This is One Thing. I'm David Rind, and this is what happens when mass deportations meet dollars and cents.

Today I have received calls from three large companies to ask if it is safe to allow their workers to come to the United States and do installation sales and service.

Stick with us! September 4th started out like any other workday at the sprawling Hyundai electric vehicle plant being built in Elibel, Georgia. This is a small town just outside of Savannah, less than 10,000 residents. The plant is expected to be a major employer in the region. Well, on that morning, construction equipment was humming, machinery was being installed, but then police cars started arriving. A security perimeter was established. Overhead helicopters began circling.

Georgia State Patrol!

Before long, the campus was swarming with hundreds of officers from several different agencies and it was clear an immigration raid was underway.

We're Homeland Security, we have to search more for the whole site. We need construction to cease immediately. We need all work to end on the site right now.

One construction worker told CNN it was like a war zone.

Chaos ensued with many workers attempting to flee and some even running into a sewage pond and others hiding in air ducts.

By nightfall, the operation was over, and 475 people had been taken into custody, most of them Korean nationals. Simply put, this was one of, if not the largest, single site immigration raid in American history. So what does this mean for this business and how President Donald Trump does business with other countries?

If ICE had just picked up everybody who was working illegally, we likely wouldn't be having this conversation today. But ICE picked up lots of people who were legally working on site.

Charles Cook is an immigration lawyer who is representing at least a dozen workers who were detained, both Koreans and Latinos. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is disputing what the Department of Homeland Security says happened here.

Good morning and thank you all for coming.

Special Agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for Georgia, Steven Schrank, insisted after the raid that the 475 people who were arrested were either not supposed to be here or not supposed to be working here.

Some that illegally crossed the border into the United States. Some that came in through visa waiver and were prohibited from working. Some that had visas and overstayed their visas.

The agency also says this was a raid months in the making after it gathered evidence, conducted interviews and secured a search warrant as it looked into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes. But Cook believes the story is not that simple.

I don't dispute the fact that they did months of work in advance. That's quite true. They clearly were very focused on some undocumented immigrants that were working in the construction aspect of this location. But what they were clearly not anticipating was that there was a lot of Korean workers specifically. Doing the service installation at the physical plant after it was physically constructed through subcontractors of Hyundai, products that we don't make in the United States, that we do not service in the Unites States and that we did have no experience working with the United states. So I would object to them saying that they were prepared for this because they clearly were not.

So, as you understand it, the Koreans who were there doing this work, they were there and thought that they were all good to go doing this work for the company at this factory.

'You know, it's immigration law is complex and unfortunately it's complex because we have a congress who refuses to make it less complex. So for example, if I as a US employer or a foreign company investing in a huge plant in the United States say, I need to buy this piece of equipment from let's say Japan because the company that makes it is only located in Japan. There's no supplier. But they must bring in individuals to literally transport it. Install it and service it to get it operational before I can hire U.S. Workers to run it. We don't have a visa that easily fits that category. So what we do is we have a business visitor program. And you would think a visitor visa is somebody going to Disneyland. And it's also somebody coming for what's called after sales, service and installation. So the vast majority is Korean and other workers That we're physically in. The completed buildings were in fact doing after-sales service installation pursuant to a valid either B1 visa stamp in their passport or under what's called the ESTA, the E-S-T-A program, which can help Americans understand when you go to London on a business meeting, you don't need a visa. You just go. And then while you're there, you take care of it at the airport. You take care. That's what ESTA is. And so ESTA allows you to come either as a tourist to go to Disneyland or to come do this type of work. Keep in mind, every one of these individuals on ESTA went through an inspection and the people with visas actually had two inspections, they had an interview with the consulate to explain what they were doing and got approved and then once again when they arrived at the airport here. So these individuals being here should have been no surprise to anybody who really had done a proper investigation.

But you don't think any of them were overstaying those visas that they were on.

As far as we know, there's not a single overstay of any of these individuals. I know the Koreans that I represent, several of them came last Tuesday and were leaving this week. They were coming for short bursts of time.

Hyundai, for its part, says none of the people detained were direct employees, they worked for subcontractors. In a statement, the carmaker said they're reviewing the vetting of employment practices by contractors and subcontactors and insists they have zero tolerance for those who don't follow the law. Meanwhile, South Korea, a country not exactly known for outward expressions of anger, is clearly upset. On Tuesday, its president called the raid an unjust infringement on the rights of Korean people and businesses operating in the U.S. And said he hopes it never happens again. In fact, the government is chartering a flight this week to pick up the detained Koreans and bring them back to Seoul. Is that a normal procedure when you have a raid like this?

This is major headlines. These are not random Koreans off the street over here working pounding nails on a construction site. These are engineers, these are highly trained technicians, these people with decades of experience in these products. And they are professionals in their home country. They're well respected in their own country. So I would imagine the phone lines are burning up between the president's office there and the White House and Secretary Rubio's office. So highly unusual a country sends a plane over, but they don't want their people sitting in a random jail in South Georgia.

So you think this was a total surprise for a lot of these Koreans who were there working on this stuff?

I wouldn't even use the word surprise, I would say shocking. It's gotta be shocking to most of them, certainly to my clients is absolutely, they still don't understand what happened because they were doing exactly what they were told they were authorized to do.

So what message do you think the Trump administration is trying to send here? If what you say is true, and these were skilled folks here on these legitimate visas trying to install this equipment.

Well, I'm going to give President Trump a little bit of credit here. He did talk about this yesterday.

We heard about it yesterday. At the same time ICE was doing right, because they were here illegally. But we do have to work something out where we bring in experts so that our people can be trained so that they can do it themselves. Does that make sense?

'I don't think the administration in D.C. Knew that they were going to arrest Koreans. In fact, I think the arrest of the Koreans from people that I've talked to suggest was literally made on the spot. ICE thought they were gonna arrest 200 Latinos. That's what they planned for. That's the busses they had. That's personnel they had, and- The decision on site to simply say, let's take everybody and sort it out later appears to have been done without approval in Washington DC near as I can tell.

We reached out to DHS about Cook's claim that agents came in planning to arrest Latinos. They called allegations of ICE law enforcement officers engaging in any kind of racial profiling disgusting and categorically false and stressed that no indiscriminate stops are being made. We should also say no one involved here has been charged with a crime. What do you think the impacts of this incident could be for foreign businesses like Hyundai who are considering whether to invest in a plant here in America?

Today I have received calls from three large companies to ask if it is safe to allow their workers to come to the United States and do installation sales and service.

Oh wow.

This is going to have a massive impact and this is industries throughout the country in a lot of different areas, not just in batteries and in cars. If we want to create manufacturing jobs in the United States and we don't actually have the fabrication of the machinery used in that fabrication, then how are we going to create fabrication jobs? How are we gonna create factory jobs? We need to build the factories first and we have lost the ability to build factories. Now maybe in five years we can do this without support from Korea or Japan or Germany, but right now we need that support and I think we're about to lose some of it because of these actions.

Charles Kuck is the founding partner of the immigration law firm Kuck Baxter. We got to take a quick break, but when we come back, CNN Business Senior Writer Alison Morrow will tell us why South Korea just learned a tough lesson about dealing with Donald Trump.

CNN's Allison Morrow is back with us, returning champion of the podcast. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So I want to step back and peel out some of the context. A big company like Hyundai comes over to the US and they want to build a plant in the States. What kind of employees are actually working on that stuff?

A lot of this work on EV plants is done primarily in Asia. The United States really is pretty new to this technology, so we don't have a ton of workers just sitting around waiting for employment on these kinds of very sophisticated new technologies. So what will happen is a company like Hyundai will bring over its own workers. And that's for a few reasons. Like one, it's the specialty of the work. So that they can train an American workforce. But then there's also the IP aspect. There's intellectual property that these companies like Hyundai, the semiconductor companies in Taiwan are very careful about protecting and keeping proprietary. So that's another reason for the kind of emphasis on bringing your own staff over, at least to set things up and to get workers trained up on how to do these things day to day.

And so this immigration attorney that I spoke to earlier, he said that the kind of visas and waivers that a lot of these workers get, allow them to work for a short period of time. Do we know if workers doing this kind of work regularly overstay those visas? How do companies view this kind arrangement?

'Yeah, so it's kind of just a big open secret in international commerce in America. So if you talk to industry trade groups in Korea and executives have been lobbying for several administrations in a row, it seems, to get a more tailored visa, an easier visa to get their workers to come over here for a short period of time. You know, that could be one to two years. It could be three, four years. Right now, those visas are capped, and the Trump administration in particular has had a high rate of denial for their, they're called H-1B visas that allow workers to stay for more than just a few months.

What do we know about this plan itself in Georgia? Because I think when it was announced a few years ago, a lot of local leaders were really hyped about it, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It was several billion dollars of investment that would benefit the local economy. So on Monday, The Financial Times reported that the open secret about Korean workers in particular overstaying their visas was very well known in Georgia because there has been a lot of Korean investment in the state.

When we heard that an employer of Hyundai's caliber was looking to make a generational commitment somewhere in our region, we jumped to the opportunity.

The governor of Georgia, who's a Trump ally, has been to Korea twice in recent years to try to encourage these investments from Korean companies because it benefits the state, ultimately.

As you all know, our partnership approach isn't just about Georgia working with companies, it's about leaders at every level of the public and private sector coming together.

And then, of course, there's been the backlash because Brian Kemp has basically said, like, we're going to follow the immigration laws and we support the raid.

And this is the whole goal of President Donald Trump's economic agenda, right? Is to get more investment in the US, have American workers kind of building some of this stuff. So in theory, this plant would be kind of the gold standard for what he's kind of after here. And yet you have this raid that has kind of brought work to a complete standstill. Is that going to make other companies rethink this whole foreign investment thing?

I think it has to. I mean, imagine you are a foreign company and you want to get access to the biggest consumer market on the planet. That's America. You want to play by the government's rules so that you can get access to the market. South Korea did everything by the book and it played to Trump's agenda.

The Korean people have great expectations for you, Mr. President. Thank you once again for your time.

Well, thank you very much, it's an honor to be with you.

Just a few weeks ago, as apparently ICE was preparing this raid, the president of South Korea was in the Oval Office.

So I think that America is becoming great again.

With Donald Trump and they were touting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from Korean companies in American manufacturing.

I believe that there is a renaissance taking place not only in the shipbuilding sector but also in the manufacturing industry and I hope that Korea can be a part of that renaisance.

'And as you know, that was a huge campaign promise by the president to create this manufacturing renaissance. I think it speaks to a kind of simplistic notion that Trump has displayed of how manufacturing actually works. There aren't actually a ton of Americans who want those entry-level, low-paid, low skilled jobs. And The reality of setting up shop in America is very, very complicated from a logistical perspective, not just because of the limitations on the visas, but the actual technology is very very specialized.

And Trump himself seems to realize the pickle he's in. He was saying the other day that he wants to set up a system where more American workers can be trained on that kind of stuff. Is that realistic?

I think it's realistic, but it has to, you know, I was thinking about this a lot. Like when I was a cub reporter, I moved to Hong Kong for a few years. And Hong Kong makes it very, very systematic and very easy to get a visa. I didn't have to stress about it. I wasn't worried that I would, you know, be swept up in a raid and have my documentation questioned. And there just wasn't that uncertainty. Reality of getting workers to come here means that they have to trust that they're going to be safe and not have to have their families worry back home if they're not going to make it back.

And here you have a very complicated immigration system and a president who wants to enforce immigration laws to the max and you get a situation where something like this in Georgia plays out the other.

'Yeah, it's a clash of his two priorities, which are anti-immigration and pro-manufacturing, and one requires the other. It's hard to overstate how big of a deal this is, not just for the business community, but for America's decades-long relationship with South Korea. We have huge and deep military ties and business ties and cultural ties to Korea. And over the weekend, I think a lot of Americans might have just kind of seen that there was an immigration raid, and that's become kind of normal for us. Yeah. But I want to imagine what Americans would... Respond to if they saw 300 American citizens being swept up in an immigration raid and potentially taken to derelict holding facilities or just being swept up unfairly. And so in Korea, that's what they were seeing. And there is a huge sense of outrage in the country. It feels like a slap in the face, like we just committed $350 billion in investment and this is how you treat our people. Could threaten to chill ties culturally in the business community going forward.

Alison, thank you.

Thanks so much.

That's it for us today, thank you for listening. Quick plea for me, please leave us some rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people discover the show. We'll be back on Sunday and I will talk to you then.