On Thursday, September 4, agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided a construction site for an LG Energy Solutions battery manufacturing plant in Ellabell, Georgia and arrested 475 people, including approximately 300 South Korean nationals. The raid was an unmitigated disaster for U.S. industrial policy and a black eye for the United States.
The United States lags dangerously behind China in the development of an advanced battery industry. This lag endangers the U.S. economy threatening the long-term loss of a domestic automobile industry. It also endangers U.S. national security by ensuring that U.S. warfighters will be using less advanced and less powerful electronic gear than their potential adversaries.
The U.S. strategy for addressing this dangerous deficiency relies heavily on persuading U.S. allies that have technical knowledge and experience in advanced battery technology to help the U.S. build a secure and robust domestic lithium-ion battery supply chain. Foremost among those allies has been the Republic of Korea. Korean companies have a competence and experience in lithium battery manufacturing technology on par with the Chinese. For the past several years, U.S. industrial policy has focused on persuading Korean companies not just to make investments in U.S. but to send trained experts in battery technology to the United States to help build the U.S. industry and train the U.S. workforce.
The arrests, deportations and humiliations in Ellabell, Georgia were nothing short of a disaster in U.S. industrial policy. The deportation of 300 potential trainers was a shameful own goal. Those actions subverted longstanding U.S. efforts to build a domestic lithium-ion battery supply chain and jeopardize U.S. defense and economic security objectives. Something went badly wrong on September 4. It is important to figure out exactly what happened and to fix it.
Analysis of the Ellabell disaster is hampered by the lack of detailed information about exactly what happened. It appears, perhaps, that most of the Korean workers were employed in tasks for which local U.S. workers were not trained. It also appears, perhaps, that the work papers of most of those workers were technically defective.
If those assumptions are true, then the question is: whose fault was that the work papers were defective? If the presence of Korean workers in Georgia was important to U.S. industrial policy, it was the responsibility of the U.S. government to make sure that those work papers were good. Any defects should have been resolved through administrative with the full assistance of the federal government. The fact that they were resolved through a police raid and deportation smacks of gross incompetence. Ellabell was black eye for America.
At the same time, local U.S. laborers need to be assured that Korean and other foreign laborers working on battery projects are bringing specialized expertise to battery projects in the United States and are not just displacing general domestic labor. The purpose of admitting foreign laborers into the United States should be to train domestic laborers and to encourage the immigration of skilled workers. The U.S. visa system should provide this assurance. The Ellabell disaster clearly demonstrates that it does not.
The U.S. government and U.S. industry need to work together to overhaul the standards for qualifying and admitting to the United States the trained workers who are needed to establish strategic industries. The Ellabell disaster seriously undermined this objective. We need to do better.