Liberals' problem with immigration
About 8,000 thousands protesters scream, “Hire Koreans,” at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul last year. / Korea Times photo by Jung Min-ho
Unlike their Western counterparts, liberals in Korea tend to oppose immigration
By Jung Min-ho
In many developed nations, liberals tend to be more supportive of immigration. But in Korea, it is the opposite.
In June last year, the liberal Korean Confederation of Trade Unions led 8,000 construction workers in a protest in Seoul against the increasing number of foreign workers. And four years ago, the country’s first lawmaker with an immigrant background, Jasmine Lee, came from the right-wing party, not the liberal one, reflecting an important first step towards multiculturalism in the government.
Many of these liberal immigration opponents are low-skilled workers, who complain about immigration’s negative effects, such as wage depression and intensifying job competition. However, the reasons Korean conservatives are in favor of immigration are less clear.
“Immigration has always been an issue that has split conservatives. On the one hand, most conservatives represent nativists and nationalist constituencies that don’t like immigration. On the other hand, they represent businesses that want labor,” Margaret Peters, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Korea Times.
In most advanced nations, globalization means businesses no longer have to worry about immigration because they can move their factories to other countries with cheap labor. This means conservatives in the West can now represent nativists without losing business support.
“But in Korea, there are still a large number of manufacturers producing goods at home who need labor. They are the ones that are pushing conservative parties to bring more foreign workers,” Peters said.
But this trend may not last as was the case for many countries in the West.
“In the past in the United States and Western Europe, attitudes toward immigration did not fit so clearly on a left-right axis. The left was divided between organized labor, which largely opposed large-scale immigration as appears to be the case in Korea,” said Louis DeSipio, political science professor at University of California, Irvine. But liberals in these regions have come to recognize that they can grow politically if they embrace immigrants and their children. Meanwhile, on the right, social conservatives, who fear the cultural change immigrants might bring, have come to dominate right-wing agenda over the business community, he noted.
“So, the positions on immigration have come to a clearer left-right divide,” he said.
Antje Ellermann, political science professor at the University of British Columbia, agrees that Korean liberals, over time, will also embrace them as members of the society.
“As countries open themselves up to immigration (which usually starts out in the form of economic immigration), trade unions initially tend to oppose foreign worker recruitment for obvious reasons, including wage depression. But the unions tend to adopt pro-immigration attitudes, in part because of their support of worker/immigrant rights, but also because they can boost their membership base by accepting foreign workers,” she said.
In the long run, Ellermann reckons Koreans ― both on the right and left ― will accept more immigrants. “But looking at the case of Germany, which in the postwar period had a similarly ethnically closed understanding of citizenship, it took over half a century. And it’s still in progress,” she said, indicating that Korea will eventually experience such changes.
As Korea’s birthrate ― around 1.2 per woman ― remains among the world’s lowest, some scholars say this change may occur much faster in Korea than it did in the West.
The lower number of children is already reshaping many industries in Korea. For example, the number of maternity hospitals has almost halved in the last decade, and schools are expected to reduce teaching jobs as they struggle to recruit students. In the next 10 years, the problem is expected to seriously concern the nation’s military as well. Ultimately, Korea's problem would not be whether to accept immigrants but rather whom it accepts.