Graphic by Cho Sang-won



Faced with an aging population, can Koreans accept immigrants as their own?



By Lee Suh-yoon



Step into any construction site, factory floor or fishing vessel and it becomes clear who keeps the wheels running at the lowest tier of the Korean economy — migrant workers.



As of September, foreign residents, numbering around 2.3 million, made up over 4 percent of the country's population. Most of them are migrant workers from China or Southeast Asian countries.



Despite the 10 percent youth unemployment rate in Korea, work that falls under the so-called 3-D category (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) is short of hands. TV programs that zoom in on such workplaces usually feature an old Korean man nearing retirement surrounded by young migrant workers.



With the birthrate projected to drop below one child per woman this year, Korea's workforce is aging faster than any other advanced economy. By one estimate, almost 40 percent of the entire population is expected to be older than 65 by 2050. The government has been actively issuing temporary employment visas to fill up the first signs of labor shortages, mostly in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors.



Experts now believe the country's transition to a multiracial society is inevitable, and perhaps the only way to save the economy and the nation's welfare system. They say that simply trying to raise the birthrate among Koreans, the focus of recent government responses, is not an adequate solution.













But it is difficult to imagine Korea as a multiracial society where immigrants and their children could take up to almost 15 percent of the total population, as is the case in developed nations that have openly accepted immigration in the last few decades such as Norway and Sweden.



"We have no choice but to accept immigrants," says Kim Joon-sik, a board member at Asian Friends, an NGO that helps multiracial families and people in poverty-stricken areas of Southeast Asia. "That's what the European countries did when their birthrates started falling. It's our turn now."



The question is, can Koreans, taught from an early age to be proud of their "Korean bloodline" and conditioned into "cultural homogeneity," accept immigrants as fellow countrymen?



Koreans have a "strong sense of resistance" to foreigners, said Kim, and the numerous state-sponsored campaigns that preach the abstract values of multiracial understanding are not helping either. Such campaigns are usually centered on the families of some 150,000 "marriage immigrants," mostly young women from Southeast Asia, and their half-Korean children. The images of these young mothers, conforming to the Korean way of life in their interactions with the Korean husband and his family, are a popular media subject.



Seol Dong-Hoon, a sociology professor at Jeonbuk University, believes the shift in perception toward immigrants can start by debunking the myth of a "pure-lineage Korean."



"It's the people who live in Korea that are Korean," he said in a recent interview with The Korea Times' vernacular sister paper, the Hankook Ilbo, pointing out 8.4 percent of the total population during the 918-1392 Goryeo Kingdom were actually foreigners.



"If you observe the physical features of Koreans, there is a clear mix of features from both southern and northern parts (of Asia)," Seol pointed out.





Migrant workers call for the right to change jobs at a rally in downtown Seoul, Oct. 14. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk