here and be on this job and making a living,” he said. “Instead, the Koreans are making a living.”
Asked if perhaps Koreans were needed for specific tasks at the plant, Cagle responded that much of the work was “generic stuff,” naming “the electrical work, the ductwork, the pipework, the pipe fitting, the pipe welding.”
The recent detentions were made by ICE, with support from the FBI, ATF, and the Georgia State Patrol.
NBC News reported:
South Korea, the world’s 10th-largest economy, is a major automotive and electronics manufacturer whose companies have multiple plants in the United States. In July, Seoul pledged $350 billion in U.S. investment in an effort to lower President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs on its products, which he ended up setting at 15%.
In March, Hyundai said it would invest $21 billion in U.S. onshoring from 2025 to 2028, a number it said last month had increased to $26 billion.
It said the initiatives involved in the investment — including a new $5.8 billion steel plant in Louisiana, expanded U.S. auto production capacity and a state-of-the-art robotics facility — were expected to create about 25,000 new direct jobs in the U.S. over the next four years.
Breitbart News has closely covered the illegal use of B-1 visas to hide the huge inflow of airport migrants from India, Mexico, and Europe into American trucking, technology, and construction industries.
Much of that labor travel activity is quietly backed by foreign governments, which extract U.S. dollars in taxes and remittances via the workers who enter legally but work illegally.
Trump’s deputies say they have begun efforts to curb misuse of the visa, which is intended for use by tourists and visiting business executives.
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