Over in Montgomery, where some 4,000 people work at Hyundai’s first U.S. assembly plant, the Montgomery Biscuits minor league team hosts a Kimchi Night every summer.

Drive east on I-85 toward Atlanta, and you will pass the occasional billboard in Korean. There are at least a dozen Korean-owned spinoff plants scattered through Tuskegee, Auburn and Opelika.

When they locate plants in the United States, foreign manufacturers avoid states where other countries have operations and try to group their plants in the most efficient way. So it’s no surprise that at the other end of this string of plants making things for South Korean vehicles, you cross the Chattahoochee and come upon the massive West Point Kia plant, which currently employs 3,000.

To say that South Korean businesses and the gove

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