Expat population tops 1.5 mil.

By Kim Jae-won

The number of foreign residents has topped 1.5 million, accounting for 3 percent of the population, the Korea Immigration Service (KIS) said Monday.

According to data from the immigration service, 1.5 million foreigners lived in the country as of early June, up 3.5 percent from 1.45 million in December.

“Most of them are workers who come to the country to get a job. In terms of nationality, about half of them are from China,” said an official of the immigration authorities.

The number of foreigners has risen quickly over the last decade. It reached 630,000 in 2002, and topped 1 million in 2007 when the government introduced a special visa for ethnic Korean Chinese.

China is followed by the United States which accounts for 9.3 percent of the foreigners. People from other Asian countries, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan are ranked next in numbers.

Experts say that the country needs to implement more efficient services to help both short-term foreign workers and married immigrants who pursue citizenship here.

“Most policies are focused on married immigrants who seek to have citizenship in two or three years. Korea needs to also reach out its hands to foreign short-term workers, who will talk about Korea when they go back to their home countries,” said Park Se-hoon, a researcher at the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements.

Park pointed out inefficiency as the biggest problem in immigration and foreign workers’ policies.

“Ministries have their own programs for multicultural families, but many of them duplicate each other because there is no control tower.”

Others say the country needs to embrace foreign culture and language more aggressively, rather than just assimilating immigrants.

“Multiculturalism in Korea is a strange amalgam of assimilation policy for the ‘daughters in law of Korea,’ usually south Asian or Chinese women, or a celebration of ‘cultural diversity’ for cosmopolitan Seoulites intrepid enough to sample foreign food and enter foreign zones,” said Iain Watson, an assistant professor at Ajou University in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, in a contribution to The Korea Times.

By region, more than half of foreigners live in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, the centers of business and industrial complexes, according to the immigration office.

In terms of married immigrants, the number marked 148,000 in December, up 2.6 percent from a year ago. Eight-six percent of them are women married to Korean men.