By Liem Wol-san
South Korea has seen itself as a homogeneous ethnic nation since at least the period of Japanese colonization during the first half of the 20th century.
It is, however, becoming harder and harder to ignore the fact that this is not the case: Apart from the fact that people living on the Korean Peninsula have for centuries mixed blood with people from other regions, Korean society has also experienced an increase flow of inward migration in recent years through the mechanism of interracial marriage and the development of a foreign labor force (not mutually exclusive categories).
While their numbers are relatively small (there are currently roughly 90,000 migrants through interracial marriage, and 400,000 migrant workers currently in South Korea), the presence of migrants in South Korea has important social and political significance.
Migrants challenge Korean society to accept an increasingly cosmopolitan culture. Beyond this, the structural barriers, discrimination and exploitation migrants face raise important questions about the state of labor and human rights in current Korean society.
This is the first of a series of articles that looks at the state and experience of migrant workers in South Korea today.
Migrant workers first began coming to South Korea in significant numbers after the 1988 Olympics.
There were two proximate causes for this influx: On the one hand Korea became known internationally as an ``advanced” country through its hosting of the sports event; on the other hand the government's relaxation of visa laws to stimulate international tourism created an easy pathway to enter the country.
Moreover with the Korean economy's development, Korean workers were becoming more and more reluctant to take low-paying unskilled jobs.
This created a labor shortage in small and medium manufacturing, which could be filled by cheap migrant labor.
As in many countries with new experiences of labor migration, there was, at first, no system of laws or regulations related to foreign labor; migrants working in Korea were, therefore, undocumented.
Since then, the government has implemented several foreign labor systems in order to curb the rate of undocumented residence and employment while at the same time providing a regulated supply of temporary cheap labor to small businesses.
These systems began with an industrial trainee system for companies with overseas investment established in 1991, which was expanded in 1993 to apply to a wider range of small companies.
Under this system, migrants work as trainees for a period of one or two year before being recognized as workers.
They were bonded to their employers and provided wages as low as 600,000 won a month.
Adverse working conditions under this system led to a high rate of desertion and thus a rising number of undocumented migrants.
In response, the government introduced the employer permit system in 2003 and will have phased out the industrial trainee system completely by the end of this year.
The problem of undocumented migrants, however, has persisted; currently roughly half of all migrant workers are undocumented.
Migrant workers in Korea, for the most part, come from areas with severe economic hardship and/or political conflict in the Asia-Pacific, Southeast Asia and West Africa regions.
Right now the majority of migrant workers are ethnic Koreans from China (close to 80 percent), followed by migrants from Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and Indonesia.
Besides working in small manufacturing jobs (often termed 3D: difficult, dangerous and dirty), migrant workers work in restaurants and other services. Roughly 4,500 have also entered on entertainment (E-6) visa, many of whom are employed in the sex industry.
The difficulties migrants face at work and in society at large are multiple. They often must contend with low and unpaid wages, industrial accidents and verbal and physical abuse from employers.
In addition, they confront a society that looks down on them as foreign and different and provides little in the way of social security.
Nonetheless, they have built their own communities and cultural, ethnic and religious associations and contribute to the Korean economy by filling jobs Korean workers are unwilling to take.