South Korea’s Enduring Racism

By Se-Woong Koo, July 1, 2018

Anti-immigration activists protested in Seoul on Saturday against a group of asylum-

seekers from Yemen.CreditEd Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SEOUL, South Korea — Hundreds of desperate Yemenis fleeing civil war — more than

550 — arrived on the South Korean island of Jeju and applied for asylum between January and

May. In response, more than half a million South Koreans have petitioned President Moon Jae-in

to turn away all refugees. Online platforms have become grounds for refugee-bashing. An actual

anti-refugee demonstration took place on Saturday in downtown Seoul.

South Korea has long been intolerant of outsiders, but the outrage triggered by this small

number of Yemenis arriving on our shores shows how deep xenophobia runs here. For all of

South Korea’s success as a democracy and as a thriving economy, compassion and humanitarian

instincts are in short supply. And the government bears much of the blame for fostering this

selfish mind-set.

As of 2016, slightly more than two million foreigners were living legally in this country.

Even when an estimated 210,000 undocumented migrants are counted, foreigners account for

only around 4 percent of the total population of about 51 million.

And the number of refugees is negligible. South Korea has accepted only 2.5 percent of

all asylum seekers it has screened since 1994 (not counting North Korean defectors), according

to Human Rights Watch.

 By comparison, asylum seekers as a share of the population in South Korea were 0.02

percent in 2017, while the figure in Germany — one of the most popular destination countries

for refugees — was 0.24 percent that same year.

The reaction against the Yemenis, while shocking, is not a surprise. Almost a decade ago,

in 2009, an Indian scholar in Seoul pursued a criminal complaint against a South Korean man

who hurled racial and sexist slurs at him and his female South Korean companion (who was

insulted for being with a dark-skinned man).

The incident prompted much hand-wringing over the enduring hostility to foreigners,

especially those who come from less developed countries or have darker skin. Not much has

changed since.

In a more recent egregious example, in June 2017, a bar in the popular Itaewon district of

Seoul refused an Indian customer. “No Indians,” the bouncer was heard to say. “It is a rule. No

Kazakhstan, no Pakistan, no Mongolia, no Saudi Arabia and no Egypt.”

None of this is surprising given South Korea’s education system. For decades, children,

myself included, were taught to believe that this is a single-blooded nation — dubbed danil

minjok in Korean. This myth of racial purity was promoted to foster national unity.

Only after 2007, when the United Nations urged South Korea to stop promoting this

racist notion, did the school curriculum change.

With interracial marriage increasing, especially between South Korean men and women

from other parts of Asia, the government has promoted the idea of damunhwa — literally

“multiculturalism.” But it’s defined as foreigners marrying South Korean citizens, so the

damunhwa paradigm promotes little tolerance for other types of foreigners seeking to stay here

long term.
 The arrival of the Yemenis coincides with a worsening climate of hate. Misogyny has

been on the rise, partly in reaction to women’s more forceful demands for gender equality. The

powerful Evangelical lobby and its political allies spread Islamophobia by claiming that “we,

too, might become a Muslim state.” The same Christian alliance has also been active in the

persecution of South Korea’s fledgling L.G.B.T. community, which had never been widely

embraced to begin with.

It would only be right for the Moon administration to take the moral high ground and put

an end to this nonsense, but there is little reason for hope. Mr. Moon, who once worked as a

human rights lawyer, didn’t hesitate to say that he opposed homosexuality during a televised

presidential debate a year ago, showing a lack of sympathy for minorities.

If the government truly believed in fighting bigotry, it would have long since pushed to

pass the comprehensive anti-discrimination act that has been stalled in the National Assembly

since 2007, but no such initiative is on the horizon.

Jeju is a visa-free zone for tourists from most countries. When pressed on the issue of

Yemeni refugees, a presidential spokesperson told journalists on June 20 that Yemen has been

added to the list of countries whose citizens cannot enter without a visa. On June 29, the Justice

Ministry announced that it was deploying more personnel to expedite the processing of Yemeni

asylum seekers, presumably to expel them sooner. The ministry will also push for an overhaul of

the Refugee Act, to prevent foreigners from “taking advantage of the refugee system for

economic reasons or residency.”

Not all South Koreans are bigots. Polling data from June 20 showed that 39 percent

supported accepting Yemeni refugees, while some 49 percent were opposed. There are also

several high-profile voices of reason.

 “How could we possibly ask our children to love this world if we discriminate against

other races, other nations and other religions?” said Jung Woo-sung, a South Korean actor and

goodwill ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency, at a public forum on Wednesday.

Perhaps a better question to ask those South Koreans who seem to be devoid of

compassion would be this: How would they expect other countries to treat South Korean

refugees in the event of a war with North Korea?