I auto-translated the Korean article on this because it has more detail.

https://n.news.naver.com/article/015/0005180971?sid=101

Sounds like the majority of people picked up were in fact Korean citizens working under false pretenses. They used b1 visas and ESTA (non-visa travel authorization) meant for things like personal travel or international meetings, but not productive work like constructing a new facility.

The fact that they were Korean insinuates that they weren’t doing run-of-the-mill construction tasks because that could be handled by local firms (who would probably be hiring local Latino workers): they were probably there for much more technical work.

Hyundai would have known this, and would have been intentionally breaking this law. This sounds to me a lot more like a big company actually getting consequences than what ice has been doing raiding small businesses and home depot parking lots.

Bartering wasn’t made immediately illegal when currency came in. Currency was made to make bartering easier and more fairly divisible.

I pointed this out above, but I think it’s worth repeating: bartering did not exist before currency, or at least there’s no anthropological evidence suggesting it did. People barter when they are used to currency, but don’t have access to any.

Bartering is a replacement for currency. There is no anthropological evidence of bartering existing before the introduction of currency. You would think somewhere there would be, but there’s not.