On the border: Lessons for Jeju?

Over 500 Yemini refugees have arrived on Jeju Island in recent weeks. Korea Times

By David Tizzard

Hungary, America and Jeju Island make for strange bedfellows. And yet they have all featured in the news this past week in relation to the problem of immigration.

Citing threats to its national security, Viktor Orban's government in Budapest has passed new legislation that criminalizes activists and lawyers who facilitate illegal immigration. Anyone found guilty of helping people cross borders, despite their humanitarian intentions, will face a year in jail.

Hungary has a history of strong-arm tactics in its efforts to preserve what it sees as its national identity and culture. At the height of the European migrant crisis of 2015, Orban had fences erected to protect the borders. He also refused to accept a mandatory asylum quota imposed by the European Commission that had been designed to share some of the burden faced by countries in the Mediterranean, including Italy and Greece.

Whatever one might rightly say about the morality of Orban's approach, it was clearly effective at achieving what he set out to do. In 2015, the number of asylum seekers arriving in Hungary was 177,000. Of that total, only a few hundred were accepted. Realizing then that Hungary was not a country likely to welcome them, last year the number of people making their way to the Eastern European country dropped to just over 3,000.

Compare these figures to Germany which, under the stewardship of Chancellor Angela Merkel, let in more than a million refugees in 2015-16. And Europe is now feeling the strain of some of those policies.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has called for registered asylum seekers to be moved to other countries while in Italy, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is refusing to allow migrant rescue ships operated by non-government groups to land. Austria's Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has also indicated that his country will adopt a tougher line on the topic of migration next month when it takes the EU's rotating presidency.

But it was not the continued plight of refugees in Italy, Hungary or Germany that received the most international media attention. The American border and the policies carried out there became the latest manifestation of the political polarization that threatens to harm the country's institutions. Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats demonize Republicans, while print and social media fan the flames by publishing pictures and content of questionable origins.

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This was evidenced none more clearly than the recent cover of Time magazine. With a caption of "Welcome to America," it featured a rather uncompassionate-looking President Donald Trump standing over a bawling toddler said to perfectly encapsulate the current government's border policies.

Tweets rang out and social media became a soapbox for moral grandstanding as people quickly shared the image. And yet, it was the people and the media's reaction that was perhaps most telling. They had become woven into a narrative and were becoming the very thing for which they would often attack their enemies: fake news.

The girl on the cover was revealed not to have been taken from her mother, nor was she an asylum seeker. The two-year-old Honduran girl unwillingly became a symbol of a social malaise of which she was no doubt largely unaware.
Interestingly, Time and the many people that shared the image online were unrepentant. The image was said to be symbolic of the situation and any discrepancies in the truth were mere inconveniences in the allowing a wider message to be heard. False dichotomies were posed in that to criticize Time was said to be defending the separation of families.

And then to Jeju Island. A strange combination of recently opened cheap direct flights between the island and Kuala Lumpur, as well as a no-visa policy designed to encourage tourism, led to over 500 Yemini refugees arriving in recent weeks, fleeing a civil war that has torn the country apart and left three main factions vying for control over the Arab sovereign state in Western Asia.

Korea joined the United Nations refugee convention in 1992 and became the first country in East Asia to enact its own refugee law in 2012. And now, these actions have all come to bear.

The island is tasked with what to do with this recent influx of people, particularly in terms of housing, food, employment and broader sustainable life. Some citizens have taken to allowing Yemeni families into their homes while others, such as Darryl Coote, have made it their mission to shed light on the situation and bring it to a wider audience.

Not all the coverage has been positive, however. A petition to Cheong Wa Dae (the Blue House) saw hundreds of thousands South Korean citizens protest the arrival of refugees and demand that action be taken to keep the country safe from what they saw as an unwelcome and dangerous encroaching culture.

So while President Moon's focus has largely been to the north, epitomized by his meetings with Kim Jong-un and a recent trip to Russia, he will soon have some important decisions to make in the South.

If anything is to be learned from other countries that have faced similar trials, it will be that hard-line policies are effective but they are unlikely to win the nation much support from the wider international community. More importantly, news and social media are increasingly powerful tools and the government and citizens alike should bear the responsibility of ensuring that the information and reports we read, share and encounter paint as accurate a picture as possible without resorting to needless distortions to simply promote a desired narrative.

When all this is done, there will be a question that South Korea needs to answer. Is it, as now a relatively more prosperous country, duty bound to protect its own citizens and borders, or does it have a wider and more encompassing responsibility to a wider audience and people of the world?