South Korean workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home

The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.

This isn't exactly new territory. A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.

> The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.

Because there is no visa process for short term professional work in the US, and never has been.

> A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.

That's just wrong. Virtually the entirety of the professional world travels around between industrial countries on tourist visas. Otherwise anyone going to a trade show is an "illegal" at risk of deportation.

As a tech person, I've never had trouble entering Europe from the US to go to a conference or whatever but I'd be very careful with respect to honorariums or expenses being covered for speaking, etc., which I have heard of people getting in trouble over. (Of course, some countries do have explicit requirements for business-related visits.)

There's work and work. Most "tourist" visa will cover things like attending conferences or tradeshows, meetings with a different branch of your employer or customers etc, but on the other side more dedicated work, conference talks you are compensated for, ... can quickly be treated differently.

And if you don't come from a preferred part of the world even the former can quickly be quite a process to prove it.

That is my impression of travelling to the US right now. Non zero risk of baseless detainment and deportation, and a non zero risk of being sent to a different country than the one you live in.

No thanks. I'll stream the conference online.

some had no visas, some had tourist visas, some had expired visas

Exactly. Being nervous, of a "suspicious" ethnicity, giving any indication that you're being paid for being in the country, can probably all lead to issues. As I wrote elsewhere, aside from some countries that require a visa for any explicit business activity, a basic visa is typically fine to go to a conference or meet with a customer, much less send some emails.

Well this extra context makes what ICE did totally understandable. I would expect any country to do the same.

South Koreans, like most developed countries, get an automatic 90 day B-1 "visa waiver" visa when entering.

The crackdown is certainly being done for the wrong reasons but it does seem strange to me just how much of the US is built around the idea of a second class of citizens who don't have documentation. It seems like a significant portion of farmworkers, construction, hospitality and childcare are routinely done by people who aren't legally in the country.

I'm sure there is more of this than in Europe than I'm aware of (food delivery is one example we're recently had a lot of focus on in the UK) but it's certainly not at the point that it's routine and expected.

How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?

Every country is careful with rules like that. The main difference is the US has been the #1 destination for almost everyone in the world to work/live for decades, so it's a major supply/demand issue that border guards have to deal with. People often compare it to European countries. Random countries that are people's 15th choice to immigrate, where they don't need to try as hard with enforcement. Or at least didn't until recently, since Europe also began experiencing American-southern border style immigration issues.

Your questions are valid however diverges from the main point. The South Korean citizens in question were breaking the law. Whether we agree on ICE’s approach and how that reflects on optics is more of a political question for this administration. Clearly, the South Korean citizens were not following established US Visa Law and Policy.

There's been a successive series of US federal administrations that gave them a pass, either through lack of enforcement or inventing temporary work visas that also covered people who already illegally immigrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_protected_status Biden expanded this authority to cover ~1.2M new people

Also in states like California they let undocumented immigrants get drivers licenses. They can even get bank accounts and mortgages in some states (which is basically impossible here in Canada).

> How does this work? Are these people somehow paying taxes regardless of their immigration status?

Some jobs are cash jobs, the employer doesn't report the income and the employee likely doesn't either, this isn't legal for the employer or the employee, but enforcement is uneven.

For jobs with proper payroll, income reporting and employment tax withholding, it's common to 'borrow' someone else's tax id. That's not legal either of course, although the employer may be ok if they were reasonably unaware of the borrowing. If the borrowed tax id is only used for work by one person, and the withholding is close to correct (or a tax return is filed for that tax id), then taxes are being paid properly, even if they're attributed incorrectly. If the tax id is used by multiple people, then the combined income might be subject to a larger tax than if earned by multiple tax ids, and withholding is likely to be iffy (withholding tables are built around a single job).

I think I've heard of ways for someone without work authorization to get their own tax idea so they can have make properly attributed tax payments, but I don't remember the details.

That is simply not true. Automatic/assumed visa waivers has been the way international professionals do temporary work in the US for many decades. Yes, the state department and DHS after it have always had the ability to revoke this waiver when abused. But there is simply no abuse alleged here. They showed up to build a factory, made no attempt to hide that fact, and that's exactly what they were "caught" doing.

This "Yooz Brok Duh Lah" absolutism is a transparently political excuse for what is very obviously a norm-breaking and unjust enforcement of a law that was working very well.

As a reasonably impartial observer, I think the truth here is somewhere in the middle. Like almost any large American factory, there are going to be some handful of people who are illegal immigrants through some means or other (if I understand correctly they had a warrant for 4 Latina people). Sweeping up anyone there who didn't have an iron clad visa, I imagine that was just a political play.

They still need to prove residency. They also cannot vote, and this is not a legal status: just the right to drive

I think the premise is off. DHS said some detainees were on the Visa Waiver Program, which only permits business visits and forbids employment. Others were on B-1, which covers meetings or limited training but not factory construction. DHS also mentioned expired or improper visas. We do not have a full manifest, so some roles may have been lawful, but the evidence presented so far shows that at least some of those detained were not following the rules of their visa.

Yes but the topic wasn't about voting?

OP was asking how there's huge communities of undocumented people in the US and how they manage to work and live without legal status. Which would be an unusual thing in almost any country. The logistics of doing so is a valid question (how do you drive to work, how do you find housing, how do you get healthcare, etc). The answer is many state and federal policies support having millions of undocumented people in legal limbo indefinitely, by offering them pseudo-legal status or loopholes.