President Donald Trump has said foreign workers sent to the United States are “welcome” and insisted he does not want to “frighten off” investors, ten days after hundreds of South Koreans were arrested at a construction site in Georgia.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump wrote that he did not want to “disincentivize investment” and that he wanted companies to bring “their people of expertise for a period of time to teach and train our people how to make these very unique and complex products”.
The remarks follow the arrest on 4 September of around 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, at the site of an electric vehicle battery factory operated by Hyundai-LG in the south-eastern US state. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alleged that the workers had overstayed their visas or held permits that did not allow them to perform manual labour.
The raid was the largest single-site operation since Mr Trump launched a sweeping immigration crackdown. Although the US decided against deportation, images of workers chained and handcuffed caused widespread alarm in South Korea. Seoul subsequently repatriated the workers on Friday.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called the raid “bewildering” and warned that it could discourage future investment. In his post, Mr Trump listed products such as chips, semiconductors, computers, ships and trains, saying the US needed to learn or relearn how to make them. “We welcome them, we welcome their employees, and we are willing to proudly say we will learn from them,” he wrote.
South Korean trade unions have called on Mr Trump to issue an official apology over the incident.
