Civic group head calls for help for repatriated Koreans
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Shin Sang-rok, chairman of the International Unity Network
By Kwon Ji-youn
The head of a civic group supporting multiracial families has called on repatriated Koreans to become active agents of social integration.
“People have a tendency to think that only marriage migrants and foreigners are the targets of social integration,” Shin Sang-rok, chairman of the International Unity Network, said Tuesday.
“We need to aid repatriated Koreans, who are neither foreign nor multicultural, in becoming agents of social assimilation,” he said.
The 54-year-old asserted that either the Overseas Korean Act must be revised to include a clause on repatriated Koreans, or the government should have a separate department to help them when help is needed.
Shin, who also runs a multicultural international school in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province, has begun a campaign to set up support centers for Koreans returning from abroad.
He said that it only needs to mirror the way in which centers for multicultural families are run.
“These repatriated Koreans are neither considered foreigners nor nationals,” Shin added. “They lie somewhere in the middle and that’s their existence.”
Shin, who studied immigration policy and counseling at the Sungkyul Graduate School, worked as a pastor at a trading firm and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2007, he set up the multicultural international school. Originally the school was aimed at children of multiracial families, but ethnic Koreans from China and Russia steadily began to enroll.
A total of 12 students are currently attending the school.