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Korea grappling with multicultural society

Under the banner of "multiculturalism," Korea is pondering ways to deal with its growing number of foreign residents.
The nation's immigration and naturalization policies, however, appear to be rudimentary and favor only a select class of wealthy investors and highly-skilled professionals.

Experts warn that the policies could eventually backfire because they do not genuinely promote "multiculturalism" but center on making immigrants "unilaterally assimilated" into mainstream society.


"Thoroughly assessing the diverse needs of immigrants, such policies should take the form of forums or interactions between immigrants and Koreans, and between immigrants and the government, not the form of one-sided unilateral education with little regard for their cultural identities," said Park Hwa-seo, a professor in the immigration management department at Myongji University in Seoul. Some are even leery that such policies stratify Korea's foreign residents, ranking them by status and possibly planting the seeds of future social unrest. This has been witnessed in other countries that have paid heavy prices for their botched immigration policies.

Currently, the number of foreign residents here stands at about 1.14 million, or more than 2 percent of the total population, according to the Korea Immigration Service. The number is expected to rise to 2.9 million in 2020, or about 5 percent of the population.


Participants form heart-shapes with their arms during an event to boost harmony between foreign workers and their Korean employers in Seoul early this month. [Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald]

Of them, migrant workers accounted for the largest portion with 496,000, followed by 50,000 foreign students, 30,000 high-skilled professionals and 4,600 workers in arts and athletics. The number of international marriages in Korea rose from 3,315 in 2004 to 4,208 in 2005, 6,187 in 2006 and 8,828 in 2007, according to the National Statistical Office. International unions accounted for about 11.1 percent of the total marriages last year.

Some 40 percent of Korean men working in the agriculture, forestry and fishery industries got married to foreign wives in 2007. Their foreign spouses come from about 124 nations, including Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.

Overlapping policies

With the nation turning increasingly multicultural, the government has been carrying out various measures to promote social integration among foreign residents here.

The Justice Ministry established the Korea Immigration Service in May of last year to comprehensively deal with social integration, immigration and naturalization tasks.

The ministry also enacted the nation's first law aimed at guaranteeing better treatment for foreigners in Korea in July 2007. However, the law has been criticized for not including any strict clauses that are legally binding.

The Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs has a "one-stop service" in place for foreign wives at 80 special centers nationwide. The centers plan to use 960 language teachers to visit 5,760 individual families this year to teach Korean. To help foreign wives raise their children here, the ministry also plans to send about 1,600 child experts to assist 10,240 families this year. With a special law to support multicultural families to take effect in September, the ministry also plans to establish a comprehensive support foundation for these families.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has run educational centers in multiculturalism since last November. The Ministry of Gender Equality is operating an around-the-clock emergency phone counseling center (1366) in six languages, including English and Chinese, and five facilities to protect foreign wives from possible domestic violence.

The Labor Ministry is implementing the Employment Permit System, which offers the same legal status that Korean workers have.

Experts argue that a coordination body needs to be set up to clear overlapping programs run by ministries and curtail spending.

For instance, three ministries -- the Justice Ministry, the Culture Ministry and the Welfare Ministry -- are operating Korean-language education programs.

"Without coordination in what they call 'multiculturalism policies,' they appear to be competitively trying to create similar programs, supposedly to strengthen their influence within the government," said Park, the professor at Myongji University.

Lee Choul-seoung, director of the Migrant Workers' Council, says the roles of each ministry should be separated with a clear distinction between functions of "regulating foreign residents" and "encouraging multiculturalism."

"Now, the Justice Ministry in charge of enforcing regulatory policies is also running programs encouraging multiculturalism, which is contradictory," Lee said. "Tracking down and punishing illegal workers while pursuing social integration is nonsense."

Lee added that a special body should be established under the Prime Minister's Office to efficiently manage immigration policies including budgeting support programs for foreign residents.

Government officials, however, say that having one agency deal with all matters is difficult given the complicated nature of policies fostering multiculturalism in society.

"Multiculturalism policies involve various aspects such as health, medicine, labor and human rights," said Yi Ki-jeong, chief of the multiculturalism policy team at the Culture Ministry.

"When each ministry is carrying out their own programs with their own specialty, creating a new government agency with all functions combined is unrealistic."

"Although our ministry has specialty in Korean language teaching, it is difficult for the ministry alone to teach all of the immigrants. Instead, we take charge of the work of developing and providing textbooks and other materials."

Appreciating various cultures

Many experts concur that immigration polices should be conducted in the sense of providing information about Korea, and not "unilaterally" forcing them to learn about the nation.

"Interactions between immigrants and Koreans, and between immigrants and the government, are vital in carrying out policies for social integration as they are all grownups with a firm sense of pride in their own culture," said Park. Many also note that immigration policies must focus on cultivating a climate of appreciating various cultures and promoting harmonious coexistence in society.

"The government-led programs about Korean language and culture are run to cater to the immediate needs of immigrants, but with a focus on eventually making them unilaterally integrated in Korean society," said Yi.

"The culture that has formatively influenced one's identity would not be easily removed despite being exposed to a different culture," Yi added. "Such assimilation policies aimed at making them integrated in the mainstream culture could serve as factors that would relentlessly trigger conflicts, which could stir social unrest beyond personal turmoil."

Experts also underscored the need for the government to educate Korean students and citizens to understand and keep harmony with people of different races and ethnicities.

Korea's high school text books still show what critics call "an anachronistic misconception" that Korea is ethnically and racially homogeneous.

Foreign wives

Foreign wives have to wait for about four to five yeas, on average, to obtain Korean citizenship, without which they have to remain foreigners.

To be eligible to apply for citizenship, a foreign wife must live with her Korean husband for two years, or has to be married for three years, including at least one year of residence in Korea.

Once the citizenship application is filed with one of the 14 immigration offices across the nation, officials will examine the applicants regarding the possibility that she is disguising her marital status to land a job here or engaging in other illegal activities.

If she has a child with her Korean husband, authorities would that conclude she is actually married to a Korean man and will not conduct the inquiry. In this case, it still takes an applicant more than 14 months to obtain citizenship, mainly due to a shortage of staff handling the requests, officials said. If the applicant has no child, the immigration office will launch an inquiry which, in most cases, takes about 26 months.

The number of foreign spouses applying for citizenship here has jumped from 2,796 in 2002 to 13,908 in 2007, according to the Korea Immigration Service. The numbers of people granted citizenship are 2,126 in 2002, 5,456 in 2003, 5,690 in 2004, 7,075 in 2005, 3,344 in 2006 and 4,190 in 2007. The figure dropped in 2006 as the naturalization work temporarily stopped due to the transfer of work to the Korea Immigration Service from the Justice Ministry's legal department.

Despite the surge, aspiring Korean citizens must wait a long time because only two officials are currently in charge of the naturalization process at the KIS. While remaining as a foreigner until she gets citizenship, she has to renew her foreigner registration card every one or two years with her husband registered as a personal reference.

Some Korean husbands have been accused of abusing their foreign wives and threatening not to serve as their personal reference, without which they will be categorized as illegal.

For this, the Justice Ministry has designated about 200 civic groups, which foreign wives can turn to in case of domestic abuse. If a designated civic group issues a letter of complaint to the ministry, this would be taken into account in the renewing process, officials said.

Divorces between Koreans and foreign spouses in 2007 accounted for 7.1 percent of total divorces, according to the most recent data from the National Statistical Office in 2007. Divorces between Korean men and foreign wives totaled 5,794, a 44.5 percent increase from a year earlier.

As to reasons for divorce, family conflicts accounted for 20.2 percent while domestic violence comprised 7.3 percent. Experts, however, note that family conflicts are closely associated with violence at home, indicating that domestic violence could be more serious than the divorce figure itself.

According to the phone counseling center (1577-1366) for immigrant women, the number of cases handled at the center amounted to 13,277 in 2007. Most of them were seriously considering divorce due to domestic violence. Among users of the center, Vietnamese nationals accounted for 42.9 percent of the total cases while Chinese wives made up 25.5 percent.

From January 2009, the Justice Ministry will run a social integration program which requires citizenship applicants to take up to 220 hours of classes regarding Korean language and culture. The length of time for the SIP classes will vary depending on how much an applicant is acquainted with Korea. Applicants can choose to take the existing naturalization test instead to obtain citizenship.

As only about 50 percent of citizenship applicants who take the naturalization test are successful, the government expects the new program to make the naturalization process easier.

However, skeptics say the program will burden foreign wives even more, as they mostly live in poor economic conditions in rural areas, cannot afford to attend SIP classes and have too many household duties.

"The program itself shows that the government is not aware of the reality facing foreign wives," said Lee, the official at the Migrant Workers' Council. "Those mostly in dire economic conditions with old parents to support cannot even find time to study for citizenship.

"The movement of people beyond national boundaries has soared, making the current nationality law increasingly incompatible with the era of globalization."

The government, however, said that nothing has been fixed yet as to the SIP, stressing that the program will be designed to make it more convenient for foreign wives to obtain citizenship.

"It is like offering more ways to become Korean citizens through the program without having to take the naturalization exam, which many felt is tough to pass," said Kim Young-guen, vice director of the immigration administration team at the Justice Ministry.

"Details have yet to be worked out. But we are mulling a variety of ways, including using the educational TV channel for those in far-flung areas," he added.

By Song Sang-ho

([email protected])

[Young FRANKenstein]

[Ya-ta Boy]

It is pretty amazing how much more diverse Korea is now than it was in '94. There were very few food options, even in Itaewon, outside of the Korean/Chinese/Japanese restaurants. If memory serves, there were only a couple of Indian restaurants in Itaewon. Now there's Turkish, Vietnamese, Greek, Egyptian, Thai and Bulgarian. Bulgarian? At my school we have teachers from Spain, France, China and Russia as well as a new Filipina. You see a lot more South Asians on the streets than in the past.

A couple of years ago the government was all hot to build a China Town. I never really understood why they would do that. Shouldn't those just grow up naturally? But since they were into it, I thought it would be a better idea for the government to encourage 'Little Itaewons' in all the cities.

[Young FRANKenstein]

[aka Dave]

One thing that came up in one of my conversation classes, is in the last 10 years you've had a bunch of Korean men essentially mail ordering brides from Southeast Asia. Now these couples are having mixed birth kids, and the Korean dads aren't really into their kids, and the, say, Vietnamese moms speak to them totally in Viatnamese. So the kids are having trouble with their Korean.

Thisi is going to be an assimilation issue.

[bovinerebel]

I get the sense that Korea is one the verge.....mere months away from exploding into a cultural revolution like the west did in the 60's. The whole place is straining under the weight of its rigid comformity and rules. The more exposure Korean get to westerners the more unhappy they are likely to be with what they have to put up with. So many co workers of mine have expressed dusgust at what they have to tolerate when they hear the equivelent of what we get away with in the "West". This system of over working and over "educating" has gone as far as it can go....it's only humn nature that people will bump back. It's already manifesting itself in strange ways...like the beef protests. It's like a pressure valve that's building and building and when it's eventually blows it's going to be an interesting place to be.

[bogey666]

[Bigfeet]

Hey, we're considered high-skilled foreigners?

[Scotticus]

[Young FRANKenstein]

[retrogress]

My wife, who is Chinese, is doing a multicultural education class next week to elementary school children here in my rural school. We have about 5 kids from MC households (out of 800 total students). The Koreans are right to get on this. They need it. As a foreign teacher, I would love to know who is from a MC family because I think its neat. But they don't. Total denial.

[nautilus]

Its awesome.

Sometimes I even bump into another foreigner in the corner shop.
Other foreigners do not baulk at sitting next to me on the subway or PC bang.

Great.

Bring in more foreigners i say.

[komerican]

[Frankly Mr Shankly]

[nautilus]

Most foreigners in korea are Asian.

If they look vaguely like Koreans, then that means the country gets away with the appearance of being 'one nation".