The comments come after last week's immigration raid at a battery plant run by two South Korean firms in the US.
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South Korea’s president said on Thursday that South Korean companies will likely hesitate to maintain or make direct investments in the United States if the US fails to improve its visa system for Korean workers.
In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee called for improvements in the US visa system as he spoke about the 4 September immigration raid in Georgia that resulted in the arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory under construction at Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant in Georgia.
Lee said the Korean workers are set to be brought home on Friday aboard a charter plane following negotiations with the US.
The massive roundup in Georgia, and US authorities’ release of video showing some workers being chained and taken away, sparked widespread anger and a sense of betrayal in South Korea.
The raid came less than two weeks after a summit between President Donald Trump and Lee, and just weeks after the countries reached a July agreement that spared South Korea from the Trump administration’s highest tariffs, but only after Seoul pledged $350 billion (€300bn) in new US investments.
Lawmakers from both Lee’s liberal Democratic Party and the conservative opposition decried the detentions as outrageous and heavy-handed, while South Korea’s biggest newspaper compared the raid to a “rabbit hunt” executed by US immigration authorities in a zeal to meet an alleged White House goal of 3,000 arrests a day.
During the news conference, Lee said South Korean and US officials are discussing a possible improvement to the US visa system, adding that under the current system South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making direct investments in the US.
Lee: ‘It’s not like these are long-term workers'
US authorities said some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the US border, while others entered legally but had expired visas or entered on visa waivers that prohibited them from working.
But South Korean experts and officials said Washington had yet to act on Seoul’s longstanding demand to ensure a visa system to accommodate skilled Korean workers, though it has been pressing South Korea to expand industrial investments in the US.
South Korean companies have been relying on short-term visitor visas or Electronic System for Travel Authorization to send workers to the US to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.
Lee said that whether the US establishes a visa system allowing South Korean companies to send skilled workers to industrial sites will have a “major impact” on future South Korean investments in the US.
“It’s not like these are long-term workers. When you build a facility or install equipment at a plant, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work,” he said.
“If that’s not possible, then establishing a local facility in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies. They will wonder whether they should even do it," Lee added.
Lee said the raid showed a “cultural difference” between the two countries in how they handle immigration issues.
“In South Korea, we see Americans coming on tourist visas to teach English at private cram schools — they do it all the time, and we don’t think much of it, it’s just something you accept,” Lee said.
“But the United States clearly doesn’t see things that way. On top of that, US immigration authorities pledge to strictly forbid illegal immigration and employment and carry out deportations in various aggressive ways, and our people happened to be caught in one of those cases,” he added.
South Korea, US agree on working group to settle visa issues
Following a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said on Wednesday that US officials have agreed to allow the workers detained in Georgia to later return to finish their work at the site. He added that the countries agreed to set up a joint working group for discussions on creating a new visa category to make it easier for South Korean companies to send their staff to work in the United States.
Before leaving for the US on Monday, Cho told lawmakers that more South Korean workers in the US could be vulnerable to future crackdowns if the visa issue isn’t resolved, but said Seoul does not yet have an estimate of how many might be at risk.
The Georgia battery plant is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that South Korean companies are currently building in the United States. They include other battery factories in Georgia and several other states, a semiconductor plant in Texas, and a shipbuilding project in Philadelphia, a sector Trump has frequently highlighted in relation to South Korea.
Min Jeonghun, a professor at South Korea’s National Diplomatic Academy, said it’s chiefly up to the United States to resolve the issue, either through legislation or by taking administrative steps to expand short-term work visas for training purposes.
He said it would be a mistake to underestimate the public anger in South Korea over the detentions in Georgia, which came after Lee’s government pledged to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into US industrial investments against the backdrop of a decaying job market at home.
Without an update in US visa policies, Min said, “Korean companies will no longer be able to send their workers to the United States, causing inevitable delays in the expansion of facilities and other production activities, and the harm will boomerang back to the US economy."
