Kemp Interview: Governor Says Korea Trip Changed the Narrative, Cleared the Air After ICE Raid

Despite the circumstances, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s third trip to South Korea in late October felt more like a homecoming than damage control.

Sitting down with executives at Hyundai Motor Group, SK Group, CJ Group, Hanwha, JS Link and other investors was more like checking in on friends than leading a formal mission, he told Global Atlanta during a sit-down interview Oct. 29 in Tokyo. Refreshingly, some even dispensed with the customary gift exchanges.

But the broader atmosphere, even as Georgia marked 40 years with an office in Korea, was not all chummy. 

While Mr. Kemp says the trip was planned before the fateful Sept. 4 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on the Hyundai Metaplant site, it took on a serious tone as the governor set about reassuring investors that the state remains committed to their long-term success. 

Given the Hyundai plant’s location near Savannah, the prominence of the companies involved, and the treatment some 300 Korean workers received at the hands of ICE, Georgia was the subject of near wall-to-wall news coverage in Asia in September. 

Many pundits wondered aloud how workers from an allied country, present to outfit an LG-Hyundai joint-venture battery factory that would employ thousands of Georgians, could be shackled, detained and ultimately sent home. 

Some Korean companies reportedly cited the incident when delaying or canceling investment plans elsewhere in the U.S. 

Hyundai, for its part, doubled down on Georgia. 

“We obviously knew what we were walking into,” Mr. Kemp told Global Atlanta. “The press that we’d seen in Korea really, in some ways, wasn’t real fair to the state, but it was what it was: You know, perception is reality.” 

Many failed to see the distinction, he said, between the roles of the state and the national governments — one that Mr. Kemp pressed in discussions with the press and top government officials, including Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo and Foreign Minister Cho Hyun. 

Mr. Kemp spent a lot of explaining not only the policy recommendations he’s passing up to Mr. Trump, but also the fact that any action on immigration remains a federal responsibility. 

That said, the governor has also sought to be a constructive go-between for companies and the president, where his status as a prominent Republican leader has afforded him access, both during the incident and in its aftermath. 

Even before the workers left U.S. soil, Mr. Trump expressed a desire to allow them to stay. And when Mr. Kemp checked in with the White House before his trip, he was asked to relay the message that visas were being expedited for them to return. 

“I think we had the first plane load of folks coming back (Oct 29) — smooth sailing through the airport, through customs, back on-site, and the White House was very aware of that and working to make that successful,” Mr. Kemp said. “I’ve made it very clear that I cannot change the visa process or the (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) process, but I’ve pushed up ideas, and then I’ve also asked for help on certain issues, and they have responded.” 

A Manufacturing Visa for Foreign Investors?

The issue isn’t just confined to Georgia, though, the governor said, citing conversations with his counterpart Bill Lee of Tennessee while they were both in Japan for the SEUS-Japan alliance conference.

“One of the things I’ve talked about is having a manufacturing-type visa, because this isn’t like an IT employee that’s coming in and is going to work for several years. This is somebody that’s coming for, at the most, probably 90 days to set a big piece of equipment, calibrate it, get it up and running, train the employees that are going to be permanent workers on how to maintain the machine, how to run the machine. And then they’re going to go back to Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada, wherever. And the president, you know, really understands that issue,” the governor said. 

That said, the incident has also underscored that companies from Korea and elsewhere should be vigilant about compliance, he said. It’s not the first time Korean companies have faced visa issues or pushback from local officials, though communications with the state had generally been sufficient to avoid the type of blowup that befell Hyundai-LG. 

Perhaps a silver lining from this incident, he said, is that it has policy makers thinking about ways to make the process clearer, while making clear the cost of cutting corners. 

During the 30-minute interview, Mr. Kemp implied that his meeting in Seoul with LG Energy was more testy than the others, given that the ICE incident caught up their direct workers and contractors. (Hyundai said no one on its payroll was affected).

“The companies over (in Seoul), really other than LG, were very, very appreciative of what we’re doing. I think LG is very appreciative too. They were just kind of shellshocked in some ways. But also, I was very frank with them as well. It wasn’t all harmless on their side of things too. There were issues on the site that led to what happened. Even if you think it could have been handled a different way, there were still almost 100 people there working illegally.” 

Asked whether heavy-handed enforcement would inevitably lead to this type of problem, Mr. Kemp said he doesn’t see any contradiction in securing the border and welcoming foreign investors, pointing to voter frustration with former President Biden’s handling of this issue as a key reason Mr. Trump was elected. 

Hailing from Athens, where nursing student Laken Riley was murdered by an undocumented migrant, only underscored in Mr. Kemp’s mind what he views as failures by Democrats on the issue during their time in control of government from 2020-22. 

“It was unsustainable and was putting pressure on housing, rent prices, communities getting overrun, not to mention all the bad people that were coming into the country and are still in our country. And so I think people were demanding something that be done,” he said. “I think the public has a lot of different views of that. I think there’s probably people in the Trump administration who have different views of that, but I’m absolutely for locking the border down, having an orderly immigration process.”

Investors, he noted, have to make sure they’re communicating with authorities about what they need, rather than trying to take matters into their own hands when facing challenges getting their workers into the country.

“I get being humane and other things, but people need to come through in the right way, and companies need to employ people the right way. And if they’re having trouble with that, they need to reach out to political leaders and say, ‘This is what we need. This is what we’re having trouble with,’ and let us work through those things.”

That’s especially important given that the ICE raid seems to have come after complaints to the agency from local leaders about migrant activity on the Hyundai site, he said.

“The best companies in Korea and Japan, they have their people on the ground in these local communities communicating — communicating with us, communicating with the local economic developers and the local elected officials, so people know what they’re doing. They trust them, respect them, and it helps cut down on the old line that you always hear, that they’re taking American workers’ (jobs).” 

Changing the Narrative in Korea

The Korea trip, and the couple of positive news cycles it helped generate, seems to have “changed the tenor of the message over there,” Mr. Kemp said. 

In many ways, he sees it as reverting to the broader tone of goodwill in the overall relationship, which has been largely positive for Georgia as billions of dollars in Korean investment have poured in. 

That started under his predecessor, Nathan Deal, who welcomed SK Battery to the state with a $2.6 billion investment in Commerce that broke ground in 2019, just after Mr. Kemp took office.

The second-term governor has presided over several record-breaking years of foreign investment recruitment, driven largely by Korean companies.

Hyundai is working with LG on a battery plant on its Meta Plant site and simultaneously moving forward on another joint-venture battery site in partnership with SK in Cartersville. Hanwha Q Cells, a solar panel maker, is investing $2.5 billion-plus in northwest Georgia factories. 

All of the above will be affected by the removal of incentives for renewable energy and electric vehicles with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Mr. Trump’s signature budget law.

Even with his focus on making Georgia the U.S. capital for electric mobility, Mr. Kemp isn’t worried about these tax credits sunsetting, seeing them as Biden-era government largesse that drove up inflation and distorted the electric vehicle market. Read: Kemp: Georgia’s Electric Vehicle Success Driven by More Than Subsidies

He pointed out that SK and Hyundai were announced before the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, though some Korean investors have credited that law with de-risking moves to migrate their supply chains to the U.S. 

On that issue, Mr. Kemp said he hoped that Mr. Trump’s trade policies would take into account that strategic industries that have left the U.S. would take a while to come back, meaning that imports of experts and parts from abroad should be expected during the transition.

“We’ve tried to give feedback to the administration and say, ‘Look, these folks are doing as you want. They’re going to hire American workers when they get these plants built, but they’re taking a hit because they can’t get this machinery anywhere else.’” 

Mr. Kemp’s visit to Japan coincided with that of Mr. Trump, who announced a raft of Japanese investment and partnership pledges after a meeting with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. In return, the U.S. plans to cut Japan’s overall tariff rate to 15 percent.

The president then went on to Korea, where he met with President Lee Jae-myung before meeting with Xi Jinping of China in Busan as both traveled to the APEC summit in Korea.

Whatever happens on the national (and international) policy level, Georgia’s celebration of four decades in Korea shows that the state is committed to its core focus: serving companies, Mr. Kemp said.

“I told the companies and the media especially: We’re not going to let one incident, or one tough problem, end an incredible 40-year relationship,” he said. “We have those relationships so we can work through these issues.”

“We’re not going to let one incident, or one tough problem, end an incredible 40-year relationship. We have those relationships so we can work through these issues.”

governor brian Kemp