President Donald Trump has bizarrely claimed he didn’t look too kindly on the massive ICE raid of a Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia.
“I was very much opposed,” the MAGA leader told reporters aboard Air Force One, en route to Japan as part of his wider diplomatic tour of Asia.
Hyundai is a South Korean car giant, and on Oct. 29, Trump will meet with its President Lee Jae Myung, who has previously blasted the raid. She warned the action would have severe consequences for South Korean investment in the U.S.
On Monday, Trump claimed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation had failed to take into account apparently legitimate reasons the South Korean car giant might have brought foreign workers into the U.S.
“When they come in and they’re making very complex machinery, equipment, they’re going to have to bring some people in, at least at the initial phase. In that case, it was batteries,” he said.
“Batteries are very complex and they’re actually very dangerous to make,” he went on. “You can’t just pick people off an unemployment line and say, ‘We just, you know, opened up a $2 billion factory.’ So, we’ve got an understanding, and this is with the world, by the way. This is not just – this is when they come into our country, we have a lot of factories being built by outside by foreign interests.”
The president then proceeded to push his argument even further by suggesting, seemingly at odds with his wider nationwide immigration crackdown, that he thought it alright for foreign investors to “bring in experts” when setting up shop in the U.S.
“They’ve got to bring people in with them for a period of time. They’ll teach our people how to do it, but even for a fairly long period of time, they’re going to need expertise to be successful. And we’re going to let people know,” he said.
“I’m letting them know right now that when they come into our country, we can expect to see them bring in with them some very talented people that have been doing it for many years,” Trump added. “They’ll teach our people how to do it. Our people will be just as good as they are within a period of time and it’ll be a phase out, but we want them to bring in experts and that’s the way it is.”
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