I find it amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp here.

“Oh, maybe they got mixed up with the visa because language”. No they did not.

“Oh, maybe it’s really difficult to find local talent”. No it isn’t. Not for them.

There are many advantages for them to illegally fly in a whole Workforce. That is why they did it.

“

What makes you confident they were acting illegally? Here's a US embassy:

> A B-1 visa may be granted to specialized workers going to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside of the United States, or to train U.S. workers to perform such services.

https://es.usembassy.gov/visas/commercial-industrial-workers...

Many of those detained have been reported to be employed by Hyundai's equipment vendors. That would be consistent with activities of this nature.

It's probably a coin flip whether a different DHS staffer would agree, though. Interpretation of these rules has always been notoriously inconsistent, and probably explains the problem here.

It’s more exasperation at how ridiculous this process is, treating foreign labor like dangerous criminals by default.

Around 90% of foreigner contractors that come to the USA to set up a factory or do maintenance on a factory are here under weird visa arrangements that the ICE would be able to poke holes in regardless. The right visa doesn’t exist, or impossible to obtain, so he Germans/swiss/japanese/koreans/taiwanese/and Chinese come here on visa waiver or simple B1 visas, or even tourist visas, to get the job the they need done out the way quickly (usually a few days or a week of work). The American visa system for short term work is simply messed up, and it’s much easier to get a visa to do the same thing in China than in the USA (surprise, guess where people decided to set up their factories?). America was really just wink/nudge before (we want you to setup a factory here! But no, we can’t really make the visa situation work out…you know what to do…), but now ICE needs to make their quotas and this is just an easy target for them.

The USA is just a bad place for foreign companies to setup factories: you need an army of immigration lawyers to do it, and be willing spending a lot of time waiting to get the “proper visas” for key personnel. South Korea’s interest in getting those engineers back isn’t just purely empathy based, there are probably only a handful of engineers in Korea that can do what they do (good luck getting that factory going before your term is out, Mr. Trump).

I'm expecting this to be one of those American news stories where the public reaction is entirely dependent on the current party in power, right?

It feels weird for HN to be going to bat for a company abusing labor laws, am I missing something here?

I haven't been following the story closely, but it is clear the Korean workers broke visa rules? Or do they just look a bit foreign and talk funny?

Even before Trump there were plenty of stories where ICE clearly didn't know their own country's visa rules.

> amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp

At some level stories are told in a way in which there is a good-guy and a bad-guy and the megacorp drew the good-guy straw this time. It was just a few years ago a Hyundai owned subsidiary was caught in the US employing underage people from Guatemala [0].

0. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...

People don't want to think about details, they just want to continue to hate on the other team and Hyuandi (and their contractors) doing something that would be illegal in just about every country on earth could interfere with that goal.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a common underpinning of bad faith arguments.

It has been really disheartening seeing a generation of, presumably, leftists abandon decades old demands and movements from local worker protections, global environmental causes, or democratic oversight over ivy league institutes by parroting the same bad arguments their opposition did to them over these decades.

As long as I have been alive, very progressive leftists always argued that ivy league institutions need admission reform. They receive billions from our tax dollars, yet their admission policies have always favored the already wealthy and powerful (the rich, alumnus, donors, "elite"). They only pay lip service to "low income families" while straddling most middle class students in insane levels of debt and refuse to publish admission rates. Progressives have always argued that these organizations cannot exist without public (tax payers) funding and as a result should have democratic oversight and should be required to publish their admission rates. We should be withholding that funding or using it as a forcing function for them to do so. The opposition have always argued (in bad faith) to "leave them alone. Education should be independent and they should do whatever they want". Now that a right-wing administration actually put pressure on them (for reasons I disagree with), every "liberal" I know just jumps on the simplest of arguments that "They should be independent. There shouldn't be any oversight required or expected on these educational institutes. That's illegal.". Whats worst is trying to explain how this is a bad argument just gets you yelled at because you must be a "both sides are the same"-person or a secretly republican or "but we're not talking about admission here. We need to unit against the enemy with one argument then we'll figure it out later once education is not under attack" type BS arguments.

Same for tariffs and global trade rules and all the global environmental destruction, human rights violations, and local economy mayhem they caused. The argument isn't that these laws need to be tightened and reconsidered to reduce our dependency on slave labor or funding massive environmental polluters or not incentivizing the biggest consumer base on the plant to consider the diesel emissions cost of shipping massive contains full of plastic trinkets across the pacific only for 99% of them to end up in a landfill. Suddenly the argument from progressives and the left are all about the economy. The cost of TEMU for the poor American consumer and how this is the world we live in. There is nothing we can or should do to change it.