We're continuing to follow the fallout from the detention and arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a Hyundai-operated plant in Georgia by U.S. immigration authorities. The South Korean government said it's now investigating potential human rights violations during the immigration raid.

“Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour took a closer look at the economic ramifications of this with Stuart Anderson. He’s executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan public policy research organization. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: The allegation here is that a lot of these workers were on visas that allowed them to be here but did not explicitly allow them to do the work that they were doing. Why would a company like Hyundai or its subcontractors choose to use these visas and what were they?

Stuart Anderson: Well, I think what happened, having talked to one of the attorneys, Charles Cook, who represented some of the South Koreans who were arrested, is that they encountered the South Koreans and saw that they were on B-1 visas, and immediately decided that that was unlawful, even though it appears that is incorrect. So it appears that ICE made a mistake. It was another case of other priorities, particularly immigration enforcement, taking precedence over what is really economic common sense. This is a factory that was going to be built to employ 2,000 U.S. workers, and, instead, you're having months’ delay and really a threat to other types of investments like this in the future.

Ben-Achour: Mistakes aside, do you believe that the desire to protect American workers and the need for foreign workers in some situations, is that appropriately balanced in the current U.S. immigration system?

Anderson: It is completely not balanced. U.S. economic growth relies on labor force growth and productivity growth, but we estimate in upcoming analysis, over the next decade, America will have about 15 million fewer workers if the current policies on legal immigration and deportation continue. And that would reduce U.S. economic growth by about one-third annually, which would be a significant negative impact for living standards for average Americans.

Ben-Achour: Some people who hear that will say, “Well, no, we should focus on getting jobs for people here in the U.S. Why would it bring us gain to give those jobs away?” How would you respond to that?

Anderson: Well, the government data show that there's been a decline of about 1.1 million foreign-born workers since the start of the Trump administration, from January to August 2025 but we've seen no benefit for U.S. workers. We've seen, actually, an increase in the unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers. And one of the reasons for that is when employers can't find enough enough workers, they decide not to invest as much. If you and I own a restaurant together, and you say to me, “Why don't we start a second restaurant?” And I say, “Well, you know what, we can't find enough workers now.” We say, “OK, yeah, you're right, you know, maybe we won't open up the second restaurant.” And when you put that across the whole economy, you can see why trying to constrict the labor supply is not an effective economic strategy for creating prosperity.