This article originally appeared in The Diplomat on September 18, 2025.
The September 4 immigration raid at Hyundai’s Georgia battery plant – which detained 475 workers, including hundreds of South Korean engineers on valid business visas – was a catastrophic own goal in the United States’ strategic competition with China. While labor law violations deserve serious enforcement, the current approach of militarized workplace raids actively undermines U.S. economic and national security interests by making it nearly impossible for even the closest U.S. allies to comply with a byzantine immigration system.
South Korean companies have committed $150 billion in U.S. investments, primarily in strategic sectors like semiconductors and electric vehicle batteries that are critical to competing with China. Yet the U.S. immigration system provides no expedited visa pathways for technical specialists from allied nations who are essential to technology transfer and manufacturing setup. Korean engineers attempting to install specialized battery manufacturing equipment – technology that the United States desperately needs to achieve energy independence – found themselves detained, some even shackled in humiliating fashion with chains around their waists, in what became the largest single-site immigration raid in ICE history.
This enforcement action demonstrates a fundamental misalignment between U.S. economic strategy and immigration policy. The CHIPS and Science Act explicitly recognized a dangerous dependence on Asian supply chains and set out to solve this by allocating $52 billion to reshoring semiconductor manufacturing. Simultaneously conducting military-style raids on the very facilities being built to achieve these strategic objectives defeats these purposes.
The 300 Korean nationals detained at Hyundai cannot even be accused of stealing American jobs – they were transferring proprietary technology and training American workers to operate cutting-edge battery production systems that don’t yet exist in the United States.