South Korean businesses have suspended at least 22 U.S. projects after an ICE raid on a Hyundai Motor factory site in Georgia detained hundreds of South Korean workers.
Some 475 employees, including 300 South Koreans, were taken into custody Thursday at the Savannah-area battery plant. Videos released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials showed the detained workers in shackles and chains. The raid shocked Seoul, a key U.S. ally, where people expressed a sense of betrayal by Washington.
The facility was part of a $4.3 billion joint venture that was slated for completion later this year. It was expected to create 8,500 jobs that would support the car company’s nearby electric vehicle plan, but construction on the factory was put on pause after the raid.
Work on at least 22 other factory sites with ties to South Korea has also been halted, reported The Korean Economic Daily. Those facilities are involved in industries related to automobiles, shipbuilding, steel, and electrical equipment.
South Korean companies with U.S. business interests have canceled travel plans and recalled their U.S.-based staff, fearing that their employees could be affected by more raids.
I’m sure the US Manufacturers will immediately pick up the slack and everything will be just fine. We really don’t need any Korean companies investing in our country. They’re polluting Real American with their foreign ways.
I suspect this will pass and a deal will be made. But clearly Korean businesses are very very pissed off.
Apparently Trump actually stepped in to say that the Korean workers could stay in the country and the workers said “hell no!”
This is part of the reason:
It’s been nearly a century since the first women were forced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japan, but the details of their servitude remain painful and politically divisive in Japan and the countries it once occupied. Records of the women’s subjugation is scant; there are very few survivors and an estimated 90 percent of “comfort women” did not survive the war.
Though military brothels existed in the Japanese military since 1932, they expanded widely after one of the most infamous incidents in imperial Japan’s attempt to take over the Republic of China and a broad swath of Asia: the Rape of Nanking. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops began a six-week-long massacre that essentially destroyed the Chinese city of Nanking. Along the way, Japanese troops raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women.
The mass rapes horrified the world, and Emperor Hirohito was concerned with its impact on Japan’s image. As legal historian Carmen M. Agibay notes, he ordered the military to expand its so-called “comfort stations,” or military brothels, in an effort to prevent further atrocities, reduce sexually transmitted diseases and ensure a steady and isolated group of prostitutes to satisfy Japanese soldiers’ sexual appetites.
“Recruiting” women for the brothels amounted to kidnapping or coercing them. Women were rounded up on the streets of Japanese-occupied territories, convinced to travel to what they thought were nursing units or jobs, or purchased from their parents as indentured servants. These women came from all over Southeast Asia, but most were Korean or Chinese.
Once they were at the brothels, the women were forced to have sex with their captors under brutal, inhumane conditions. Though each woman’s experience was different, their testimonies share many similarities: repeated rapes that increased before battles, agonizing physical pain, pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and bleak conditions.
“It was not a place for humans,” Lee told Deutsche Welle in 2013. Like other women, she was threatened and beaten by her captors. “There was no rest, ”recalled Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipina woman who was forced into prostitution in 1943. “They had sex with me every minute.”
Naturally, Trump thinks this is no big deal.