By Kim Tae-jong
Staff Reporter

Police have arrested 8,035 violators of the Immigration Law during a 70-day crackdown started April 1. They have detained 148 and booked 7,887 without physical detention, the National Police Agency said Monday.

Chinese nationals made up the largest portion of the foreigners arrested, totaling 2,744. The most common offence was illegal marriage to obtain Korean citizenship, which made up 45 percent of the total cases.

Other major illegal activities include document forgery for visa application, which accounted for 14.5 percent. Unqualified native English and Chinese-speakers made up 8.3 percent. Most of them entered Korea on tourism or student visas, which do not allow them to work here.

``Due to the English education fever here, a lot of foreigners, especially from English-speaking countries, are often found working illegally here without the proper visa,'' a police official said.

Among the arrested were 187 people from Thailand, 90 from Vietnam, and 37 from Russia.

Police plan to send those with other nationalities to the Ministry of Justice for sanctions. They can face deportation, depending on the seriousness of their illegalities.

Police also said illegal immigration crimes were becoming ``smarter,'' compared to traditional document fabrication.

Some Koreans went through illegal fingerprint fabrication surgery to enter countries they had been deported from. Some Chinese used DNA test forgeries to be categorized as ethnic Korean-Chinese for easier admission, police said.

Some immigration brokers systematically helped Chinese obtain forged DNA results and documents to make them appear to be the biological relative of a Korean, allowing them to obtain Korean citizenship.

e3dward@koreatimes.co.kr