Why Trump is deporting those Korean workers

Aren't Americans supposed to have those jobs? 🤔

I was on Michael Medved’s radio show recently, discussing the latest head-scratchers in the Trump economy: tariff reversals in court, attacks on the Federal Reserve, a “Golden Age” in which hiring plummets.

Michael brought up the recent immigration raid at a Korean battery plant near Savannah, Georgia that netted 475 foreign workers the Trump administration plans to deport, most of them South Koreans. “I’m stunned to read the details of this raid,” Michael said. Then he asked if I had any idea why this happened. Here’s the interview:

The oddity of the raid is that it occurred at a plant being built in the United States by Korean carmaker Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, a leading maker of batteries for electric vehicles. That’s exactly the sort of investment Trump’s trade war and litany of tariffs is supposed to encourage. Making imports more expensive, in theory, makes it more economical for foreign producers to set up shop in American and build stuff here. So the Korean giants appear to have been doing what Trump wants.

Yet there are three reasons Trump may have objected. First, those new factories opened by foreign companies are supposed to employ American workers. Trump’s ultimate goal isn’t just more factories, it’s more manufacturing jobs for Americans and a return to some gauzy industrial heyday Trump seems to think represented Peak America. More foreign-owned companies employing workers from their own countries isn’t something for Trump to brag about. It actually violates another Trump pledge, which is to expel unauthorized migrants and cut down on immigration of all forms. So the Korean workers had to go.

Second, Trump hates electric vehicles, which don’t belong in his idealized America, where everything runs on fossil fuels and factories proudly belch diesel exhaust. Trump has called EVs a “ridiculous crusade.” The tax bill he signed in July canceled EV purchase subsidies President Biden signed into law in 2022. Trump bought a Tesla when Elon Musk was his buddy, but in June said he planned to sell it after an epic beef with the Tesla CEO. The Georgia action was a raid not just on foreign workers but on EVs and the whole green agenda.

Third, the raid gives Trump a new cudgel to wield in his trade wars, where he is constantly seeking leverage that might help him get trade deals he can tout as wins. Trump supposedly has a trade deal with South Korea, but it’s not signed yet and negotiations have bogged down over which exchange rates to use to asses the value of Korean investment in the United States. It would be right out of the Trump playbook if the Georgia raid was meant to signal that Korea should sign on Trump’s terms, or more raids could be coming.

That’s Trump’s likely logic. There are also holes in the logic. The Georgia complex is supposed to create as many as 14,000 jobs by 2027, most of them American jobs. The foreign workers at the site were mostly building the campus where Americans are supposed to work. Is it worth holding that up? Doesn’t Trump want to brag about some of those new jobs leading up to the tight Georgia Senate race next year?

The Korean workers being sent home also aren’t the archetypal “invaders” that Trump voters get so fired up about kicking out. None seems to have snuck in over the southwest border from Latin America. Some had visas, some had lapsed visas, and others may have tried but failed to get visas due to bureaucratic snafus. Expelling them won’t produce much fist-pumping among America Firsters.

Granted, those Koreans weren’t Trump’s model workers—native-born Republican-Americans—but they were there to enable the renaissance of Trump’s model workers. And now they’re gone.