September 12, 2025
SEOUL – Last week’s immigration raid by US authorities at the construction site of Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solution’s joint battery venture HL-GA in Georgia set off alarms for Korean companies already investing billions of dollars to establish manufacturing footholds in America.
Although 316 Korean nationals were in the process of being released from detention to come back home on a chartered flight on Friday, the aftermath of the unprecedented mass arrests has sent shock waves through not only affected companies, but also through the Korean government and public.
Q. Who were the Koreans detained?
Of the 475 total detainees from the construction site, there were 317 Koreans, one of whom has opted not to return immediately to Korea. They included 47 LG Energy Solution employees and workers from Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solutions’ partner companies, as well as subcontractors for Hyundai Engineering.
The detained workers were engineering and equipment installment experts who were trained to work on highly advanced tasks such as beginning the operation of a battery manufacturing plant for electric vehicles.
Q. Have Korean companies faced US visa trouble before?
The incident was the largest single-site immigration enforcement execution in US history, leading to the arrest and detention of 475 people in total. However, it was not the first time US authorities clashed with Korean firms over visa issues.
During the prior Joe Biden administration, which encouraged investment worth tens of billions of dollars from Korean battery giants, one firm faced scrutiny regarding the validity of its short-term workers’ visas as it set up a production line for a joint venture plant with a US automaker.
“Our firm encountered visa-related friction with the previous US administration, although not as severe as the recent Hyundai-LG incident,” a source familiar with the matter told The Korea Herald on condition of anonymity.
“We had negotiated with the US Embassy (in Korea) to draw up a contract, ensuring that Korean workers could perform production line setup tasks under B-1 and B-2 visas.”
Q. What visas were they on?
Some detainees held B-1 or B-2 visas, which should allow them to come to the US to install, service or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside the US or to train US workers to perform such services. However, others entered under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, system, which permits foreigners to enter the US for tourism, business or transit for a maximum of 90 days.
While the B-2 visa mainly covers tourism, it also permits short-term business engagement such as attending conferences or meetings.
Although working temporarily in the US on B-1 and B-2 visas was viewed with some skepticism during the Biden era, the US Embassy showed leniency toward Korean companies looking to expedite facility construction, backed by a commitment to create thousands of local jobs.
However, the tide shifted sharply in the second half of last year and grew even more stringent after Trump won the 2024 US presidential election.
Q. Why not use E-2 work visas?
According to immigration attorneys, many partner firms involved in Hyundai and LG’s Georgia battery plant and other new US projects by Korean companies made significant efforts to obtain E-2 visas, but ultimately failed. As a result, they resorted to deploying workers on B-1 and B-2 visas to meet tight construction deadlines.
“We processed many E-2 visas, and until the first half of 2024, approvals were generally successful, with an approval rate exceeding 95 percent. But since the second half of 2024, almost all applications — except for 1 or 2 in every 10 — have been denied. This change is closely linked to a shift in policy at the US Embassy,” said Son Jeong-kueon, lead attorney at US Immigration Corp., a Seoul-based law firm specializing in handling US visa processing and immigration.
Unlike B visas, which prohibit employment in the US, the E-2 visa — intended for investors in US businesses — allows longer stays of up to five years and includes a work permit that lets the visa holder actively engage in the invested business.
Data from the US State Department shows that the number of E-2 visas issued to Korean nationals has showed a significant decline, dropping from more than 600 in the early months of 2024 to below 400 by May this year.
According to Son, the US Embassy has specifically restricted E visas for “technological engineers” employed by subcontractors working for major Korean companies on new facilities under construction in the region.
“The embassy may have reduced E-2 permits for these subcontractors due to their inexperience with US business practices, including tax filings and compliance, resulting in poor E-2 visa management,” he said. “Although E-2 visa holders must be paid by their US entities, many could have received salaries from Korea, violating the visa requirements.”
Q. Couldn’t US workers do the job?
According to Korean companies, the initial involvement of Korean workers from battery manufacturers and their subcontractors is necessary in order to build high-quality production lines like those in Korean facilities within the short window of time that US President Donald Trump had provided them.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act sets deadlines for battery plants to qualify for tax credits: construction must start by July 4, 2026, or if starting after that, the plant must be in service by Dec. 31, 2027.
“Sourcing US workers to handle the entire line setup phase would be unreasonable because relying on a less-skilled local workforce risks failing to meet the quality standards of LG Energy Solution and other Korean companies. There may also be a lack of essential equipment suppliers in the US battery sector,” said an industry official.
“Is this affecting American hiring? No. Local workers are extensively involved in all other construction tasks. Successfully building a quality joint venture battery plant is key to long-term local employment, and proper setup is critical to ensuring stable, ongoing jobs.”
Q. What does this mean for plant construction?
Construction at the HL-GA plant has stopped.
There is no timeline on when the construction work will resume. According to McKinsey & Co., a battery manufacturing plant capable of producing 50 gigawatt-hours of batteries per year risks losing $4 million a day if it stops production.
The Hyundai-LG battery joint venture represents a $4.3 billion investment, with plans to produce 30 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually, enough to power about 300,000 electric vehicles. By 2031, the project is expected to create roughly 8,500 new jobs.
Combined with Hyundai Motor Group America’s nearby EV plant, which began operations late last year, the total investment in Georgia comes to about $7.6 billion, generating an estimated 40,000 direct and indirect jobs. This makes it one of the largest economic development projects in Georgia’s history.
Q. Will Korea’s MASGA shipbuilding project be hit too?
Korea’s initiative to support the revival of the US shipbuilding industry, dubbed “Make American Shipbuilding Great Again,” is less likely to be impacted by the immigration raid frenzy, according to industry sources.
For instance, Hanwha Philly Shipyard was an acquisition of an existing shipyard, making it a different story from building a plant from the ground up. As dispatches to overseas shipyards mostly cover production and technological expertise, it does not require so many personnel.
Q. Are other foreign firms facing the same problem?
Japan and European countries also face inadequate work visa quotas for the US, but have not been challenged officially with similar visa problems.
Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and other major automakers are primarily focusing on expanding and upgrading their existing US plants rather than building numerous brand new, multibillion-dollar facilities.
According to an Associated Press report on Tuesday, Japanese and German automakers, which established US factories in the 1980s and ’90s, respectively, carried out similar practices as Korean companies by sending workers from their homeland to the US to set up operations and then train local workers, saving time and reducing costs during their factory launches.
Q. Can the visa mess be fixed soon?
Seoul and Washington agreed to set up a working group to discuss the establishment of a new visa type to enable Korean expert workers to enter the US. According to Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US gave assurances that the detained personnel will not face penalties if they try to come to the US to work in the future.
Meanwhile, US-invested Korean firms that were not directly impacted by the raid are closely monitoring the fallout of the incident and exercising greater caution when their workers have to visit the US for business.
Kim Pil-su, an automotive engineering professor at Daelim University, suggested that the US should allow specialized work visas for Korea similar to those offered to Singapore and Chile, which allow qualified personnel to work in specialty occupations in the US under annual visa caps of 5,400 for Singapore and 1,400 for Chile.
“There must be greater fidelity between large Korean conglomerates and their vendors and subcontractors for immigration compliance across multitiered construction and commissioning networks,” said Arius Derr, director of communications at the Korea Economic Institute of America in Washington.
“Congress should create a country-specific, high-skill channel for Korean nationals that is similar to the model used with other partners with which the United States has a free trade agreement.”
Adding that a predictable, dedicated-cap channel for time-bound technical deployments would reduce pressure on Korean firms and align with the rapid timelines for foreign direct investments in the US, Derr also pointed out that the Trump administration should reconsider whether the deterrent effects of broadcasting such raids outweigh the negative public sentiment the footage generates in a country like Korea.
“If Washington wants the facilities, the jobs and the strategic insulation that comes with Korean (foreign direct investments), it will need to align entry and exit mechanics with the industrial strategy it has chosen,” said Derr.