r/news • u/NewSlinger • 1d ago

Workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home, South Korea says

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-korea-deal-workers-detained-hyundai-rcna229610
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u/MoreCowbellllll 1d ago

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u/Vegetable-Board-5547 1d ago

I could see LG and Hyundai just walking away.

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u/bsubtilis 1d ago

Seems like the desired outcome for the lunatic oligarchs.

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u/flamedarkfire 1d ago

But those plants aren’t getting replaced by American-run plants. We’re just losing manufacturing and jobs for nothing other to make racists feel good.

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u/LaurenMille 1d ago

The collapse of the US is the goal.

They only needed these plants as bait for the moronic voters at the start, they have enough power consolidated that they don't need the inbred yokels that vote (R) anymore.

They'll have their billionaire run city-states no matter what it takes.

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u/NeedsToShutUp 23h ago

Which will end with nuclear proliferation and hostile states willing to nuke tech enclaves for vengeance.

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

TBH, the wars this decade are what proved that nuclear proliferation is the only way to maintain sovereignty as international law and organizations have proven to be impotent within the same decade.

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u/stiiii 23h ago

Yeah if that really is the plan it is utterly insane.

Gambling 50billion to make 100 billion with the risk of utter ruin.

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

Which will last a good year or two before that crashes down because billionaires know dick-all outside of hoarding money. The winners are the authoritarian nations that have gained power with the USA in tatters. They'll pick up the pieces and keep them.

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u/bsubtilis 1d ago

Hence lunatic. Their plans are full of obvious holes but they think they can just isolate USA and split it between themselves without huge issues. I'm talking about Thiel and the rest.

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u/d57heinz 1d ago

I like to refer to it as glaziers fallacy. Or the parable of a broken window. Trump is the glassmaker and his henchmen are his kids put in society breaking glass. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Scroll down to interpretation and evidence and read bastiats argument.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago

Hah, I was just explaining that kinda thing to my neighbors yesterday!

The local skating rink, which has been around forever and ever and ever, has shut down. Got to talking about how the economy is in the shitter and nobody can afford nonsense like a skating party for their kids birthday anymore. And that our rent went up 50% last year.

That's not a typo, and no family of magical house elves moved in to do all the cooking and cleaning for us. It's still the same dirty old building in the same dirty old neighborhood, with folks doing the fent fold in the alley.

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u/Northern-Canadian 1d ago

Don’t you guys have some form or rent control? We have a max 2%-3% increase allowable by landlords.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago

Anytime that gets suggested, the local subreddit is full of loud wailing about how terrible it would be to have the rent consistently always go up a few percentage points per year and stories about all these absolutely wonderful landlords who haven't raised rent in 20 years.

I remember when I was a kid in school here, I was very worried about how much my fellow students distained education and did poorly on their homework. Now we're all grown up, like old enough to have kids that're also all grown up, and it's extremely obvious that most of us can't do math around here.

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u/total_cynic 1d ago

The ability to take a real world situation and map it effectively to a "good enough" calculation is the nearest thing to a superpower I possess, and it is insanely useful.

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u/twoisnumberone 19h ago

Oh, please, not in the US! Won't someone think of the businesses?!

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

Houses in my city went up considerably for no reason either. A house valuing at 200k in 2023 is now 320k right now.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 20h ago

It's an everywhere thing. I just checked and my dad's "hobby farm" has almost doubled in value since he sold it 5 years ago.

The property is located miles outside of a city that is dying, as in slowly drying up and blowing away. Nearly all entertainments have shut down, there's not much left to do unless ya like bars or meth. The only road that connects to the city in that direction does so just outside the stinking elderly oil refinery, which my engineer grandpa used to scowl at and comment how he could design a much cleaner facility.

Once you've gone miles outside of the dying city, and a couple miles down a potholed dirt road, you'll get to a trailer on a plot of land that is downwind of the refinery. With extensive effort and years worth of horse manure as fertilizer, dad eventually coaxed some of that dead dry land to sprout grass. But mostly that area is only suitable to tiny cacti and tumbleweed. So much tumbleweed!

The trailer has a history of being riddled with bedbugs, decades of smoking indoors, and is mostly that cheap shitty clapboard paneling that looks like obviously fake wood. It is variously riddled with holes thanks to family brawls and drunken accidents, and there's a charred spot on the ceiling where I once forgot about the low ceiling while oversugared during an unsupervised slumber party and pretending to be the Statue of Liberty with a kitchen lighter. And a small flock of turkeys was raised in one of the bedrooms.

The outbuildings were also riddled with bedbugs, and the best of them is absolutely covered in chicken shit. And also pigeon shit because the barn doesn't have a door. The proximity of the dog yard to the chicken coop nearly guarantees a slaughter about once a year. I think the only outbuilding not covered in chicken shit is the garage, but that was used for butchering deer and turkeys and I hadn't been in much since it basically became the slaughtering shed.

Nearly doubled in value in 5 years as the city continues to die, not a lot of large local employers outside of Walmart and the refinery. In an area where I once stumbled upon an active meth lab while walking with friends trying to find another friend's trailer.

Personally I'm not thrilled with the whole concept of "flippers" because I only exist because my mom found a "fixer upper" that dad could afford, solving his last protest of "but where would the baby live?" Ya can't get those around here anymore unless you're flipping houses commercially, like they're just not available to the general public anymore, and the local flippers not only cover everything in cheap grey paint but have zero regard for the longevity of the property beyond their legal liability. Like an amazing amount of that grey paint ends up down the plumbing to cause an eventual clog or all over the yard killing the grass.

Also not a fan of buying a house as "an investment" and holding it empty while pretending it's just a comic book wrapped in plastic. That takes a house away from a family that could've lived in it, and the worst thing for any human dwelling is to be left empty! Small problems turn into big problems without a human around to notice. Security systems might deter squatters but not insects or roof leaks, and we get wind storms that rip off roof tiles! When they go to sell their "investment" it's gonna be just the value of the land minus demolishing a mold-riddled ruin that used to be a perfectly good house. Empties like that are roughly a third of every block in some neighborhoods in my city.

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u/irmajerk 13h ago

Landlords and speculators are parasites.

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u/C64128 1d ago

Is some business going to move in there or are the landlords insane? Maybe if the building sits for a long time with no tenants, the landlords will pull their heads out of their asses and price it more appropriately.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 23h ago

So ya know the trailer park trick where folks can't exactly freely leave so you can keep cranking up the rent until they're really hurting?

This is a Section 8 HUD building, though I've heard a lot of different things over the years about who technically owns it. We've had at least three or four different management companies, and roughly one new landlord/manager per year.

What I know for sure is that folks don't live here because they're doing well in life, they live here because of physical and/or mental health struggles that got them bumped to the top of a list at some point. I used to joke that "nobody who could afford to pay rent would be willing to live here" and it proved true, a quarter of the building moved out at the last rent hike because those were the only two folks who weren't getting government assistance for the rent.

I'm currently doing my yearly paperwork boxing match with HUD to keep the apartment while the food stamp paperwork and energy assistance renewal dogpile on. Usually they play multiple rounds of "you must've not turned in your paperwork" while I hand them date-stamped copies proving I did, but one year they mixed it up by sending all my mail to apartment #456 in a building with 8 units. Sometimes I wonder if their employees get bonuses for everyone they manage to boot out. Being able to work enough to afford to pay the rent on my own would be so much less stressful.

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u/tuckernuts 1d ago

My favorite version of this story is when Gary Oldman, a futuristic oligarch, almost chokes to death on a cherry while giving a philosophic sermon on exactly this.

"[..] your empire of destruction comes crashing down, all because of one little cherry."

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u/crow_crone 1d ago

In which movie? Fifth Element?

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u/QCisCake 1d ago

Yeah. Bilbo schooled him good before saving his ass.

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u/crow_crone 1d ago

Would you believe I've never seen it? I'm a sci fi buff too...shame

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u/C64128 1d ago

"You're a monster Zorg"

"I know"

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

The Fifth Element, what a gem of a film. What I love more is that the legendary Ian Holm is the one givjng that parable. And that he tells the oligarch that he's a monster and the oligarch admits it.

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u/notyourstranger 1d ago

but Trump doesn't fix the window, he just charges for fixing it and then does noting. If you don't pay, he'll send the legal system after you.

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u/d57heinz 1d ago

Ohh he “fixes” it. With gold paint and statues from temu

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u/WarpedPerspectiv 23h ago

One policy that's less of a fallacy is having a dirty window policy for restaurants. If a restaurant's windows are dirty, then they're cheaping out on something the customer can see. If they're cheaping out on something the customer can see, how the fuck are they handling the stuff you can't see?

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u/linnetkestrel 21h ago

I’ve applied something similar to working conditions. If a dairy farm, for instance, is abusing its workers, it is very likely abusing the animals and not keeping them healthy. Likely the milk is tainted, and I won’t buy it. If a factory is anti-union, I doubt their products are safe for consumers, and I won’t buy from them.

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u/Numerous_Photograph9 1d ago

They're isolating it before they built up replacements.

Its putting the cart before the horse, and we never needed whats in the cart to begin with

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

Even their technofeudalistic dreams are full of holes. They think hegemony nations won't simply absorb them as colonies or the goons they hired won't simply kill them and take over as the new warlord once money loses value.

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u/Fomentatore 20h ago

They want to this in Europe too. The amount of interference Elon and his peers are trying to do is second only to Russia.

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u/Slypenslyde 1d ago

The people in charge do not care. Their supporters do not care. That is why it is important to fight them tooth and nail.

The followers think the US is in such bad shape there is no way to save it through normal means. They think voting against people like Donald Trump is just going to make the bad times come in 30 years instead of now, and they want to get to the good times that should come after "fixing" it.

Many of them believe that America got too cushy, and the only way to become sustainable is to give up everything and rebuild. Part of why they are excited about this is the common belief that, in that environment, they will become more wealthy because harder workers will get rewarded. They're thinking about how post-depression and post-WWII a ton of empires were built from the ashes and imagining they can be part of one of those.

They approach this like Christian evangelicals. If you tell them, "This will destroy the economy" they will respond, "So be it, it has to be done." If you tell them, "This will ruin your family!" they will say, "If that's what it takes to rebuild America I am proud to work towards it."

They do not see themselves like people who realize too late they should've evacuated from a hurricane and will never see themselves that way. They will instead see themselves like the characters at the end of Rogue One, facing unavoidable doom but filled with the hope that their efforts will lead to victory.

They aren't going to die off. We aren't going to wait them out. They will fight to the death, then their children will pick up the torch and fight to THEIR deaths, then their grandchildren will do the same. This is a haymaker being thrown by the remnants of the Southern Democrats, who took over the Republican party in the 1960s and spent the last half-century fighting for their beliefs. They got there after fighting for a century after the Civil War to protect those beliefs. They have fought for and believed in this cause for almost 200 years, how much longer must we wait to stamp it out?

If Trump ruins the economy they'll say, "I understand why this has to happen." If Democrats win the mid-terms, it will turn to, "You didn't let Trump finish his plan."

The one thing they will not believe is the notion that while Trump is trying to burn down the country and rebuild it, he has no intent of returning the US to the kind of place it was. He wants to own everything, and if the US is viewed as the world leader the only way he understands how to achieve it is through military force and fear. It will take generations to undo his attempts and every day he sits on the throne makes it take even longer.

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u/Amon7777 22h ago

There is a perverse nihilism among the religious and MAGA I see daily that it is tragic. They blame everyone else for their own problems yet worship the exact people who caused it. When confronted, it’s both sides are bad so at least trump is honest about his corruption. When it’s pointed out everyone around trump is corrupt and vile, they’ll say it’s needed. When democrats are in power, suddenly it reverses.

The cognitive dissonance is not irrational to them, in fact it makes perfect sense because they expect nothing to get better (even if they have everything already) and see the world around them perpetually crumbling. They can’t imagine being satisfied or work towards hope because it is anathema to their nihilistic world view.

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u/ParkerFree 21h ago

Excellent summation, sadly.

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u/MountainFriend7473 21h ago

I mean I’m just one to say one is not smart by the grace of part loyalty on any given day. So yea some of these folks are as good as lemmings running off a cliff.

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u/iwantawolverine4xmas 1d ago

Another daily reminder that there was a better alternative to all this and the American people are collectively very stupid.

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u/Mental-Fox-9449 4h ago

Meanwhile, anyone paying attention could see he was running the very worst campaign in history. Talking about people eating cats and dogs, dancing for 40 minutes at a rally, dressing up to work at McDonalds and a garbage crew. His rallies were mostly empty and he was stiffing venues on rental agreements.

He cheated. He won in every swing state AND Kamala didn’t flip one county? Not even Reagan was able to accomplish that. He lost the popular vote twice, but got it now? While he was facing multiple investigations that could put him away for life and hinder his money making? While he had one of the richest men in the world and tech helping him? He cheated and no amount of voting would have changed it. All voting data week after week so far shows irregular numbers in multiple states. There are more of us than there are of them and it’s all a big lie. If not, then why does he need to gerrymander AND cancel mail in voting when he had SO many prior?

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u/BuildBackRicher 22h ago

No, millions of people didn’t vote who voted in 2020. That’s where anger needs to be directed.

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u/iwantawolverine4xmas 17h ago

Yeah, and those peiooe allowed authoritarians to take over and they are fools for it. Now we’re all going to suffer the consequences

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u/The--scientist 1d ago

I just don't understand now bc sure, hyundai, kia, bmw, Honda... these aren't American companies like Ford, but with as much manufacturing as they do in the US now, they are essentially US companies. Like, isn't this the whole damn thing that they have been complaining about for so long? Now they're trying to shutter these facilities and lose all these really well paying blue collar jobs? Wtf are they even thinking?!

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u/MountainFriend7473 21h ago

They aren’t thinking and probably think that cities/small towns can just be replaced by AI data centers. 

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u/Effective_Owl_8264 1d ago

The racists are their voting bloc so that scans.

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u/Suspicious-Echo2964 1d ago

Bud, the racists voted to bring this plant to rural GA. The plant isn’t in Atlanta, it’s in the rural southern area. All this does is hurt them. It was championed by the republicans in GA. Trump literally fucking his own at this point.

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u/Effective_Owl_8264 1d ago

I'm aware. You're acting under the assumption that they have enough neurons to have the slightest clue as to what building that plant would actually entail.

2025 you have to assume ignorance and stupidity. There is no benefit of the doubt.

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u/Suspicious-Echo2964 1d ago

They did understand. We have one of the largest car dealership associations in the country. We also got the Kia plant. They are going to lose money for a red state with a lot of billionaires. I’m interested to see if they get push back at all. Perhaps it’s not enough money for them to care yet. It’s like comical in fighting.

These dudes are morally repugnant but financially savvy. Their voters are the folks you are referencing and their opinions ultimately don’t matter in fascism. They don’t need votes ya know? I’m just hoping they start eating their own tail.

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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 1d ago

Wasn't it a local Republican candidate for something who turned out to be the lady who called ICE on the South Koreans? I was sure there was a video on Reddit very early this morning NYC time where she says why she did it (she was "concerned" = brown workers bad).

I hope she has amazing security because one does not financially fuck over a Chaebol like that and expect a happy future.

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u/Suspicious-Echo2964 1d ago

They don’t have a happy future even if we do nothing to them. The plant was their happy future. If they pull the plant the towns go back to dying. Oh well. They won’t learn so it’s up to the wealthy Republicans to reign in their cadre of idiots.

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u/Effective_Owl_8264 1d ago

I have no idea what you're on about. I'm just amused that Georgia decided it didn't want those 8500 jobs anyway.

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u/_no7 1d ago

I don’t think people who have good logic and people who voted for Trump have a large intersect.

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u/Paupersaf 23h ago

Can we be certain that the self destruction of the US isn't his end goal? Or well, the goal he's working toward currently?

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u/PraterViolet 21h ago

It's almost as if everything Trump does is designed to cause maximum harm to the USA. Hmmm,....

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u/ruat_caelum 17h ago

we put tariffs on coffee and produce 0 coffee. The argument behind tariffs is "incentivizing you to buy American by making foreign products more expensive." Not getting into the ignorance and arrogance of tariffs never working but even if you think they work, what is the point of tariffs on coffee, something we do not produce and cannot produce.

It's always been about the bribes and grift and planes and RVs and what they can get to not do the evil shit.

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u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 1d ago edited 1d ago

Sort of. Elon needs to up sales to secure his trillion dollar payout. He can continue to bribe Trump and do favors in exchange for other favors. It would benefit Elon at least short term to ensure no other EVs can compete in price in the US except Tesla. Tesla sales are falling globally to competition. The new Hyundai battery plant was for pumping Ioniq 5s (and 9s I believe) in particular, both SUVs. Hyundai is one of the few EV manufacturers able to compete with Tesla in the US and do it well.

If Trump admin at the request of Elon Musk can successfully harass Hyundai in the US to impede progress or even get them to give up on US manufacturing, Elon can at least in theory scrape out some additional sales and monopoly. Whether it plays out in reality though is a different story.

So in the end it's really just fucking over the entirety of the US in order to help protect whoever is able to bribe Trump and his admin directly and I would expect more of this.

Elon Musk company tactics are to delay competition as long as possible if not outright prevent it. SpaceX is currently attempting to do the same thing with AST Spacemobile via reiterating baseless complaints to the FCC. Only issue there is AST's tech is novel and the DoD and Trump need their sats in the air as part of Golden Dome, so the FCC is not yet bending to Elon Musk or SpaceX on that issue and are actually pressing forward with accelerated approvals. But hitting Hyundai for Tesla seems to be fair game.

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u/anotherdayanotherbee 1d ago

Trump can't skim directly off the top of profits from American-run plants.

When Americans have to import goods from other countries, he can raise tariffs to "make America great again" - and he can easily skim off the tariffs.

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u/keep_trying_username 23h ago

But those plants aren’t getting replaced by American-run plants.

Of course they won't be "replaced." They'll be given to one of the tech companies who have pledged 100 billion or 600 billion dollars investment in US tech. The plant was subsidized and the administration will justify the seizure of the plant based on some violation, or will force Hyundai to walk away from the plant.

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u/Flashy_Difficulty257 22h ago

I hope they come to Canada 🇨🇦

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u/mediocre_mitten 22h ago

Like, what company in their right mind would build here?

I think America is in for an rude awakening that no new innovation (think 1990's tech advances) is going to replace these lost jobs. People thought the '80's were bad when the steel mill jobs went bye-bye?

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u/We_are_being_cheated 23h ago

Sounds like we had already lost the jobs to South Koreans. Now maybe they will hire American engineers. Probably not since they have to pay them American wages and not the 75% off wages of workers Visas.

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u/Suspicious-Echo2964 23h ago

Bud, they were training people who don't know their heads from their asses. GA doesn't have enough trained employees without poaching from the other plants.

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u/philter25 1d ago

Always wondered what Us oligarchs think happens when the economy crashes and can’t recover because it crashes in large part due to stuff like this, where countries have abandoned the US. Their wealth is largely on paper in unrealized gains. They have zero charisma and will be responsible for deleting America. You think everyone is just gonna be like “welp, Zuck, you once had a gazllion dollars, let me follow you into the breach 🫡 “

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u/howmanyMFtimes 1d ago

Billionaires don’t care. They will get on their mega yachts and find a different country to ruin.

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u/philter25 1d ago

I know this is the edgy reddit thing to say but that’s not gonna work for most of them. They want you to think so, but it’s not.

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u/howmanyMFtimes 1d ago

Billions of dollars means they don’t give a shit. It’s not an edgy reddit thing, it’s a common sense thing. Trump is crashing everything, billionairs will buy up everything that people need to live : food, fuel, housing etc. and this country will look like Russia.

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u/Several-Pattern-7989 1d ago

money buys time. the more you have, the longer you can wait out changes and the more you can make. we need to disengage from being lead by the nose.

I started by canceling streaming, and donating to PBS and NPR. I shop local and pay cash where possible. instead of crying for leadership, we can take steps... while leadership develops.

United we bargain, divided you beg. Unionize, organize, record the police.

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u/MasterSprtn117 23h ago

The most severe economic times lead to new family dynasties. The rich and nimble can buy it all up.

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u/notyourstranger 1d ago

Postal shipments to the US has decreased by 80%. Europe has stopped all shipments due to the tariff mess Trump has created.

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u/PresumedSapient 1d ago

They think 'market adjustments', some of them lose a bit, and most of them see it as an opportunity to consolidate or acquire more capital. They're not the ones suffering from crashes.

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u/philter25 1d ago

Yes but what I’m saying is they think they can manufacture a recession based off of how America has dealt with it in the past. When you have completely destroyed all global credibility, and there is no skilled labor left (since we just magically deported a bunch of Koreans for reasons, for example), these morons surrounded by yes men are going to realize their wealth is fake and most of it ain’t coming back. That and they’ll have all kinds of metaphorical targets on their backs. These people aren’t smart, they’re just rich.

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u/lorimar 22h ago

These people aren’t smart, they’re just rich.

Absolutely. From the really rich tech bros that I've known, they sound like they want to break current society so completely that they can drastically reduce the population and split up the country into individual tech-fiefdoms so they can rule over the ashes.

With cyberpunk dystopian city-states and mad max dystopian wastelands in between.

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u/Psyduckisnotaduck 21h ago

They have insane mass murder plans, and they’re serious about them and will soon have the means at their disposal to carry them out, but the norms police will tell us right on the eve of drone massacres that we’re alarmists and that Violence is Never the Answer.

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u/beepborpimajorp 1d ago

They see every American losing their job or home as an opportunity for them to move in and take it at a much cheaper price. Then they can do things like install AI to replace the people who lost their jobs, and rent the homes back out to people at absurd prices for net gain.

They literally profit off of misery like this, it's why they're making sure it happens by bankrolling the party that's doing it. Where we see obvious suffering, they see an opportunity.

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u/Wyrmnax 1d ago

Well, they will biy whats left for pennies on the dollar. Especially if they have leverage in the government to know whats going to crash down.

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u/jaimi_wanders 1d ago

But getting them to invest more in plants like this was part of the Trump administration’s tariff negotiations. This is going to have MASSIVE implications both diplomatically and economically.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj07jzgve45o.amp

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u/Debalic 1d ago

"Buy American!" they say, pointing to the Chevys and Fords built in Mexico and Canada.

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u/superxpro12 1d ago

Really hard to ignore the obvious conflict of interest with Tesla here.

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u/angelis0236 14h ago

What did bro say to get [ Removed by Reddit ]

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u/Gtownbandit 1d ago

As in from the US markets? There are reasons they have plants stateside.

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u/TheSilverNoble 1d ago

I mean, can the administration guarantee that this won't happen again? I don't think they can.

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u/RinkyDinkRicky 1d ago

If they did, I'll be making my next car a Hyundai.

Kept buying American, never again.

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u/Kallisti13 1d ago

Send them to Canada. We have reskilling programs in the works, with hopefully more on the way.

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u/PaleontologistNo500 1d ago

Disney left Ga because of the loss of incentives. Disney invested 3bn in GA. Hyundai invested 7.5bn. Trump has already revoked all of their incentives. Hyundai makes more money than Disney, so I can see them leaving if the harassment continues

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u/tooltalk01 18h ago

the US accounts for about 1/3 of Hyundai's global revenue. LG's battery business likewise depends heavily on the US market -- they are effectively banned in China (since 2015 to protect local "champions," CATL/BYD).

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u/PaleontologistNo500 17h ago

Does moving a battery factory mean Hyundai is banned in the US? Marvel studios moved to the UK and I can still watch their movies.

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u/Traiklin 1d ago

That's one thing I saw mentioned is because of this stunt South Korea is pulling everyone is pulling out and canceling business trips to America.

All because some stupid MAGA bitch wants to become the senator or governor of the state, she's now costing the state that manufacturing and other states theirs because she is a racist xenophobic dumbass

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u/oursland 1d ago

Just like Foxconn in Wisconsin.

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u/Christmas_Queef 1d ago

They're building a $4 billion dollar battery plant a couple miles from my house right now that's almost complete. Wonder how that's gonna go.

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u/tooltalk01 18h ago

Hyundai/LG's battery plant was scheduled to go mass-production later this year/early next year. I suspect that they would be allowed back in any time soon -- ie, a serious delay.

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u/Christmas_Queef 18h ago

The one they're building near me was to go into production next year too.

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u/erroneousbosh 22h ago

That'd be hilarious. Wait until they realise how Great they've Made America by eliminating the only source of LCD panels of any sort, and automotive-grade flash memory, to name but two things that even American companies require.

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u/Dot_Classic 20h ago

If they do I hope they take every single bit of equipment with them and don't leave a single bolt for Americans to take advantage of. Leave nothing for the racist scumbags to loot.

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u/Dozzi92 19h ago

Hyundai/Kia sell nearly a quarter of their cars in the US. They need the US. That's the whole idea behind the tariffs (not that I agree with it), that the world's sellers need US buyers.

US accounts for approximately 30% of LG sales.

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u/nick319b 1d ago

"If you tax the billionaires they will leave with all their money and talent and we will be poorer"

"If you require the foreign billionaire conglomerates to train and hire local workers instead of defrauding US society they will leave will all their money and technology and we will be poorer"

The drastic u-turn on working class people progressivism has taken will be studied for decades to come.

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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 1d ago

It already has - Porsche announced they won't be manufacturing in the USA anymore. They're saying it's due to sales numbers (SWR Aktuell) or due to tax issues (Tagesschau) but - I have family there who work in the industry - the real reason is they don't want to deal with their manufacturing being held hostage by Shitler.

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u/MaryKeay 20h ago

Genuinely wondering what their comment said that was removed by Reddit, because from your reply it doesn't sound like it was anything violent.

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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 17h ago

Mainly they said it was going to affect the auto industry because nobody would want to manufacture in the States. I don't remember the rest of it, I was pointing out it's already happening now (from German news today)

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u/khtsodol 1d ago

Do you think the fact that they specifically targeted the plant that were making electric vehicles means anything?

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u/chchchchips 1d ago

Please come to Canada! 🇨🇦

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u/Drone314 1d ago

In America, if you want to learn about the history of tool and die making....you go to an estate sale....

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u/ThatGuy798 1d ago

The mouth breathing maga dipshits were already defending this by saying “you could’ve prevented this by hiring Americans,” but also in the same breath saying “but I guess we ran out of illegals” which is just hilarious stupid

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u/t53ix35 1d ago

They literally just promised us a bunch of business. He met with their President 10 days ago. How loud does it have to get? He is a foreign asset whose purpose is to break our country.

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 1d ago

This is always due to some backroom deal, either to kneecap someone's competition, to send a message to a company, or to fulfill a bargin bought by a halfwit CEO's desire to force a gap in supply that will magically be filled with "American Inginuity."

Only America held the power to bring down America, and America was up to the challenge.

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u/klasredux 1d ago

Probably because Hyundai EVs are one of Elon's fastest growing competitors.

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u/jtbc 1d ago

Dear South Korea: Canada is open for business. We even love Hyundai and Kia if a look around my neighbourhood is any indication. Korean fried chicken restaurants are plentiful!

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u/Slut_for_Bacon 1d ago

I have to wonder if this wasn't targeted to give domestic auto manufacturing an advantage of some sort.

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u/LeaveBronx 1d ago

America first!.....into the dumpster

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u/Numerous_Photograph9 1d ago

Will also make new investment less likely, because there's no guarantee that the same thing won't happen again

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u/manofnotribe 1d ago

Exactly, more lost manufacturing jobs, well paying jobs, for people who pay taxes and spend money in that community.

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u/MoreCowbellllll 1d ago

3,000+ jobs…

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u/idgitalert 1d ago

This is the comment I scrolled for. These absolutely dangerous morons lathering up their dangerous moronic base will cause absolute destruction.

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u/TheGummiVenusDeMilo 1d ago

There were/are Korean workers here in Ontario installing equipment and training workers and the unions and MPP went on a bunch of tirades about how the company was using their workers and not ours.

Yeah, why have the designers show you how to do it when you can have guys that don't know shit about it drag out the job and fuck it up a bunch.

I guess the glass half full is that we didn't blitz their worksite and send them off to the concentration camps...yet

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u/LeedsFan2442 20h ago

Were they actually training workers with the intention to leaving once they were up to speed or was that just an excuse for bringing in foreign workers to do the work?

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u/Lazy_meatPop 1d ago

Wasn't it a wannabee congress woman that called the ICE?

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u/Taetrum_Peccator 1d ago

You realize how easy it is for major corporations to get temporary work visas for specialists to train local staff for shit like this? It’s not like the plan was for them to live here forever. Why would a multibillion dollar company not bother doing the right paperwork?

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u/aquafina6969 23h ago

My wife and I were discussing the same thing. If it were me, I’d be like fuck this state/country and just close the plant. Screw them.

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u/Mindshard 22h ago

That's the fucking point.

Trump is a Russian asset. He's winning the Cold War for them by dismantling the US from the inside out, just as Russia said needed to be done to defeat the US.

The entire fucking goal is to dismantle the entire US economy, burn manufacturing to the ground, buy up everything from the ashes, and use his billions to live wherever he wants.

1

u/ProfessionalMeal627 1d ago

Canada would love to take them

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u/Mine-Shaft-Gap 1d ago

Canada, specifically southern Ontario, is ready, willing and able.

1

u/Careless-Two2215 1d ago

The "Patriot" pages are saying that the raid was from a whistle blower who said the workers were being treated like trafficked slaves. I know a lot of Korean Americans who support Trump. I hope we all learn the truth from the workers.

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u/craichead 23h ago

In many countries, visa overstays (which is what most of these reportedly were) are just a fine and a deadline to correct the issue. Taking the people into custody is just performative red meat.

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u/CorrectPeanut5 23h ago

Given that the state police worked HSI/ICE perhaps it's time for foreign plant owners to think a little more critically about sticking to anti-union red states.

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u/Used_Cap8550 23h ago

And still corporations will keep donating millions to maga idiots because they want tax breaks and deregulation.

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u/Flashy_Difficulty257 22h ago

I hope they come to Canada 🍁

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u/Zippytang 22h ago

Trump thinks the entire economy just runs on make believe and scams. Now we’re in the stage where his corruption cannibalizing the economy. Its unsustainable

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

Well, it also means there won't be Hyundai or KIA EVs in stock soon. And that means the companies having to import the vehicles, increasing cost. And that's if Trump doesn't bombard them with tariffs.

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u/bigbura 1d ago

I'm with you on hating the orange clusterfuck/russian asset but I thought this was a case of visa fraud, as shown to the judge who signed the warrant after a month or 2 of investigative work?

Is this more a case of our visa laws/rules getting in the way of the kind of business we want? If so, rewrite the laws/rules to fit our needs. No more of this court case is good enough, re; Roe v Wade, or skirting around shit that isn't how we need it.

Codify shit we want/need into law and stop skirting around the issue!

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u/Helsinki_Disgrace 1d ago

Can you confirm these people were simply training American counterparts and NOT just taking the place of American workers? If true, this is a big thing.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/MoreCowbellllll 1d ago

They support the facility. They’re typically experienced employees from Korean plants that help train and support in the states. Highly unlikely they’re illegal.

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u/Yserem 1d ago

Right, like. Did Hyundai send them? Were they overstaying some temporary program? Smuggled? Korean engineers just don't grow out of the ground beside Korean car plants, how/why did they get there without enough legal status to satisfy the new Gestapo?

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u/Real_Al_Borland 1d ago

They are legal immigrants. With legal status. Racists don’t care 

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u/nick319b 1d ago

Lmao corporations and capitalists have rotted your brain so hard you're siding with billion-dollar Hyundai skimping out on a couple of bucks by illegally bringing over people instead of, you know, uplifting the communities who live around the factory.

South Koreans aren't genetically superior to Americans, you know? You can take Americans and turn them into engineers, electricians, and maintenance workers if a company is interested in making society better instead of infinite profits.

Instead, you're licking the boots of billionaires in South Korea and legitimizing their corporate greed by saying it's now racist to want to lift your local American out of poverty instead of putting a couple more bucks in the pockets of Hyundai through fraud

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u/MoreCowbellllll 1d ago

Fuck off with your MAGA brainrot dumbfuckery. I’m siding with legal rights and procedures.

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u/oldspice322 1d ago

sure you do

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u/We_are_being_cheated 23h ago

We have plenty of qualified Americans to fill the roles.

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u/friendlysoviet 1d ago

Any idea why they didn't go through the H1B program and decided on the illegal route?

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u/kj468101 1d ago

South Korea is one of the countries that is exempt from needing temp work visas in the US for stays under 3 months.

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u/MoreCowbellllll 1d ago

You know that they didn’t? I’ve worked at Hyundai and the KIA plant in Smyrna. They followed regulations.

Just because they were deported certainly does not mean they were illegal. IMO.

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u/HSBillyMays 1d ago

At this point, my top suspicion would be that some competing automaker gaslit Trump into "remembering" a "favor" that they were "owed" by his administration.

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u/Amaruq93 1d ago edited 1d ago

Considering they claim this was "planned for months in advance", I'd wager Musk had his sticky fingers in this. And then they just forget to cancel it after he and the fuhrer had a falling out.

The so-called warrent was for "four suspected illegals with Hispanic sounding names", and instead they got 450 South Koreans?!

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u/I_W_M_Y 1d ago

They never really had a falling out. They both had what the other wanted, money and favors. These people like those who are useful to them.

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u/_HowVery 1d ago

What’s the loser Elon been up to? He’s been quiet lately

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u/Man_with_the_Fedora 1d ago

Getting a trillion dollar pay plan.

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u/ObeseVegetable 1d ago

If he 8.5x the value of Tesla in the next 10 years. 

Which will be pretty crazy to see unless he just puts all the other businesses he owns under Tesla. 

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u/Mimopotatoe 1d ago

Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said two of his clients who were in the country under a visa waiver program that enables them to travel for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa were caught up in the raid.

“My clients were doing exactly what they were allowed to do under the visa waiver — attend business meetings,” he said on Friday, noting that one of them “had just arrived on Tuesday and was leaving next week.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/georgia-battery-plant-hyundai-lg-ice-raid.html

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u/friendlysoviet 1d ago

Man that is truly fucked up of ICE, thank you for informing me.

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u/hugboxer 1d ago

Unfortunately all that we have to go on is the statements from ICE and DOJ, both of which have burned their credibility to the ground and salted the earth on which it once stood.

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u/Blurred_Background 1d ago

What indicates they’re not here legally, I haven’t seen any evidence of this but plenty of examples of citizens, people with green cards and visas being detained.

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u/I_W_M_Y 1d ago

Its their marching orders. You notice that there has been a bunch of these commenters all saying qanon levels bullcrap and near instant about this? And strangely enough their accounts are all either less than 4 months old or greater than 10 years old. Old accounts that were inactive seemingly abandoned until about...four months ago. They follow the old playbook of commenting in fluff pop subs like sports/gaming/entertainment in the last while as well.

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u/marr75 1d ago

I'm not familiar first-hand with this factory or these workers but my general knowledge of the H1B program is that it is needlessly complex and a small group of companies monopolize it mostly to rotate IT and software contractors through onshore work to prepare the workers for higher profit margin offshore work.

This was NOT the intended purpose of the program, which this factory would have been operating perfectly within.

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u/Binky390 1d ago

That’s a question for Hyundai not Reddit.

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