When Republicans listed their achievements in Georgia in the 2024 elections, recent gains in the state’s fast-growing Korean American population ranked high on the list.
Not only had Gov. Brian Kemp made South Korea one of the state’s largest trading partners by then, but Republican Soo Hong, the daughter of Korean immigrants, picked up a contested state House seat in Gwinnett County, where the Korean population increased so quickly it’s now dubbed the “Seoul of the South.” Add President Donald Trump’s improved performance among Asian American voters across the country, and Republicans here were feeling good.
But the Trump administration’s highly publicized raid last week of the sprawling Hyundai Metaplant in Ellabell could put all of that, along with U.S.-Korean diplomatic relations, at risk. As Korean leaders in Georgia told me this week, the images of more than 300 Korean workers being shackled and led away from a factory that Georgia Republicans sought in the first place is a shock that may never be forgotten or forgiven.
“The Korean community will never forget. Korea will never forget,” said Sarah Park, president of the Korean American Coalition in Gwinnett County. “The impact and image and the history will be remembered forever. This is not a one-time thing.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Park had just returned from an emergency trip to Savannah after seeing news reports of more than 500 federal, state and local agents descending on the sprawling Hyundai and LG Energy Solutions plants in South Georgia. Officers detained 475 workers at the construction site, the Department of Homeland Security’s largest ever single workplace enforcement action. Although the department described the site as part of a vast conspiracy to hide and exploit workers, Park said the Korean nationals detained were high-tech professionals, sent by their Korean employers to get the battery operations online.
“Now they are shackled and detained and publicly painted as criminals,” she said.
House Minority Leader Sam Park, a Democrat from Gwinnett County, described the detained workers as specialized engineers and technicians who were in the country temporarily, and legally, to complete the advanced systems being installed on the Ellabell campus. Raiding the site not only racked Gwinnett’s Korean community with fear, he said, it undermined Georgia’s efforts to bring foreign investment to the state in the future.
“It just doesn’t really make any sense, any which way that I look at it, other than trying to grow immigration quotas,” he said.
He also called the raid of Georgia’s premier economic development project a “wake-up call” for the Asian community and said no immigrant population is safe from deportation under Trump, no matter their country of origin or level of expertise.
“This is a very clear example of yet another lie of the Trump administration,” he said. “Their entire focus was to get rid of violent criminals, which everyone supports. But that’s not at all what they’ve actually done.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Everyone I spoke with in Gwinnett County, no matter their party, said it’s too soon to know what the ultimate political impact of the Hyundai raid could be. But they said it shows the immediate need to modernize and expand the country’s work visa program for companies doing business here. Although attorneys for several workers said their clients were working legally, local complaints about foreign laborers had been swirling around the plant for months.
State Rep. Matt Reeves, a Republican from Duluth, has been trying to pass a guest worker expansion since he arrived at the state Capitol two years ago. He met Saturday with Korean leaders in his district to talk about the Hyundai raid and what comes next.
“To see several hundred Koreans on a project that everybody was proud of, then put in jail was upsetting and shocking to them and to me,” Reeves said. He also said the whole event “immediately brought home to me that the Georgia guest worker program I’ve been working on for a couple of years is an idea whose time has come.”
Reeves’ bill would create a Georgia point of contact for businesses to access temporary work visas for the labor they say they desperately need. Although Congress would have to increase the number of visas available, Reeves said the bill could help address a reality the Hyundai raid exposed — an economy that needs immigrant labor and specialized foreign workers to expand and grow, even as it puts Americans to work.
Without Reeves’ solution or something like it, Georgia’s days of announcing multibillion-dollar “metaplants” might be over. Why would an international company agree to come here otherwise?
Along with trying to push his bill next year, Reeves will also face a challenge for his seat in Gwinnett County from Michelle Kang, the same Democrat who ran against him in 2024 and lost by 621 votes. Kang was born in Korea but has since become a U.S. citizen and local community activist. She agreed the raid revealed a structural need to expand and modernize skilled work visas in the U.S. But she blamed the president for the raid itself.
“If President Trump truly wanted to attract Korean companies, he should have provided institutional support to ensure they could contribute to the U.S. economy and create jobs,” she said. “Instead, he undermined Korea-U.S. relations and betrayed that trust.”
Reeves, for his part, said politics should not be a part of the conversation. “I’m out there trying to serve my constituents and solve problems like this. If somebody’s out there trying to score political points off it at a time of heartache and tragedy, shame on them.”
After days of intense diplomatic negotiations, Korean officials announced Tuesday that a chartered plane had been dispatched to Georgia to bring the soon-to-be-released Korean nationals home. But by Wednesday, the plans were off — delayed, they said, by “circumstances on the U.S. side.”
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