'Unqualified' expats question Seoul's guidelines for relief fund payments

Public servants at Seoul's Seongbuk District Office with a banner reading “Emergency Disaster Relief Fund” in large text, discuss the city's disaster relief funds. Yonhap

By Ko Dong-hwan

A tenured Indian university professor of economics in Seoul did not expect he would not receive the national disaster relief fund he thought was for all residents.

Having lived in Korea with his family for 17 years, he contacted his local community center in Songpa District and called the Seoul City Help Center for Foreigners hotline to find out why ― only to be told he was not eligible because and his family members were not permanent residents.

But even after hearing the news, he still wondered about the criteria that determined a foreigner's eligibility for the subsidy.

“I just wanted to know the exact rules and regulations regarding this,” the professor, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Korea Times.

The professor is among many foreigners in Seoul who did not receive their share of the relief fund that the central government and city governments each budgeted and allocated on two-tracks to “all residents in Korea” following COVID-19's impact on the national economy. Qualification as a “resident,” according to Article 12 of Korea's Local Autonomy Law, is met when reporting one's address to a local government office.

Seoul Metropolitan Government had advertised that it would “pay the subsidy to all Korean residents regardless of their status of incomes or assets” in amounts ranging from 400,000 to 1 million won ($329~$822) depending on the number of household members. The household-based subsidy, starting May 18, could be credited in several ways, including as a pre-paid card or gift certificate.

But despite the promotion, after the city government began dispersing the funds, reports of foreigners who said they did not receive the subsidy started to surface. Clearly there was a loophole in the pay list that was unknown to the public.

“We don't have the power to choose which foreign residents in our jurisdiction we pay the subsidy to,” a Songpa District Office official told The Korea Times. “The criteria of eligibility of foreign subsidy recipients gets sent from the central government.

“This operation depends solely on people's voluntary reports (of their addresses), so those who didn't report won't be able to get it, but for those who report and still didn't get subsidized, that would be 99.9 percent because they weren't in those criteria.”

The criteria were explained by Seoul city office's Local Welfare and Care Division official Kim Ki-gon. The only foreigners eligible were refugees, international marriage migrants, and foreign children of someone married to a Korean citizen. Those who did not meet these criteria were disqualified by the city government.

Kim told The Korea Times the government cited the Emergency Aid and Support Act under the Ministry of Health and Welfare to decide the eligibility list, which defines the range of coverage for foreigners. He said the government had to make the list promptly because the matter was urgent and used a limited city budget.

But the authority also had to be careful with the list because it had already received 2.2 million applications for funds from households of Korean citizens.

“We had to regard foreigners separately from Korean citizens because we couldn't risk the list of actual eligible recipients,” Kim said. “For instance, if any of our city's local community centers where no interpretation service is available had a rush of foreign subsidy applicants, there would be huge confusion in the administrative process.”

Kim added, however, that the city was considering whether to introduce additional criteria to allow more foreign residents to access the disaster relief funds.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety, which planned the state-level disaster relief funds for residents, did not respond to The Korea Times.

On June 11, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea said it had advised Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon and Gyeonggi Governor Lee Jae-myung to subsidize "all foreign residents" in their regions with registered addresses.

The independent state human rights watchdog's move came after some international marriage migrants and pro-migrant Korean activists filed a complaint with the commission in April, saying that excluding foreigners was discriminatory and violated their human rights.