Having working in US immigration, most reporting on immigration issues leaves a lot to be desired.
Because of the poor reporting, it's not possible to say for sure what happened, but it sounds like Hyundai/LG/subcontractors brought in hundreds of South Koreans on B visas and had them engaging in productive work. That's not what B visas are for. B visas are for meetings, sales, and maybe some light training/setup/integration. When the CEO talks about needing specialized, skilled workers, that's a strong suggestion these workers should have been on L visas.
Unfortunately the same article doesn't even mention the L visa, and cites an immigration lawyer who complains about the difficulty of getting H-1B visas. But L visas are not capped like H-1Bs. In India we approved thousands of L visas specifically for skilled workers to assist with bringing plants/equipment online.
In short, the B visa is not a work visa. Most countries worldwide are quite restrictive about the conditions surrounding work visas, and people who violate the conditions of their visa shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences. Having a valid visa but violating its conditions means you are violating immigration law.
Corporate immigration departments can and do cut corners and may have thought they would save money and time by sending foreign workers on B visas (which they might have already had) or on the visa waiver program. L visa holders don't even have to get paid US-level wages, so one take on the visa type is that it is already a way for companies to undercut US labor.
> and maybe some light training/setup/integration.
What do you mean by "maybe" or "light"? That's an explicitly permitted activity:
> 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.
Modern factories are filled with machines the size of buildings, making that installation sometimes hard to distinguish from the forbidden "construction". It's possible that some of those Koreans were unequivocally on the bad side of the line, but I see zero possibility that the agents could have meaningfully assessed that in the time between beginning the raid and taking the workers away in shackles.
I feel like installing equipment is widely considered to be an illegitimate use of B-1 visas, despite this explicit guidance. I don't understand why. I see from your comment history that you were a US diplomat. Is the internal guidance you received different from what's published?
"If the contract of sale specifically requires the seller to provide these services or training,
and you possess specialized knowledge essential to the seller's contractual obligation to perform the services or training it may be permissible for you to perform these services. In addition, the machinery or equipment must have been manufactured at a location outside of the United States and you may not receive compensation from a U.S. source."
Given how vague the reporting has been, we don't know basic facts like what the workers were doing, what the agents saw, what types of visas they were on, etc.
This PBS article quotes a local labor union leader who claims "unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/attorney-says-detained-k...
Obivously the person quoted has an agenda and didn't actually witness those activities - so we just don't know. That being said, if that description is accurate, in general that kind of activity would not be appropriate on a B-1 visa and wouldn't qualify for an L visa.
But again, it depends on the details. Maybe the cement base is some special blend for certain equipment, maybe "erecting steel" involves highly specialized welding techniques, maybe this pipe fitting involves specialized high-pressure ratings outside the norm.
When I was a diplomat, our internal guidance (at least, what I was privy to) was never different from public information, just more detailed.
I'd be suprised if the corporate immigration departments of Hyundai or LG messed up this badly. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if some no-name subcontractor decided to play fast and loose with the visa rules to win a contract with a low bid.
> But I wouldn't at all be surprised if some no-name subcontractor decided to play fast and loose with the visa rules to win a contract with a low bid.
I feel like "subcontractor" here could mean "staffing agency used by Hyundai to shed liability", but could also mean "equipment vendor". The latter seems much less likely to be noncompliant, since they get the special benefit of the policy we're discussing and since customer-site labor is a smaller share of their cost (since their primary business is building the machines in Korea).
A lawyer for some equipment vendor staff seems to be alleging that their B-1 applications had been drafted specifically to comply with this policy:
> Kuck said letters included with visa applications that he reviewed spelled out the scope of the work and appeared to meet requirements.
> "It was more detailed than some of the letters that I've written for clients in similar situations," he said. "The vast majority of folks, including the ones I represent, should never have been detained."
I guess it's likely that at least one person detained was unlawfully present, and at least one person detained was lawfully present. The actual ratio is still unknown, but the reputational damage is done--"we took you away in chains, imprisoned you for a week, and deported you, but that's okay because a different worker at your site was noncompliant" is not a great message.
I don't find the claims made by an immigration lawyer representing the workers to be particularly persuasive, just like I don't find the claims made by the local union rep about what they "believe" the workers were doing to be persuasive.
People and companies can and do write whatever they want in letters submitted with visa applications. That has no bearing 1) on what you are actually allowed to do given a certain visa type, and 2) what the worker actually ends up doing.
In other words, the visa applications may very well have been valid and approved on that basis, but the applicants might have been engaging in other activities that were not permissible. This is quite common - people will say "I want to go to Disneyworld" when they actually intend to overstay their visa, or "I want to visit family" when they actually intend to work as a nanny or cook for a few months, then return home.
I'm not saying this raid was conducted properly or that all the arrests were justified, but I do think the reporting on it has been almost negligent. In contrast, here is an old article written by an immigration lawyer discussing the complexities of the B-1 business visa: https://blog.cyrusmehta.com/2016/05/the-b-1-visa-trap-for-th...
People and companies can and do write whatever they want in letters submitted with visa applications. That has no bearing 1) on what you are actually allowed to do
Is it really as kafkaesque as you state? You have to enumerate your planned activities in order to get a visa, but receiving said visa is in no way an affirmation that the enumerated activities are legal to perform? That sounds completely dysfunctional to me.
It is the traveler's responsibility to know what activities are permissible given their visa, and to only engage in those activities. That's no different from everyone's general responsibility to abide by the law.
A US visa is simply permission to present yourself at a port of entry for admission, at which time you may questioned further by border control, and in rare cases denied entry.
Most B visas are valid for multiple entries over 10 years. The fact that you wrote a letter and brought it to your original visa interview (which may have been years ago, and likely wasn't even looked at by the officer, who in a busy consulate has less than 2 minutes to complete your interview) does not mean the US government has affirmatively granted you permisison to do everything on that letter.
I think getting taken away in chains and imprisoned is significantly worse than getting denied entry? I understand you're not saying the raid was conducted properly, but you're consistently downplaying the part that did the damage.
Inconsistent policy resulting in unpredictable denial of entry is bad, but a typical working professional may tolerate that risk. Inconsistent policy resulting in arrest at some random point during your stay followed by indefinite detention (how long would that have lasted without the high-level diplomatic response?) is much worse.
> Is the internal guidance you received different from what's published?
Probably, I doubt anyone in the US government has a consistent view of what immigration laws are _and_ how they're actually enforced. Whole thing feels like a giant slapdash of things thrown together and assessed in whatever way feels right that day.
Here's a fun one: do people born in Hong Kong count as being born in China for green card purposes? Used to be no, then Trump 1 said "yes" with an executive order, then as best I can tell no one in government really enforced that, then immigration lawyers tell me they're counted as rest of world instead of China, and now? Who the hell knows, whoever gets your case probably makes up what they feel is the law.
So the US government does a dog and pony show of ASMR chaining and perp walking Korean engineers constructing a factory vital to our economy and national security?
And this after the admin starts a tariff war against treaty allies for not building factories in the US? Very schizo.
This whole situation is complete insanity and is completely the fault of this administration and the maga movement.
It’s also the fault of the last administration, because when you bend the rules and your reign ends, you have no control over how the next regime is going to enforce the law as it stands. I do not disagree this is insanity, but this is the result of kicking the can on immigration issues for almost two decades. Congress must do its job, but refuses to. Is it not reasonable to both incentivize domestic manufacturing investment while also adhering to immigration visa regulations?
Hyundai has done something similar with children refugees from Central America previously in 2022.
The reporting is light on what these workers are actually doing. Real construction work like pouring concrete is certainly unacceptable on a B visa. But as you have said B visas are fine for light training/setup/integration. It seems to me that these people are actually just setting up the plant by configuring new machinery.
Similarly, highly skilled semi-conductor researchers are not h1b. Semi-conductor workers of various sorts might be, though I note they are trying to make a visa specific the semiconductor industry, but high level researchers who design new chips are not restrained to h1b. I was downvoted for noting this fact recently.
People don’t want honest discussion on immigration. It’s not a good faith debate, rather lies and disinformation., and the populace knows that by now.
If you want a real answer, a big part of it has to do with consular non-reviewability. Basically, there is far less ability for an applicant to make legal challenges to visa decisions made by a US visa officer outside the US.
Another reason is, what happens if you apply for a renewal or different visa type while you're in the US, and your visa is denied? Now we're relying on you to leave the country, whereas if you already had to leave the country to apply and you're denied, you're not still in the US.
There actually was a pilot program for domestic revalidation of H-1Bs. Applicants liked it (no need for a trip outside the US), and those of us working in India liked it (less workload for us). However I doubt this administration will support expansion.
In my experience most renewing H-1Bs planned their visa interviews (or often "dropbox" cases where they didn't even need to come in person) to coincide during a few weeks trip home. They were not generally coming to India, then applying and waiting several months.
The cases that take months are those with some problem - missing some documentation, evidence of petitioner fraud, national security concerns with the applicant, etc. And yes, in those cases people (and sometimes their families) end up getting "stuck" outside the US, kids miss the start of the school year, people can't get back to their apartments and houses and pets. It sucks, but we have vetting for good reasons.
Their point was that this change applies to non-immigrant visas (which in theory are only issued to people who do not intend to immigrate to the US), not immigrant visas.
Year or longer waits for B visas are common in India. Part of the problem is the statutory requirement that first-time applicants need an in-person interview. When I worked in a US consulate in India, we would have loved to have lowered the age at which we could waive interviews from 80 to 70 or even 65, but that would have required action in DC. We also would have loved to have had more staff, but were limited by the amount of diplomatic positions the Indian government would approve.
There's no staff in Haiti to process visas at all, the embassy is on ordered depature. There are staff in Nassau, including people trained in Haitian Creole, and there are many Haitian applicants who apply for visas in Nassau. Where do you think the US should interview Haitian applicants? Also, if someone from Haiti has the resources to travel to the US, they have the resources to travel to Nassau for a visa interview.
It's common for countries to require you to apply from your country of nationality or residence, and to prove lawful residence if you're not a national of the country you're applying in. I'm in the middle of a French visa application for my daughter right now, and she must apply in the U.S. where she's a citizen.
I’m not an expert at this, but is it true that the US is very unique in requiring interviews for all tourist visas and for almost every visa?
I’m American and every visa I’ve had to apply for did not require my physical presence at the embassy and I used a third-party processing service to get everything done.
Therefore, while I would need to apply to these countries from their US embassy because my physical presence was not required, I would generally not need to return to the United States to obtain their visa?
And this aspect of a US visa does make it significantly harder even though the application policy is similar to other countries?
I'm not aware of any other country besides the US that has a blanket policy of requiring at least one interview in almost all cases.
That said, back in the 2000s I had to apply in person at the French embassy for a student visa, in in the 2010s I had to apply in person at a Chilean consulate for a special visa.
Many countries have outsourced the bulk of their processing to contractors like VFS or TLS these days. But also, our experience as Americans is not representative as we generally have fewer visas we need to bother obtaining, and face less scrutiny when doing so.
I'm not sure if the US interview requirement makes it "harder" to get a US visa - it may be that getting a US visa is just harder than getting another country's visa, which might still be true even if we didn't interview people. The big thing that makes getting non-immigrant visas to the US difficult for many people is that, unless shown otherwise, US immigration law assumes you are an immigrant.
I was a US diplomat in India for 2 years and processed tens of thousands of visas. While this change will cause some inconvenience for, e.g., current H-1B visa holders from India who can no longer travel to Canada or Mexio to apply for new visas, in general it makes a lot of sense. I worked at the number one H-1B processing post worldwide. Our post had the expertise to quickly evaluate applications and approve the clearly legitimate ones while scrutinizing the potentially fraudulent ones. We tracked fraud patterns and kept tabs on known-bad petitioners. We could visit petitioner locations on the ground in India. This expertise doesn't exist in Canada or Mexico. Staff at those embassies and consulates would have to consult with us in India, or simply make uninformed decisions. Note also that bona fide residents of a country can still apply in their country of residence.
For a few weeks in India, we had a string of third-country nationals (I won't say which, but it's not hard to find) apply for foreign medical graduate visas. We weren't familiar with the context in country they were coming from. They seemed to be generally good quality applicants and many were approved. It turned out that there was a cheating scandal in that third country, an entire batch of test results had been invalidated, and the embassy located there was refusing their visas, so a few applied in India and were approved, then word got out and more came. We eventually wised up. However, there was really no good reason for these applicants to be travelling from their home country to India for a visa appointment even under normal circumstances (India isn't exactly known for having short visa wait times).
People make two big assumptions about immigration in my experience
1) They think the system should be extremely simple
2) They assume everyone involved is being honest
When the reality is
1) Many people involved are lying to claim immigration benefits they have no right to
2) The system needs to have a level of complexity and difficulty to prevent these people from accessing these benefits
I don't doubt you Stevie, but I wonder if you could share any sources, proofs of data regarding your remark #1 about people lying.
I believe it is happens and I assume there might be a number of drivers for it, but I wonder how big of a problem is it in reality and how much has it been abused.
For example, friends told me the scheme in the UK might be too prone for fraud on the other hand most of the anti immigration topics do not seem to ask it to be fixed but rather stopped.
What is your opinion on that? Do you think immigration is a big source of corruption problem? And how big is it relative to other problems?
My question comes from a point that I question if this is a populist/nationalist act to create a common enemy, literally the Enemy from 1984, rather than actually addressing the root cause of the problems.
I am referring to the UK mostly because I have many friends living and working in the UK and some are British and some others are not.
And it seems weird to me that tackling such issues ( eg of the asylum seekers and the illegal immigration) as root causes of the current economic situation.
Is it going after those folks really make a change on the prospects of the economy or is it addressing emotional needs to feel that someone is in control and that someone will take care of you because they fight the "enemy"?
For example, one of my British folks pointed out, and I did not validate myself, that the cost per asylum seeker is of £40 a week and there about 110.000 people in that situation which would make an expenditure of 4M per week or 200M per year. Which seems quite a large amount of money to deal with humanitarian assistance. And it would represent about 10% of the total expenditure.
Another friend pointes out that UK collects £2.7B in taxes considering Health care, skilled and senior staff workers.
The deficit in the public accountants are rather debatable so I do not have an opinion.
What do you make from it?
It's well known that people often lie on visa applications and try to immigrate illegally. The US publishes a yearly review of overstayers broken down by country of origin. So you can see where the highest problem areas are. Sometimes this is masked because of way stricter visa issuance policies. So for example, you may not see a super high overstay percentage for India because many folks get rejected at the visa application stage. But still, this gives you a clearer picture of how rampant the lying is and the subsequent "disappearing" in the US.
That is an interesting document. I did not know about it.
I will say that the absolute numbers are higher than I expect, but the relative numbers are around the ballpark of 1%. And depending what is counted maybe ~2% which seems to me that the problem itself is not as big as it seems to me people are making it to appear. It does not seem to be foreigners are trying to overtake or abuse the country systematically as the it has been said by some. Is my reading of the situation same as yours?
So for Visa Waiver countries one of the requirements is to keep that number under 1% or so to stay in the visa waiver program. For visa required countries, if the visa vetting process wasn't so strict, probably the numbers would be a lot higher.
Because there is a statutory requirement that applicants who require an interview appear personally before a consular officer. So far, the State Department has interpreted this to mean "standing physically in front of".
Having done tens of thousands of visa interviews, I do think the requirement of a physical appearance before an officer is important. I could quickly review a person's travel history by looking through their passports, questioning them about prior trips. A person's travel patterns and visas to other countries can tell you a lot. I could quickly use a UV light or magnifier on educational documents to see if they were genuine. Several times, I overhead conversations from other applicants and officers that were relevant to my applicant (same employer/group) and I would consult with them. There are many other details you notice when doing this in person thousands of times.
There are also practical matters - if you're trying to do this via video link, how to you authenticate the person on the other end? At the consulate, we fingerprint them and compare them to previously collected biometrics. If you offload this authentication to a contractor site in the US, but I'm in India, is this site open in the middle of the night?
In cases where the applicant qualifies for a waiver of the interview, the State Department actually does (or at least did when I was there) have a substantial program whereby visa applications are largely processed remotely. An applicant would have no hint as to whether or not that happened, though.
Is there a statutory requirement that the consular officer that conducts the interview make a decision without input from other people?
Like it seems hilariously backwards in your example that the cheaters were able to make an end run around the system you praise, when it would be easy to have someone local taking a look at global applications. Or just applications that someone thought were odd.
99% or more of the visa applicants we interviewed in India were Indian. We interviewed them in India so that we had access to local staff who spoke all major Indian languages, a fraud unit well-versed in authenticating local documents, and connections to local authorities for more complex cases.
Nothing is "easy" when you have a line of hundreds of people who have been waiting months or over a year for their appointment and you have 120 seconds to deal with them in a fair and respectful way (which unfortunately does NOT always happen), while you also have personal job repercussions if you fail to properly vet their application and miss an important national security related detail.
As it turned out, we flagged enough of those cases as a patern for further review that did result in us consulting with our staff in the third country and discovering the issue. Also, visas that are issued can be revoked, or flagged for further scrutiny by CPB if necessary.
I worked in a US consulate in a country with bad air pollution and developed asthma for the first time in my life during my two year tour there. I've since left that country (and the job) but still suffer the effects of the exposure. I used both the State Department provided AQI numbers as well as the host country's numbers to plan when and whether to spend time outside.
None of the reporting I've seen on the issue has investigated the cost of the program. On the subreddit for State Department Foreign Service Officers, which I still frequent, the most plausible estimates for the installation of this equipment at a single foreign post range from $180k to $250k, plus ongoing maintenance that would require flying in private contractors from the U.S. and putting them up in a 5 star hotel (in countries where you need this type of monitoring, hotels less than 5 stars generally don't meet Western standards). [1]
There has to be some kind of middle path between take a chainsaw to anything that has the word "environment" in it, and spending the cost of four years at a private college to install equipment that is available off the shelf for a few hundred dollars. (Yes, I know consumer grade equipment won't cut it, there are major network security concerns, etc., but surely it could be done at 10x or 20x the cost of a consumer solution, not 500x).
I work in a restricted environment where I can't install or-tools. In order to solve our scheduling problem, I wrote a solution in Prolog that runs in a purely web-based "notebook" environment. It works well and has the benefit that non-technical users only have to deal with specifying simple "facts", then running a pre-defined query.
I also have access to Google's OR API as a trusted tester and have been toying with the solveShiftScheduling endpoint. Out of the box, I don't think I'll be able to easily represent some of our constraints to work with the API. Also, our management frequently want to change the scheduling behavior, so while I can reformulate the problem to make it work with the API now, I never know what's coming down the pipe.
Because of the poor reporting, it's not possible to say for sure what happened, but it sounds like Hyundai/LG/subcontractors brought in hundreds of South Koreans on B visas and had them engaging in productive work. That's not what B visas are for. B visas are for meetings, sales, and maybe some light training/setup/integration. When the CEO talks about needing specialized, skilled workers, that's a strong suggestion these workers should have been on L visas.
Times reporting confirmed a few of the workers were on B visas: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/economy/hyundai-...
Unfortunately the same article doesn't even mention the L visa, and cites an immigration lawyer who complains about the difficulty of getting H-1B visas. But L visas are not capped like H-1Bs. In India we approved thousands of L visas specifically for skilled workers to assist with bringing plants/equipment online.
In short, the B visa is not a work visa. Most countries worldwide are quite restrictive about the conditions surrounding work visas, and people who violate the conditions of their visa shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences. Having a valid visa but violating its conditions means you are violating immigration law.
Corporate immigration departments can and do cut corners and may have thought they would save money and time by sending foreign workers on B visas (which they might have already had) or on the visa waiver program. L visa holders don't even have to get paid US-level wages, so one take on the visa type is that it is already a way for companies to undercut US labor.