Immigrant wives need tailored support programs

Immigrant wives from Buyeo, South Chungcheong Province, make rice cake during a workshop organized by a local Nonghyup office. Workshops like this are common but experts say they are not well-organized. / Korea Times file

By Kim Se-jeong

There are some 300,000 immigrant wives in Korea. These women, who become Korean residents through marriage, suffer from the inability to speak the Korean language and the lack of knowledge on Korean culture and the society.

Government assistance has been available since 2006, including free Korean language workshops and cultural orientations, to help facilitate their transition.

However, these programs are not well received.

Many complain that these programs are identical in every center and are not tailored according to the learners’ level of need.

At a recent workshop on policies on interracial families, they also complained that the policies are way too nationalistic.

“The government policies boil down to this: bear babies and provide labor needed in Korea,” said Kim Hyun-mee, a cultural anthropology professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.

“The government asks you to change your name and forget your heritage to be part of the Korean society. You are expected to fit into the patriarchal society instead of respecting your own identity and heritage.”

Another problem these immigrants face is that the Korean society expects them to stay poor, as Lee Min, a marriage immigrant born in China, knows.

Lee was an early immigrant, having moved to Korea 17 years ago from China after marrying her Korean husband. She remembers struggling to learn the Korean language in an attempt to better navigate the culture and society she was in. Now a mother of two teenagers, she works at a Multicultural Family Support Center in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province, and her family is relatively well-off.

Lee said she wants people to ask her what she really needs and wants before giving her things and making policies that affect her.

“I am invited to these events where I receive gifts from companies that I do not even know,” she said. “(As an immigrant) you encounter many occasions like this. Companies come to you with gift boxes as part of their corporate social responsibility activities. We are an easy target for them.

“But, you know what? These gifts do not really help us. I feel that people look down on me. Also, these gifts feed the xenophobia in society. There are people who don’t like us just because we receive all this stuff. I am not sure whether this is necessarily a good thing.”

History of Interracial families

An interracial family refers to one in which one or more members have a different cultural background. In Korea, the term almost always refers to a family in which one parent is an immigrant.

Migration to Korea through marriage goes back to ancient times. One of the earliest interracial marriages documented in Korean history is that of King Suro of the Gaya Kingdom (AD 43-532) to Sri Ranta, an Indian princess of the Ayodhya Kingdom.

The number of interracial marriages peaked in the mid 2000s, driven by lonely rural Korean bachelors who flock to China and Southeast Asia to find a wife. This number has since stopped growing owing mainly to the rising number of crimes and domestic violence, according to experts.

The domestic violence rate in interracial families was 70.4 percent in 2012, higher than the 53.8 percent in other households. News headlines often featured immigrants who were unable to cope with their problems taking their lives by jumping off an apartment building or drinking pesticide.

Some suffered from constant beatings by their husbands, who then become paralyzed and unable to pay related hospital bills. Many tried to run away from their spouses, only to be found and then hurt or worse, killed.

The government began to crack down on “marriage brokers” whom it considers as the root cause of the problem and toughened marriage visa requirements for women from Asian countries. Korean marriage brokers worked as a matchmaker and made a fortune with brokerage fees.

In 2012, a steadily increasing rate of domestic violence in interracial families prompted the government to review its policies.

As of December 2014, the number of women who became Korean citizens or in the process of earning citizenship is 300,000. Together with their spouses and children, the number is almost 800,000. Most of such immigrants came from China, followed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Cambodia, Mongolia and Thailand. The government estimated that by 2020, the number will reach 700,000 and by 2050, 1 million.

Policy development

Policies for interracial families started to take shape in 2006. The first Multicultural Family Support Center opened that year and laws on support for interracial families went into effect in 2008.

In 2010, the prime minister’s office drafted a comprehensive long-term plan for interracial households.

The first phase of the grand plan, which ended in 2012, focused on providing basic needs, including through language, culture and cooking workshops, which were implemented by support centers across the country. The laws and the support centers received credits for helping create a diverse society.

The second phase of the plan began in 2013.

“The new plan aims to enhancing cultural understanding within families and the society so that immigrants are respected as members of the society,” the plan said. “Also, the new plan is working to make programs higher quality and longer term, instead of short term.

One important element about the second phase is that it is trying to reflect the changing demographics among the interracial families. Immigrant women are getting older. The majority of them were their 20s in 2009 but expected to be their 30s in 2020. More are in their second marriage, and more are trying to keep their connections with their home country.

The government’s policies have also expanded to include children in interracial families. It started providing the children with academic support through local support centers and began inviting male young adults to serve in the military, which it previously did not allow. It began giving immigrant women more specific job trainings, for example, to become translators and interpreters for Korean and their home language.

Many say a good policy is not about what it offers to beneficiaries but how it makes them feel.

“The immigrants feel they are the subject of CSR programs,” Kim said. “Also, the policies can make them feel they are in Korea only to bear babies and provide labors to the society. They are here to make a life, not to fill in what Korea doesn’t have.”

Representatives from the support centers echoed Kim.

They said the programs they offer lost touch with people. “These programs don’t consider that they are human and they have different needs,” said one representative who refused to disclose her identity at the seminar, in line with Kim’s view that the current policies should take human rights and gender elements into account more.

The support center representatives said this can be achieved to a certain extent if they have more freedom in planning and implementing projects.

“I wish we had more autonomy so that we can do whatever we think meets the women’s needs,” another participant said. Currently, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family supervises their work.

Immigrant women say they deal with stigma every day, and overcoming this stigma will take time.