SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean president said Thursday that South Korean companies are likely to hesitate to maintain or invest in the US if the US fails Improve that visa system For Korean workers.
During his 100-day inauguration press conference, Lee called for improvements to the US visa system as he spoke about the September 4th immigration attack in Georgia. 300 Korean workers At a battery factory under construction in a vast car factory in Hyundai, Georgia.
Lee said that the Korean workers will be on a charter plane home on Friday after negotiations with the US.
The massive recap of Georgia and the release of a video of US authorities showing some workers being chained and taken away has sparked a widespread sense of anger and betrayal in South Korea. The attack comes less than two weeks after the summit between President Donald Trump and Lee, and just weeks after the country reached a July agreement in which South Korea escaped South Korea’s highest tariffs, but only after Seoul pledged $350 billion in US investment.
Both Lee’s liberal Democrats and conservative opposition lawmakers have accused detention of an outrageous burden, comparing South Korea’s biggest newspapers to the raids with avid “rabbit hunt” to achieve the White House goal of arresting 3,000 people a day.
During a press conference, Lee said South Korean and US officials are discussing the possibility of improving the US visa system, adding that the current system “can’t help Korean companies to hesitate a lot” about making direct investments in the US.
Lee: “These are not long-term workers.”
US officials said some of the detained workers illegally crossed the US border, while others legally entered the country, but either expired their visas or entered the visa exemption that barred them from working.
However, South Korean experts and officials said Washington has not yet acted on Seoul’s long-standing demand to ensure a visa system to accommodate skilled Korean workers, but is pushing South Korea to expand its industrial investment in the US
Korean companies rely on short-term visitor visas or electronic systems for travel permits to dispatch workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks.
Lee said whether the US has established a visa system that allows Korean companies to send skilled workers to industrial sites will have a “significant impact” on future Korean investment in the US.
“These aren’t like long-term workers. If you build a facility or install equipment in a factory, you need technicians, but the US doesn’t have that workforce, but people don’t issue visas to stay and do their jobs,” he said.
“If that’s not possible, establishing a local facility in the US will result in serious disadvantage or be extremely difficult for us. They will wonder if we should do that,” added Lee.
Lee said the attack showed “cultural differences” between the two countries in how to deal with immigration issues.
“In Korea, we see Americans taking tourist visas and teaching English at private cram schools. They do that all the time. We don’t think about it much.
“But the US clearly doesn’t see things that way. On top of that, U.S. immigration authorities have pledged to strictly ban illegal immigration and employment, and to deport them in a variety of offensive ways, and our people just happened to be caught up in such cases,” he added.
South Korea, US agrees to working group to resolve visa issues
After a meeting with Washington Secretary of State Marco Rubio, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that he agreed to allow workers detained in Georgia to finish work on the ground later. He added that he agreed to establish a joint working group for discussion to create new visa categories to facilitate the creation of Korean companies’ staff in the US.
Before departing for the US on Monday, Cho told lawmakers that if the visa issue is not resolved, more South American workers could be vulnerable to future crackdowns, but Seoul still has no estimates of how many people are at risk.
The Georgia battery factory is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that Korean companies are currently building in the US. It includes other battery plants in Georgia and several other states, semiconductor plants in Texas, and shipbuilding projects in Philadelphia.
Min Jong-hoon, a professor at South Korea’s National Academy of Diplomacy, said it is primarily up to the United States, either through law or by taking administrative measures to expand short-term work visas for training purposes.
He said it was wrong to underestimate the rage of South Korean citizens about Lee’s government’s detention that came after he pledged to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into US industrial investments against the backdrop of corrupt employment markets at home.
Without an update on US visa policies, Min said: “Korean businesses will no longer be able to send workers to the US, causing inevitable delays in expanding facilities and other production activities, and the harm will return to the US economy.”
