South Korea- An Inverted Pyramid?

South Korea
– An Inverted Pyramid?


By Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja),
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway

Recently, the South Korean society experienced an ideological shift – of unprecedented proportions. While from 1948 (when the South Korean statehood was established) onward the political nation of South Korea used to define itself as “ethnically homogenous” (using the Korean pronunciation, tanil minjok, of the Japanese Meiji expression, tanitsu minzoku – “the homogeneous nation”), now its newly-found heterogeneity is being actively highlighted. Both the former South Korea President, liberal advocate Roh Muhyun, and the current president, conservative building industry executive Lee Myungbak, are officially defining today’s South Korea as a “multicultural society”, and governmental officials, local leaders and academics are busy devising the measures for “better assimilation of the foreign-born population”. What are the reasons for such a momentous ideological shift?

The most pressing reason is the unprecedented growth of the sector of foreign-born population the government cannot afford to simply ignore – the marriage migrants, spouses of the (mainly male) South Korean citizens, who themselves are entitled to eventual naturalization. The growth in their numbers was virtually explosive: “international marriages” made up to 14% of all marriages in South Korea in 2005. For comparison – the share of the international marriages back in 1990 was only 1,2%, and in 2001 – still only 4,8%. The share of the “international marriages” somewhat decreased in 2006 – to 11,6% - but still remains relatively high. Around 75% of such marriages are between a Korean man and a foreign bride – in 2005, 66% of these brides were Chinese and 18% were Vietnamese. In some particular regions, the share of the international marriages is even higher – 22,6% in mostly rural Southern Chǒlla Province in 2006., for example. The extraordinary growth in marriage migration – which the government cannot curb, both due to the lack of any legal instruments to do so, and due to social stability concerns, since “foreign brides” are often the only opportunity for poorer rural bachelors to get married and acquire children at all – will, in combination with other factors, to a significant increase in the proportion of non-native Korean populace in South Korea. Once the current trend is sustained, by 2020 – according to some estimates – around 5% of all South Korean residents will be other foreign-born or “mixed-blooded”, a level comparable with the proportion of non-autochthonous populations in some European societies. In the situation when reality completely contradicts the old-fashioned ideological claim, South Korean authorities made the only possible choice – scrapped the outmoded ideology and began learning from the foreign experiences of dealing with the migrants, trying to forestall their complete marginalization from the mainstream society.
“The question now is:
how the South Korean authorities are going to design the “multicultural society” in South Korean style?”
That the decision to part with the illusions of “homogeneity” – by the way, already criticised, among others, by UN’s Human Rights committee – was the right one to make does not require any further elaboration. The question now is: how the South Korean authorities are going to design the “multicultural society” in South Korean style? Unfortunately, it looks as if among all the possible alternatives, the most conservative ones are being consistently chosen. And the expected result will be appearance of a society in which the cultures of minorities are relegated to the social fringes and the younger generations of the migrants are pressed to completely abandon their original non-Korean identities for the sake of their survival; a society where socio-political, class stratification will largely overlap with the racial and ethnic one. In a word, a society strikingly resembling Japan today – quite ironically, given Koreans’ proclivity to criticise the discriminatory treatment of the Korean minority in Japan. Alas, as a Korean proverb goes, we tend to learn from those we hate.

First, the marriage migrants are not simply being integrated – they, and especially their offspring, are supposed to be assimilated. The government stresses their right – actually, more understood as a duty – to receive Korean language instruction, to learn and practice Korean customs and family ethics – in a word, to “Koreanize” themselves. The show-like events with “foreign brides” wearing traditional Korean clothes, bowing deeply to their mothers-in-low and making Korean food to please their husbands are often being given prime TV time. Ironically – or perhaps sadly – the force-fed “Koreanization” does not mean the freedom from physical, verbal and moral abuse. In fact, around 7 out of 10 female marriage migrants report that they suffer from domestic violence: nothing strange since the unofficial, but widespread popular discourse in Korea regards them as “imported brides”, highlighting the economical gap between their countries of origin and South Korea, a relatively high-wage middle-rank Northeast Asian power. Their assimilation is culturally a one-way street, a typically imperialistic unilateral process: the “imported wives” are being almost forcibly Koreanized, while Korean society remains arrogantly disinterested in Vietnamese or Philippine culture, literature or music, regarding all these countries basically as just sources of cheap labour and natural resources, and also captive markets for its outbound mass-culture flow, the so-called “Korean wave”.

Second, while 70-80 thousands of marriage migrants are entitled at least to formal inclusion into South Korean society (South Korean citizenship acquisition), the estimated 350-400 thousands of foreign workers stay on a much lower rung of the South Korean social ladder. Unless exceptionally lucky to stay five or more years legally and thus qualify for permanent residency (in most cases, their contracts are for 3-4 years without any right to prolongation), they – unlike marriage migrants - are supposed to be “permanent outsiders”, exploited, underpaid and then thrown away, often in the most unceremonious and abusive manner. They back up Korea’s industrial pyramid acting as a “safety valve” in the time of woes and allowing the employers to check the chronic discontent of their “native” workforce with some extra perks. Basically, the foreign workers represent in Korea a quintessential “internal colony” of mature industrialism – an over-exploited, underpaid, thoroughly downtrodden stratum, somewhere in the lowest part of the social hierarchy. But there are also some important features that distinguish them clearly from other oppressed and subjugated strata of Korean society (say, part-time workers or low-wage female employees) and turn their life in Korea in one unending, excruciating, unbelievably painful battle for survival and a minimum of human dignity. First, around 67% of them are “illegal immigrants” – compare it with 7,4% in Taiwan or 3,2% in Singapore. And once you are “illegal”, then everything is permissible – wage delays, physical and verbal abuse in the workplace, absence of any meaningful social security network, detention in the prison-like immigration facilities and forced deportation without any semblance of a “due process” – even if you have to leave your de facto wife and children back in South Korea. Second, any meaningful alternative to the “illegal” work is lacking – there exists a system of “employment permits”, largely modeled on the Singaporean and Taiwanese prototypes, but it often entails significantly lower wages than that of the locals, lots of expenses in the process (fees, etc.), and does not allow the worker either to change the workplace or to bring his/her family to Korea. It does not allow to stay in Korea for more than 3-4 years either, thus making the foreign workers’ population an unstable community with permanently shifting membership, unable to strike deeper roots in the Korean society and fight effectively for its working and socio-political rights.

In a way, the South Korean society today is an “inverted pyramid” of sorts, and is going to be even more like this in the future. Capped by the majority of full-fledged, pure-blooded South Korean citizens, it is propped by a hierarchical ladder of various minorities alienated from the mainstream on both ethno-national and socio-economical grounds. The marriage migrants, “mixed-race” children with Korean citizenship and/or, say, highly salaried professionals from the privileged European or Northern American countries (or Japan) constitute the higher layer of that ladder – alienated and often discriminated, for sure, but at least included into the society. The “legal” Asian and African workers – supposed to be kicked out after being exploited in a concentrated manner for 3-4 years, never to be integrated but, at least, having some ways of legal redress in case of abuse – stay somewhere in between, while the vast and growing pool of the “illegal” labour props up the whole edifice on the bottom level. The North Korean defectors – now numbering around 11.000 – stay somewhat closer to the middle group of the “legal” manual labourers from abroad. They are viciously discriminated against and mostly relegated to the least prestigious, worst paid jobs, despite their official status as South Korean citizens – but, at least, are not threatened with summarily deportation. In case of any serious troubles in North Korea, a popular exodus from there may significantly increase the numbers in this group, possibly even making it the largest of all the underprivileged and alienated minorities in the South Korean society. Such turn of events will be a catastrophe for North Korea, denying its citizens any chance of meaningful, independent development – but it will be also a boon for South Korea’s grossly inefficient small and medium-size business sector, providing it with an unending supply of cheap and socially unprotected labour. ##