Here is how Fox News reported on the massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia:
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of 475 illegal migrants during a major immigration enforcement raid on Thursday at a Hyundai electric car battery factory in Georgia.
HSI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven Schrank noted that while the raid was at a Hyundai facility, not all the migrants worked for the parent company. Some worked for subcontractors at the site.
“We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said during a news conference on Friday.
Here is how the New York Times reported the same story (Gift link!):
The United States has for years pressured South Korea to invest billions of dollars in American industry, a push that has only increased over the last few months.
That made it all the more shocking for South Koreans when they learned that U.S. immigration officials had raided the construction site of a major Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia on Thursday, arresting hundreds of South Korean citizens.
U.S. officials said they had arrested 475 people during the raid, in Ellabell, Ga., because they were in the country illegally or working unlawfully. Most of them were South Korean nationals who had been sent to help finish building an electric-car battery factory, according to industry officials familiar with the project. Most, they said, were subcontractors working for the carmaker Hyundai and the battery maker LG Energy Solution, South Korean companies that share ownership of the plant.
The raid came at a sensitive time in trade relations, unsettling South Korean businesses investing in the United States.
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Or perhaps I should revise this Ethics Alarms slogan to, “Nah, the New York Times isn’t a shameless anti-Trump spin factory!”
Think about the Times take on this event. The U.S., it implies, should ignore deliberate violations of U.S. law to placate a trad partner. No—you biased morons—it should not. “Most of them were South Korean nationals who had been sent to help finish building an electric-car battery factory,” sayeth the Times. Oh! Oh that’s okay, then! As long as the South Korean citizens were sneaked into the U.S. to help finish building an electric-car battery factory, its not a problem. Break whatever laws you feel you need to, South Korea Friends!
475 American citizens could have those jobs. The whole idea behind the U.S.’s foreign trade policy is to bring more manufacturing to the U.S., meaning more jobs for Americans. If the companies just bring over their own workers illegally to do the same jobs here, the benefits to the United States will be significantly curtailed.
The raid came after South Korea agreed to $350 billion worth of investments in the U.S. as part of a Trump trade deal struck in July. The battery plant under construction is scheduled to begin operations at the end of this year. The facility, costing $4.3 billion to $7.6 billion , is slated to supply batteries to Hyundai’s nearby Savannah EV plant and stands as the largest single industrial investment in Georgia’s history. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret” over the raid. “Our companies’ economic activities and our people’s rights should not be infringed unfairly in the US legal enforcement process,” a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry said.
See? Trump is infringing on the rights of South Koreans to work here illegally. Autocrat! Fascist!
I liked Hyundai’s ridiculous “Hey, don’t look at us!” response too: “As of today, it is our understanding that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Company,” Hyundai told Fox News Digital in a statement. “We prioritize the safety and well-being of everyone working at the site and comply with all laws and regulations wherever we operate.”
Riiiiiight…
[P.S. When the inevitable unauthorized comment defending the Times or insisting “But…but….a lot of commenters pointed this out!” arrives from EA Designated Banned Commenter “A Friend,” I hereby promise to hollow out the comments and invite everyone here legitimately to heap abuse on him, the more uncivil the better…]
Ethics Alarms 
When a company brings workers from over seas, typically the company handles all the paperwork for establishing the credentials of the workers and getting their particular visas established.
This isn’t on the arrested workers. This is on Hyundai and South Korea.
Why isn’t it on the workers as well? It’s each individual’s responsibility to make sure he or she isn’t breaking a law, either in their own country or in ours, no?
It is. But I know companies (we employ guys from Central America on a seasonal H1B basis) incentivize the hassle by promising to take care of everything). If we who only hire a dozen guys a summer to supplement our normal labor force do this, I’d imagine a company employing 275 guys have told them all “don’t worry about it, it’s taken care of”.
Yes that doesn’t legally absolve an adult from making sure it’s taken care of. But people are gonna people and trust large institutions ostensibly working on their behalf.
475*
What is lacking in all of the treporting is the nature of the violations. Korean nationals can come her for 90 days in a 180 day period without a visa. The violation may be overstaying the visa.
On the other hand, it could be a violation of the nature of work permitted on a visa. I’ve been involved in one of these deals with LG energy. The partner company pays the capital and operating costs of the factory, and LG provides all technical knowledge needed. Their engineers are totally responsible for the equipment design, installation and training. LG gets fixed price payment for every batter produced. In these types of projects, what those foreign nationals can and can’t do under a visa free or visa is limited. Basically hands on trade work is impermissible. I’ve been coached to never pick up a tool, no matter what.
The employees and subcontractors still need to go to the US embassy or consulate to receive an H1B or L1B visa. You have to have a proper work visa to do work in the USA. Hyundai needs to consult with immigration lawyers about the immigration requirements, and then properly prepare employees and subcontractors for their visit to the USA embassy/consulate, and entrance into the USA. A previous company I worked helped implement software created in Europe, with a big consultancy branch in Canada, had to deal with this issue all the time for consultants traveling to the USA. So at our yearly conferences in Toronto we had breakout sessions to go over all the immigration related issues. This includes what documents you need to bring and what you should and should not say to a CBP officer.
So Hyundai dropped the ball big time. Also each person traveling to the USA has a responsibility to know the important requirements for entrance into the USA; you do this when you go on vacation, and they should apply the same level of care to business visits. Not knowing these things is incompetence.
My gut feeling is that Hyundai did not have things in order, and that they asked the subcontractors and employees to lie about the purpose of their visit to CPB officers.
You know, this doesn’t strike me as a typical immigration raid. People here on work or training visas are not exactly the same as people who have just illegally crossed the border.
I agree that there is a shared responsibility for these workers. If a company wants to bring in people to build a factory, they certainly have an obligation to ensure that they have the proper visas and work authorizations for their workers. But the workers — and it sounds like these are fairly skilled people – also need to be sure they are following the rules.
I deal with students and professors here on F-1 and J-1 visas (students, professors, researchers typically), and they do tend to want to be sure that they follow all the rules. They’ve always understood that they could jeopardize their visas and their ability to stay in the U.S. if they don’t.
I suspect there is a third responsibility for this mess, and it rests with our government. Surely on a big project like this, there is some oversight — surely we had to know that there was a large foreign worker contingent there. Is there no one who should be checking to see if things are done properly?
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But.
I recall the furor over the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago. It was likened to swatting a fly with a sledgehammer — why use the nuclear option?
One would think that if Homeland Security (or whoever) got word that there were a lot of illegal or improper workers at the Hyundai factory — why not call up Hyundai and work with them to fix the situation? I’d think they would have every incentive to ensure that they have a legal work force, and could work with their contractors to fix things.
Now perhaps the administration did just that and Hyundai brushed them off, stonewalled them. I don’t know, but I’ve not seen any reporting that that was the case. Of course in this age of oh so reliable and unbiased journalism, would it be reported? Sooner or later, probably, but the administration doesn’t appear to have said anything.
It would’ve been nice for ICE to let them know some paperwork was expired or missing (if indeed that was the case), and give them a deadline to fix it, but I’m thinking that the Trump admin’s general crackdown on illegal aliens should’ve been clear enough that companies using foreign labor had better get everything order, and I expect after these events they will be more compliant going forward. The raid also make’s it clear that Trump isn’t being racist against Hispanics, all illegal entrants are subject to deportation, regardless of skin color. To quote a certain popular Korean-American movie that’s about expelling bad actors: “This is how it’s done done done.”
Yes, it will encourage the others. But I do feel that it was an unnecessary public relations mess. A little nuance would serve the administration well in these cases.
Apparently this has been a long standing issue in Georgia. Here is a 5 year old article at a different company from Korea getting busted in Georgia.
https://www.globalatlanta.com/sk-battery-installs-immigration-checks-amid-criticism-of-hiring-practices-at-korean-owned-plant/
Note the overtones of, “These guys are building batteries for electric vehicles! We can’t throw them out of the country! They are saving us from global warming!”
On the general theme of comparing coverage from different news outlets I find AllSides.com (a public benefit corporation) to be very helpful.
The feature I rely on most is a news aggregator that selects coverage from left, center, and right media sources for the headline stories of the day.
For the Hyundai story, they used the NYT for left-leaning, BBC for center, and Just the News for right-leaning. I find the site really helpful not only for seeing how the two sides are slanting coverage, but also to identify information that is more trustworthy when all three “sides” report basically the same thing. Looking across their three samples, the NYT focuses in on a few of those detained whose lawyers claim they were simply there for business meetings which did not violate the terms of their visas. So they are slanting toward “innoncent people arrested.” Just the News states that 450 illegal immigrants were arrested, presuming guilt. The BBC simply notes how many were detained and offers quotes from the special agent in charge, from Hyndai, and from Trump (who refers to those detained as illegal immigrants “some not the best of people”).
They also have a media bias chart, which rates NYT news as leans left, NYT opinion as left. Fox Business is rated leans right, Fox News as right. Among those classified as center are BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Forbes, Reuters, WSJ and a few others. The chart does not rate accuracy; the site does publish separate pieces evaluating specific instances of misinformation and misleading claims.
“The feature I rely on most is a news aggregator that selects coverage from left, center, and right media sources for the headline stories of the day.” Memeorandum? Because its wildly left-biased now. And that media bias chart is itself biased. Fox News is “Right” but the Times just “leans right”? The BBC is emphatically not “center.”
You seriously quote that long-lasting smear that Trump pronounced all Mexican immigrants as “not the best people”? By definition, illegal immigrants aren’t the best people…see, the best people follow laws both of their own nations and of other nations.
This was “not the best comment,” Holly.
Huh, not familiar with “memeorandum” (just looked it up, seems to be a different news aggregator, with rather a different mission).
Description of memeorandum: “memeorandum is an auto-generated summary of the stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. Unlike sister sites Techmeme and Mediagazer, it is not a human-edited news outlet, but rather a media-monitoring tool for sophisticated news consumers.”
Not sure why you mentioned this? Is this a site you are recommending INSTEAD of AllSides.com? Would appreciate a clarification here.
Re the center rating for the BBC:
AllSides.com notes that “center” is a range (scores less extreme than -1 and 1) and encourages readers to check the individual item to find its exact score. I did so for the BBC and the score is -.80 (within the range, but toward the left, matching your perception–and mine too). Of the ones I checked that fall in this center range, the two with the scores closest to zero are CSM (-.30) and WSJ (.33) which also pretty much matches my perception.
The “lean” range is from -3 to -1 (lean left) and from 1 to 3 (lean right), and NYT news falls in that range while NYT opinion is more extreme, so it falls in the LEFT range < -3. I checked various pubs in the LEFT and RIGHT ranges and The Nation is -5 and Breitbart is +6.
The sources of these ratings are Independent review, Editorial review, Community feedback (numbers vary but for the more well known sources there are tens of thousands of responses) and (for some, not all) Blind survey. AllSides also gives a confidence rating in their score. The results may not align with your perceptions, and their cutoff points might be different from ones that you would choose for the different parts of the ranges. However, I don't see an inherent problem with their methodology.
It DOES seem, based on my reading of EA so far, that you have particularly fraught feelings about the NYT, which you nevertheless appear to read regularly (?) This leads me to wonder if your own rating methodology might (for this particular publication) be somewhat colored (for whatever reason) by your strong emotions about this publication (are you originally from NYC perhaps?).
The “not the best people” is something Trump said when asked about Hyundai, quoted by the BBC article. There was no discussion of Mexican immigrants in that article. Re your assessment of "not the best comment" it does seem that I signposted this quote inadequately so that you thought maybe I was MYSELF inserting this quote from some another context (that would indeed be odd!!) rather than giving a snippet of what the BBC quoted.
Fuller quote from the BBC article quoting Trump:
President Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday: "They were illegal aliens and ICE was just doing its job."
Asked by a reporter about the reaction from Seoul, he said: "Well, we want to get along with other countries, and we want to have a great, stable workforce.
"And we have, as I understand it, a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people, but we had a lot of illegal aliens working there."
"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."
I did a little fact-checking to be sure the BBC was not misquoting Trump, and found an video clip from Fox News dated 5 September. The quote seems to be word-for-word accurate.
So I quoted the BBC, which took the approach of relying on quotes from multiple people, instead of the slant towards presumed innocence or presumed guilt shown by the NYT article and the Just the News article respectively. I actually think their approach accords well with a more close-to-center rating compared to the other two.
Pointing out these different approaches also served the purpose of my comment which was about assessing media bias, not about my personal views on the Hyundai raid.
I agree that it was not the best possible comment I (or anyone) could have made (now wondering for a moment what that would be — but maybe you'll choose one from the discussion to highlight!)
You do no the history of “not the best people,” right? I was not aware that Truump used it again: that was obvious trolling because of the reaction to the first time he said it.
The fact that “AllSides” claims the BBC is neutral and the Times just leans left should be enough to warn anyone against relying on it.
As with the Phillies Baseball grab issue, we need more info.
There are two plants being worked on, in different locations. One is an existing building being adapted/renovated, and the larger project is brand new construction. Some of the local reporting is that many of the Korean workers are “construction workers”.
Not that that it matters as to improper immigration/visa arrangements, but it could raise questions about why we would need to allow Korean construction workers if there are available Americans to employ. I can see the possible need for experienced Hyundai employees familiar with technical particulars regarding certain manufacturing systems, machinery installation, etc., but not pouring concrete, running wiring, and installing roof systems.
News story today is that South Korea has made a deal to have their nationals return to South Korea voluntarily. It makes a difference, since if they were to be deported there would be serious future consequences.
I presume they are going to try again and do it legally this time.