South Korea said on Monday that it wanted hundreds of its citizens, who were arrested last week during a large American immigration raid in a car battery project and should soon be returned home, to be authorized to reintegrate the United States.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cho Hyun, soars Washington on Monday evening and will meet the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his trip to solve the problem. Cho also said that he would ask for the American visa system for Korean workers to be rationalized in the future.
About 300 South Koreans were among 475 arrested Thursday on the site of a $ 4.3 billion project by Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solution to build batteries for electric cars. It was the largest operation to apply a single site in the history of survey operations of the Ministry of Internal Security.
The RAID sent shock waves across South Korea, a great American ally, who tried to finalize an American trade agreement agreed at the end of July. He came only 10 days after the new president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, met US President Donald Trump in Washington and the two promised closer business ties.
In addition to potentially effilossed bilateral links, development highlighted the number of foreign companies in the United States have struggled to find qualified American workers.
Seoul said on Sunday that discussions to organize the liberation of workers, who were mainly employed by subcontractors, were widely concluded. A plan is underway to bring them home on an chartered plane this week under what a South Korean Foreign Affairs manager said it would be a “voluntary departure”.
“From the start, we negotiated with the premise that there should not be any personal disadvantage (to the workers detained),” Cho told a parliamentary audience on Monday.
Details on how workers may have violated immigration rules have not been published by authorities or businesses, but South Korean legislators said on Monday that some may have exceeded the limits of a 90-day visa derogation program or a temporary B-1 commercial visa.
The Minister of Finance of South Korea, Koo Yun-Cheol, said on Monday that he had heard that some experts had traveled from South Korea to help a trial of the factory, which was to start production in October.
“You have to get a visa to try a try, but it is very difficult to get an official visa. The time was exhausted, and I think the experts went to the United States,” he said.
Building in South Korea
Seoul expressed his misfortune as for the arrests and the public release of sequences showing the operation which involved armored vehicles and the sequence of workers.
Trump, who accelerated deportations nationally while his administration reprimands illegal immigrants, said last week that he had not been aware of the raid. He called those detained by “illegal extraterrestrials”.
On Sunday, he called for foreign companies to invest in the United States to “respect the immigration laws of our country”, but seemed more conciliatory.
“Your investments are welcome, and we encourage you to legally bring your very intelligent people, with large technical talents, to build world class products, and we will make you quickly and legally possible for you to do so,” he said on Truth Social.
Hyundai Motor is one of the largest foreign investors in the United States and is one of the South Korean companies participating in a commitment of $ 150 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States, which is addressed to a fund of $ 350 billion that the South Korean government has promised separately.
A spokesperson for the automaker said that some staff were invited to suspend non-essential trips to the United States.
LGS has also suspended most of the staff’s business trips to the United States and will remember employees based in South Korea now in the country.
The battery manufacturer said last week that he was cooperating with the American authorities and had paused for construction work on the factory.
A spokesperson for Hyundai Motor said that last week, none of the detained persons was employed directly by the car manufacturer and that the production of electric vehicles on the sprawling site was not affected.
The companies refused other comments on Monday.
