The immigration raid last week on an electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia owned by two South Korean manufacturers was yet another setback for what had been a fast-growing industry in the United States.
The sector was already beleaguered by lower-than-expected demand for electric vehicles, tariffs on raw materials and the rapid phaseout of a federal tax credit for purchases of E.V.s, which have led companies to delay or scale back production.
But the raid at the plant under construction in Ellabell, Ga., which is owned by the carmaker Hyundai and battery supplier LG Energy Solution, raised more risks for foreign manufacturers in the United States. Immigration officials arrested 475 people. Of them, about 300 were South Korean citizens, according to the South Korean foreign minister’s office.
It is not yet clear how many of those detained by ICE last week were building the plant and how many were workers brought in to install and calibrate specialized equipment, or to train the local work force.
Some American workers in the area have complained that they have not been given a fair chance at employment at the $7.6 billion taxpayer-subsidized complex, which has been billed as the largest economic development project in Georgia’s history.
These labor tensions have been building as the federal government, seeking a stronger foothold in the battery business, has wooed foreign companies to expand manufacturing on U.S. soil.
The United States is relatively new to making these batteries. The leading manufacturers are headquartered in Asia, and they typically bring engineers and technicians from their home countries to set up new factories, where assembly lines of robots coat, slice and assemble the components that help power a car. Much of the battery cell technology is proprietary, and there is little margin for error.
“When you don’t have a whole cohort of people who know how to run cell-making factories, you rely heavily on the folks from the home factory,” said Celina Mikolajczak, who was been an executive at battery companies including Panasonic.
That practice has not gone over well with American labor unions that want those jobs, said Betony Jones, who was director of the office of energy jobs at the Department of Energy during the Biden administration.
“E.V. battery companies are very secretive about I.P., so they were bringing in their own workers when it came to installing their machines and maintaining their machines,” she said, referring to intellectual property. “But unions were really pushing for that work.”
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Over the weekend, LG Energy Solution said it suspended all U.S. business trips except for customer meetings, conferences and exhibitions, and advised all traveling employees to “immediately return home or remain at their accommodations, considering their current work status.”
The company’s pullback comes as investment in U.S. battery manufacturing was beginning to slow. Tesla’s success in popularizing electric vehicles, paired with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act three years ago, brought a flood of money to the sector. Companies poured roughly $80 billion into U.S. battery manufacturing since the middle of 2022, up from around $10 billion in the three years earlier, according to Rhodium Group, a research firm that tracks investments with M.I.T.’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
But the business outlook was darkening as E.V. sales fell behind many companies’ lofty expectations. The Trump administration’s efforts this year to raise trade barriers and remake federal energy policy to be more favorable toward fossil fuels introduced new uncertainty and financial challenges. Perhaps most notably, starting next month, electric vehicles will no longer be eligible for a $7,500 tax credit that had helped make the cars more affordable for many buyers.
Other critical sectors have used labor from abroad as they build in the United States. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for example, relied heavily on labor from Taiwan at its plant on the outskirts of Phoenix.
The raid has also caused outrage in Seoul, where major media outlets ran articles highlighting the poor conditions in which Korean workers would be held, and included a photograph released by ICE of the workers being arrested. News outlets also focused on the difficulty South Korean companies experience in securing work visas for the technicians they need to complete plants in the United States.
South Koreans can enter the United States without a visa for 90 days under a visa-waiver program that allows them to participate in tourism or attend some business meetings, but not full-time work, according to Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research think tank. A temporary business visa, known as B-1, allows for short-term training and consulting, but not full-time construction work.
On Sunday, the two countries reached a deal to free those detainees and send them home to South Korea via a chartered plane, according to Kang Hoon-sik, the chief of staff for President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea.
Still, the sweeping nature of the raid could make skilled technicians more apprehensive about coming to the United States, even for short stints. That could increase the cost of establishing new U.S. factories and slow construction.
“The current situation is creating a dilemma,” said Andrew Yi, a Seoul-based partner for Roland Berger, a consulting firm. Strict enforcement of certain visa rules “would in the short term delay the completion of the factories that are going up.”
Barry Zeigler, business manager of Local 188, a union that represents plumbers, pipe-fitters, welders and HVAC service technicians for 15 counties in Georgia, said South Koreans were working as welders and pipe-fitters in the Georgia plant — jobs that he said should have been given to Americans. He said he had visited the plant in the past, adding that about 65 members of his union were hired by subcontractors to lay pipes there, but were let go a few months ago.
“People think the Koreans are here to do a special job; that’s B.S.,” he said, adding that politicians had turned a deaf ear to his complaints about the factory until the raid.
The plant has been dogged for months by investigative reports by the local TV station WTOC about poor safety conditions and widespread use of unauthorized laborers. At least three workers have died at the megasite, including a man identified as Sunbok You, who was run over by a forklift in March, according to local law enforcement. The police report obtained by the station identified the forklift driver as Sunhwam Bae, who spoke to officers through a translator.
LG Energy Solution has faced safety issues at other plants as well. A contractor died this summer at a battery plant in Holland, Mich., after he got stuck in a machine. And this past weekend, 15 people from the same facility were hospitalized after a chemical spill, according to local news reports.
Ms. Jones, the former Biden administration official, said American workers had a right to be angry if E.V. battery manufacturers were cutting corners with safety and declining to hire and train American workers.
“There are a lot of battery factories being built across the U.S. and their workers are not dying,” she said.
In a statement, LG Energy Solution said the company prioritizes “the safety and well-being of our team” and that its $25 billion investment in North American manufacturing would create about 14,000 jobs in the United States by 2027. Hyundai said the company was “committed to maintaining the highest safety standards.” It also said its employees “are required to comply fully with U.S. laws and regulations.”
The politics are awkward for Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who embraced the Biden administration’s clean energy policies, showering the project with an estimated $2 billion in tax credits and incentives in a bid to make Georgia the “electric mobility capital of the country.” President Trump has relentlessly attacked both electric vehicles and Mr. Kemp, who resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020 election results in Georgia.
Marie Hodge Gordon, director of communications at the Georgia Department of Economic Development, released a statement that emphasized the fact that electric cars — the Hyundai IONIQ 5 — have already begun rolling off the assembly line at the auto plant on the site. It stressed that the incentives for the project “are based on new, long-term Georgia jobs, not the roles under investigation by law enforcement.”
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
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