With Immigration and Customs Enforcement – aka ICE – now conducting new enforcement actions in North Carolina, including a high-profile workplace raid in Charlotte this week, a natural question is whether the massive Toyota battery plant at the Greensboro–Alamance megasite could ever see something similar.
The short answer, based on everything that happened after this year’s infamous Georgia raid, is no. Certainly not on that scale.
When ICE descended on the Korean-run Hyundai and LG electric vehicle battery project in Ellabell, Georgia in September and hauled roughly 300 Korean technicians into detention centers, the fallout was immediate and international. The political damage, the economic shockwaves and the intense diplomatic anger from Seoul changed how Washington handles immigration enforcement at major foreign-owned industrial projects.
That lesson was painful for Georgia, but it’s exactly why the Toyota project in Alamance County is far less likely to experience anything resembling the surprise mass roundup that paralyzed the Hyundai–LG site.
In Georgia, federal officials detained about 475 workers, and well over 300 of them were South Korean nationals. They weren’t line workers – they were specialists, installers and technicians brought in by Hyundai and LG to assemble the complicated systems that turn an empty building into a functioning battery factory. Federal officials said many were working on the wrong kind of visas or had overstayed earlier authorizations.
South Korea erupted. Top officials in Seoul condemned the treatment of the detained workers in the strongest possible terms. Labor Minister Kim Younghoon said the scenes looked like something from a war zone and argued that not even prisoners of war would be handled that way. Korean media broadcast images of handcuffed workers and busloads of detainees – and the outrage spread far beyond political circles.
President Lee Jae Myung warned that if this is how Korean workers are treated in the United States, Korean companies should think twice before investing billions of dollars in American factories.
That message landed in Washington with real force. South Korea has historically been one of the United States’ closest allies, a major trade partner and a country the US depends on in countless ways.
The White House scrambled to contain the damage. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau flew to Seoul to express deep regrets over how the raid was handled. US officials promised better coordination on future enforcement actions, emphasized the importance of foreign specialists and began discussions on visa fixes that would allow Korean experts to legally enter the country for temporary installation work.
A large number of the detained workers were ultimately released and placed on flights back to Korea. Korean leaders argued that the United States can’t invite companies to build billion-dollar factories, subsidize those projects with incentives, cut ceremonial ribbons and tout job growth – only to turn around and arrest the very people installing the equipment.
The Georgia raid also sent shockwaves through the economic-development world. State and local officials in North Carolina spent years working to land the Toyota battery plant, which is one of the largest manufacturing investments in state history. Billions of dollars are on the line. A mass enforcement action targeting foreign technicians could stall production tremendously.
And after Georgia, everyone knows it.
Even with the return of aggressive immigration enforcement and the new North Carolina raids, another Georgia-style surprise operation makes little sense. Not after the diplomatic crisis. Not after the public relations disaster. And not when the federal government is trying to reassure allies that American factories are safe places to invest.
That doesn’t mean a handful of workers at the Toyota site won’t be arrested or removed if they are here on the wrong visas. With ICE back in the field in this state, including the raids in Charlotte, there’s no doubt agents are willing to conduct targeted actions.
But a mass sweep with hundreds of arrests is far less likely. The Georgia raid essentially forced federal, state and local officials to acknowledge that economic development and immigration enforcement can’t operate in separate silos anymore. If any issues arise at the megasite in Alamance County, the far more likely scenario is quiet coordination, behind-the-scenes negotiations, fixes to visa categories and discreet removals of individuals – rather than anything resembling the buses and zip ties that shocked South Korea and rattled Georgia’s economy.
North Carolina leaders who spent years bringing Toyota to the megasite don’t want to see the project stalled. Apparently, neither now does Washington, which is still trying to repair the diplomatic and economic damage from what happened in Georgia.
