Last week's raid on a huge electrical battery plant in Georgia, netting 475 illegal aliens, put paid to the myth that those foreigners illegally present in our country only take jobs Americans don't want. Actually, they're like anyone else, and take the good jobs when they can get them.

According to the New York Times:

Immigration officials arrested nearly 500 workers, most of them South Korean citizens, at the construction site of an electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia on Thursday, as the Trump administration continues its far-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration.

The raid, which U.S. officials have called the largest-ever Homeland Security enforcement operation at a single location, stirred tensions with the South Korean government, a valued trade partner of the United States. It also revealed competing interests within the Trump administration between the president’s push to expand manufacturing in the United States and his aggressive efforts to crack down on immigration. The plant at the center of the operation was co-owned by the South Korean carmaker Hyundai.

U.S. immigration authorities said the detained employees — many of them hired by subcontractors to help finish the plant’s construction — were working or living in the United States illegally.

Here's what ran in the press last year at the announcement of the LG plant with its large foreign investment:

Georgia and southeast coastal counties are subsidizing Hyundai and its suppliers in the form of $2.1 billion in tax breaks, construction costs, discount land and other perks, a deal that Gov. Brian Kemp announced would produce good-paying jobs for hard-working Georgians. 

The largesse comes with conditions. Hyundai Metaplant, the LG joint-venture battery facility, and five affiliated Hyundai suppliers must together invest $5.545 billion and hire at least 8,500 workers by 2031 at an average annual yearly salary of $58,105. Those jobs must be retained until 2048. 

Instead of hiring Americans at those living-wage salaries, they hired illegals from their home country, with LG saying it was just the work of rogue subcontractors and they didn't know a thing about it otherwise.

Kind of dubious. 

It calls attention to illegals taking good-paid jobs that Americans want, but it also calls attention to another problem, described by AT contributor Brian Wink last week -- that, employers are actually incentivized by the tax system to hire foreign over domestic workers, even if they have legitimate visas.

In his very well-researched piece, Wink wrote:

That is, the foreign non-resident worker, a class of employee that is hired under several different visa programs, each offering their corporate sponsors a privilege over hiring American workers.

One such privileged program is the F-1 OPT visa worker. F-1 visas are those granted to foreigners studying in the U.S. After graduating from university, these visas can be used for employment in the U.S. via OPT, optional practical training. They give a standard one year of eligibility, but they can be extended to three years for STEM graduates.

These foreign grads are preferred over U.S. grads due to a shocking tax bias, they are not subject to FICA taxes! Neither they, nor their employer, are charged Social Security or Medicare taxes during their F-1 OPT employment. This makes them hireable at a 15.3% discount over Americans.

So the corporation is given a tax benefit for reducing the American citizen employment base, the very base that keeps Social Security and Medicare solvent.

If they're hiring illegal over even visa workers, one wonders what kind of cash they were saving for themselves even as American taxpayers subsidized their venture. Were they paying all relevant taxes, or were they falsely claiming tax exemptions, or what was going on?

The bottom line here is this incident, the result a longtime investigation by ICE, illustrates that at a minimum, illegals were taking good-paying jobs meant for blue-collar Americans and leaving them to perform menial jobs if they could get them.

President Trump has supported the raids, but responded with equanimity in allowing the company to right the matter by sending their own jet to repatriate the illegals and allow them to come back legally with all the right paperwork.

The issue, though, remains. Not every job taken by an illegal is picking strawberries or waiting at Home Depot for spot jobs, or cleaning houses.

Image: Logos, via Wikimedia Commons // CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain 

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