Does Seoul Still Have A US Alliance?

On a cloudy afternoon, 330 people arriving at South Korea’s Incheon airport today captured more attention than most of them ever could have imagined.

In any other circumstance, their arrival would have been the most inconspicuous event, but their high-profile detention at a Hyundai-LG battery factory in the United States this past week made that impossible. And the welcome they received reflected not just Korea’s relief at their return but also the widespread anger and resentment their detention sparked across the country.

At the airport, they were welcomed by emotional families, an array of media flashlights, and cheers from officials, which included South Korea’s Presidential Chief of Staff Kang Hoon-sik. Kang apologised to the workers “for not being able to bring them back home sooner”. He told reporters that he had come to the airport to highlight how seriously President Lee Jae Myung was taking the incident that had affected "innocent people of Korea."

Also at the airport was a volley of protesters, many of whom were not shy of expressing just how angry they were at the US. Reuters reported seeing one man unfurl a large poster with US President Donald Trump wearing an outfit with the initials of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. The poster showed Trump holding a bag full of dollar bills and slinging a machine gun across his chest. The caption read: "We're friends!" Another protester told The Guardian that the workers’ detention was a “national humiliation” and “evil behaviour” by the US. “Trump, who do you think you are?” he shouted.

The shocking episode, which has rattled the more than 70-year alliance between the US and South Korea, is very much in line with the deep uncertainty that has become a characteristic of the Trump Administration. It also highlights how foreign companies struggle to bring skilled labour into the US to set-up their investments, with many turning to creative measures to navigate American visa laws.

South Korean firms, for instance, are traditionally required to apply for short-term work visas for specialists needed in their high-tech plants in the US. For years, they have said they struggle to obtain those visas. And that struggle has only intensified under the increasingly strict immigration laws of the Trump administration.

In the past, many of these companies resorted to a looser interpretation of visa rules. Their workers required an H-1B visa to work in the US, which experts say is generally difficult to get. So, as a workaround, many workers turned to a visa waiver programme — dubbed the B-1 — which is a business traveller visa that largely does not allow work. One person who works at the Hyundai-LG factory told Reuters that this had long been a routine practice. Even a Korean foreign ministry official acknowledged the practice in July, saying a lack of proper work visas for contractors forced them to turn to B1 visas to travel to the US quickly.

“The business community, the Korean government and diplomats have been well aware of this problem all along,” an industry insider told the Financial Times.

One Korean equipment technician also told Reuters he had once obtained a B-1 visa by claiming he was a supervisor, rather than an equipment specialist. Another said his application for a B-1 visa to work at the Hyundai-LG factory was rejected earlier this year, without explanation. So he then tried to fly to Mexico and cross the border, but was blocked from boarding the flight in Seoul.

While these moves reflect the desperation of companies to get work done according to their standards — and an urgency among Korean workers to potentially earn better pay by working in the US — they also shed light on the grey areas that led to the raid at the Hyundai-LG factory. CNN says the raid was the result of a months-long investigation. Reports on the visa designations of the detained Korean workers have been mixed, with some saying they had valid visas. But, by all accounts, a significant chunk of them were in the US on the B-1 visa.

Some Korean workers, who chose not to go to the US, told Reuters they — and their companies — had been warned to be careful amid increasing immigration scrutiny in the US. An equipment technician, who previously worked with six of the people arrested in the raid, said: “I warned them they could screw up their lives if they are caught… I begged them not to go to the United States again.​

But it is also clear that many who were arrested had no clue just how much trouble their visa designations could cause. One such worker recounted to The Korea Herald how people at the factory knew beforehand that “a crackdown may take place in the morning”. “But we didn’t think much of it because we didn’t think we had any problems with our visa… Suddenly, at some point, people were being taken away without any explanation,” he said.

TKH reported the worker held the B-1 temporary visitor visa.

Collateral damage

For South Korea, the detention of workers at the Hyundai-LG plant is yet another development that questions the stability of its alliance with the US. Seoul already faces immense uncertainty over a trade deal with the US, even as tariffs weigh heavily on its export-reliant economy. Early this week, the Bank of Korea warned that US tariffs will reduce the country’s growth rate by 0.45 percentage points this year and 0.60 percentage points next year.

And this is not the first time that South Korea will find itself on the short end of the stick due to US policies. For instance, when the US sanctioned Iran under the first Trump presidency, South Korea was hit especially hard as it had been a major importer of Iranian oil. From importing $7.8 billion worth of Iranian oil in 2017, it went down to $2.1 billion by 2019. That year, the Trump administration also stepped up demands to increase payments made to the American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula.

But perhaps the biggest damage to South Korea has come from the trade war between the US and China that has now been raging on for years. “Throughout history, the tenor of US-China relations has had a major impact on the Korean peninsula,” CSIS explained all the way back in 2019. “Caught between its security patron and its giant neighbour, Koreans will be increasingly forced to choose between the two,” it said. And that dynamic has steadily played out in the six years since — be it immense pressure at one time to ban China’s Huawei, which has tight links to Korean tech giants, or, more recently, being forced to restrict semiconductor shipments to China. Giving in to any pressure from the US would also make Korea vulnerable to potential retaliation from China.

All that baggage will make it much harder for the Korean government to manage the fallout from the detention of its workers. It will also complicate the deal it made with Trump to lower US tariffs to 15% from the earlier 25%. The deal is already shrouded in uncertainty as the two are still at odds over the terms of the $350 billion that Korea has committed to investing in the US.

That investment will become even more uncertain now thanks to the raid on the Hyundai-LG plant. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said this week that South Korean companies will now be "very hesitant" about investing in the US. “Korean businesses that have entered the United States are likely in a state of serious bewilderment,” he said. He also said he will “not engage in negotiations that are not rational or just.”

Ongoing negotiations will also be complicated by emerging reports of how workers in the US were treated while in detention. One worker told The Korea Herald they had no privacy and open bathrooms “that felt like a violation of basic rights.” A Korean newspaper described the workers being treated like “prisoners of war”.

On Monday, Chosun Ilbo, the country’s conservative daily newspaper, called on the Korean government to convey to the US that “the South Korean public is now questioning whether it should continue investing in America.” “It inevitably raises fundamental questions about what ‘alliance’ really means to the US,” Chosun Ilbo wrote, according to the New York Times. The paper has traditionally advocated for strong ties with the US.​

Still, presidential chief of staff Kang has said the raid will only be a “new beginning” as the Korean government will “actively pursue improvements to the US visa issuance and residency system, including the creation of a new visa category”. Efforts in that regard have already begun.​

But Kang also expressed frustration with the constant twists and turns that changing American governments bring with them. "The standard changes every time and constantly there has to be deal-making, not only on tariffs, but it'll also be the case with security issues," he said.

And that’s a dynamic that countries across the world will have to reckon with — if one of America’s closest allies is this vulnerable, how might anyone else be spared?

• Tariffs on cars made in China and many other Asian nations are set to face tariffs of up to 50% in Mexico.

• Japanese carmaker Toyota plans to start making two battery-powered sport utility vehicles at its US factory in Kentucky.

• The Adani group in India has stopped allowing vessels sanctioned by the European Union, the US and Britain at any of its ports.
  

• And deadly anti-graft protests in Nepal – sparked by a now-removed social media ban — have forced the country’s prime minister KP Sharma Oli to step down.