Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea: Reflections and Future Directions

By Minjeong Kim, Ilju Kim, Julie S Kim and 11 more

Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea provides an in-depth look at the lives of families in Korea that include immigrants. Ten original chapters in this volume, written by scholars in multiple social science disciplines and covering different methodological approaches, aim to reinvigorate contemporary discussions about these multicultural families. Specially, the volume expands the scope of “multicultural families” by examining the diverse configurations of families with immigrants who crossed the Korean border during and after the 1990s, such as the families of undocumented migrant workers, divorced marriage immigrants, and the families of Korean women with Muslim immigrant husbands. Second, instead of looking at immigrants as newcomers, the volume takes a discursive turn, viewing them as settlers or first-generation immigrants in Korea whose post-migration lives have evolved and whose membership in Korean society has matured, by examining immigrants’ identities, need for political representation, their fights through the court system, and the aspirations of second-generation immigrants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978803121

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Introduction

MINJEONG KIM AND HYEYOUNG WOO

When Minjeong Kim, the first co-editor of this volume, mentioned her research on damunhwa gajok (multicultural family) involving Filipinas and Korean men in rural South Korea (M. Kim 2018) to her mother, the older woman recounted the story of her lifelong friend, Ms. Yu. Since the early 1970s, Ms. Yu had been in a relationship with a Japanese businessman based in Japan. They had a daughter together. Ms. Yu was a hyeonji-cheo (local wife)—a term used at the time to denote a Korean woman in a long-term relationship with a non-Korean man who traveled to Korea for work.¹ Because the businessman was already married and had children in Japan, Ms. Yu, as a single mother, raised their "honhyeol (mixed-blood) daughter by herself in Korea. The father provided support for their daughter and paid for her college education and participation in a study abroad program in Germany. Eventually, the daughter found a job in finance in Japan, where she met and married a professional who had emigrated from India. Ms. Yu occasionally traveled from Korea to Japan to help her daughter with child care. It is a multicultural family, Minjeong’s mother concluded, but we did not have a word for families like that before."

Prior to the twenty-first century, Koreans had long constructed their identity as Han minjok (ethnic Han people or one people) and propagated ethnic homogeneity; thus, they would in no way have considered multiculturalism or multicultural families to characterize Korea or Koreans (Lie 2014). Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, especially following the Multicultural Family Support Act (MFSA) passed in 2008, Koreans have become quite familiar with the term damunhwa gajok (multicultural family). Nevertheless, the concept of multicultural family is often contested, and its application is far from clear. What do we mean by multicultural family? What makes a family multicultural? How does the Korean government define such a family, and how do Koreans perceive and use the term? Ms. Yu’s family is certainly multinational and multiethnic, but is the meaning of multicultural based solely on family members’ multiple nationalities?

The Korean government enacted the MFSA to support the members of multicultural families to have stable family lives and carry out their roles and responsibilities as members of society, and to contribute to improving the quality of life and facilitating their incorporation into society (National Law Information Center 2018). This act stipulates that multicultural families consist of couples made up of a Korean citizen and either a marriage immigrant or another type of foreign-born naturalized citizen. However, by specifically identifying marriage immigrants, the MFSA prioritizes families with marriage immigrants over those with other types of foreign-born immigrants. Gyeolhon iminja (marriage immigrant) is a gender-neutral designation, but many Koreans presume that marriage immigrants are women from other Asian countries who marry Korean men. In principle, gendered programs under the MFSA were created to expand the social and legal rights of marriage immigrants in Korea, who were estimated to number approximately 200,000 in 2009—over 17 percent of the foreign-born population in Korea at the time (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family 2020; Statistics Korea 2020a). As a consequence of the widespread gendered understanding of multicultural families, the families of Korean women married to foreign-born men have been relegated to the margins of the MFSA’s reach, and families comprising exclusively foreign-born immigrants (with no Korean spouse) or those like that of Ms. Yu (with no legal spouse residing in Korea) have been excluded from the act altogether.

The Korean government maintains this restrictive definition of multicultural families, whereas public discourse, in contrast, uses the term damunhwa (multicultural) to refer to all families that are not pure Korean. For example, the families of labor immigrants are also called multicultural families. The children of multicultural families are commonly referred to as multicultural children, which has replaced the older term honhyeol, now considered outdated and degrading. One could say that multiculturalism is the Korean counterpart of the contemporary buzzword diversity in the United States. A quick Internet search yields a wide assortment of phrases that include the word damunhwa; the results include, for instance, references to multicultural education, multicultural scholarship, multicultural movies, multicultural entertainers, and a multicultural orchestra. On top of that, in public discourse, the term multicultural is used when discussing the issues that immigrants and bi- or multiracial/ethnic Koreans face, such as discrimination, marginalization, and the need for social assistance. Despite the significant diversity in lived experiences among these families, the term multicultural family has become a new label applied to immigrants and their children who are racially and ethnically different from native Koreans and tend to face high levels of social and economic disadvantage.

In this context, Redefining Multicultural Families aims to reinvigorate scholarly discussions about families with immigrants in Korea by raising critical questions and offering new directions of inquiry. Before proceeding with this objective, we would like to introduce two important issues concerning critical discourses on multicultural families in Korea, as well as the limitations and possibilities of these discourses. The first issue concerns a clear delineation, or the lack thereof, between the terms multicultural families and multiculturalism. When discussed in the Korean context, multicultural family policies and multicultural policies have been used interchangeably because, as we describe below, the Korean government’s multicultural initiatives have operated primarily through multicultural family policies. Instead of reinforcing the blurry line between multiculturalism and multicultural families, this chapter juxtaposes some critical elements of multiculturalism and Korea’s application of multicultural family policies to identify gaps that have been overlooked and to address these gaps.

The second issue concerns the ways in which the state’s multicultural policies are multifaceted. Sociologist Hae Yeon Choo (2016) has suggested that these policies are used to control and contain immigrants through selective inclusion (in the case of marriage immigrants) and exclusion (in the case of labor migrants and undocumented migrants).² In political scientist Timothy Lim’s (2014) more optimistic or open-ended assessment, Korea’s multicultural turn, despite an imperfect start, signals a move in the right direction for Korea. Although these views are seemingly contradictory, this is not an either/or issue. Rather, these developments have happened simultaneously. Now that more than ten years have passed since the 2008 MFSA was implemented with vigor and speed, the question at hand is this: How effectively has the discussion about multiculturalism and multicultural families evolved in Korea?

With these two discursive issues in mind, the chapters in this volume reflect on the diverse realities of families with immigrants in Korea. Here, before introducing the content of the individual chapters, we reevaluate the meanings of multiculturalism and the objectives of multicultural family policies in the Korean context.

Meanings of Multiculturalism

Redefining Multicultural Families deals with the experiences of immigrants and their families in Korea, against the backdrop of the Korean government’s multicultural family policies. Many pundits and academics have viewed these policies as a specific application of multiculturalism in the Korean context, sometimes conflating multicultural family policies with multiculturalism. As a first step in the critical appraisal of this situation, we consider the meanings of multiculturalism as it has been previously discussed in Western countries. Multiculturalism and multicultural family policies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but distinguishing them from each other is an important exercise to explore potential directions for innovative policies toward multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is a contested concept, and scholarly debates over its theoretical interpretation and actual application have revealed ontological limitations. Conventional questions about multiculturalism have concerned the recognition of minority communities and their cultures, which is interwoven with identity politics (Okin 1999; Taylor 1995). Questions regarding who represents culture often bring forward voices that have been left out, and the goal of multiculturalism is rectifying these omissions in various areas of society, such as education, history, the media, and politics (Okin 1999). Along with this politics of recognition, multiculturalism entails providing minorities with group rights to protect cultural expressions that differ from those of the majority. Applications of multiculturalism include the protection of religious belief and expression, the implementation of public policies and subsidies supporting diverse cultural activities and inclusive educational curricula (such as language and history), the advocacy of political representation and minority rights, and the establishment of governing entities grounded in minority cultures, separate from the federal or national governing system (Okin 1999).

In seeking to realize multiculturalism, one confronts the question of whether genuine multiculturalism is possible with the existence of a communal or societal culture representing a nation or state (McLennan 2001). Forsaking such a common culture is not feasible because, essentially, a state cannot be culturally neutral. For instance, the selection of an official state language inevitably promotes the majority culture. As a compromise, a state’s promotion of the majority culture should be balanced with liberal justice, which requires special rights recognizing and protecting the cultures of minority groups (Joppke 2002, 247).

In recent years, scholars have contended that multiculturalism has declined in Western countries (Alexander 2013; Chin 2017; Joppke 2002, 2004). For example, Christian Joppke has argued that countries such as Australia, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which had long promoted explicit multiculturalism, have gradually downscaled their efforts or retreated from multiculturalism. According to Joppke, in the 1970s and 1980s, Australia promoted the notion that multiculturalism is relevant for all Australians, and some progressives asserted that Australia itself equated to multiculturalism. However, a government-commissioned report in the late 1980s emphasized an Australian identity distinguishing the nation from other countries, with multiculturalism presented as one of the values and features of this identity, alongside democracy, for example. Here, the report’s author argued that an Australian core, or what is identifiably Australian, had to be defined separately from multiculturalism (Joppke 2004, 246). Sweden’s former multicultural policy, launched in 1975, allowed immigrants to maintain their ethnic identity without forcing them to acquire Swedish citizenship. However, beginning in the 1980s, Sweden gradually withdrew from its explicit multicultural policy, shifting its emphasis from the protection of ethnic identity to a neutral position toward immigrant integration (Joppke 2002). Similarly, in 1983, the Netherlands put forward a robust version of multiculturalism in their ethnic minorities policy, which provided each ethnic group with its own infrastructure, including ethnic schools, media, and social services. Then, by the late 1990s, the country withdrew from the original policy, removing all references to ethnic minorities and emphasizing immigrant integration as individuals rather than as members of ethnic groups.

Many economic and political factors influenced these countries’ paths, but Joppke observed the de-emphasis of ethnic group identities as a common trait in countries’ downscaling of or withdrawal from multiculturalism. Diverse ethnic and cultural identities and expressions were formerly the core element of multicultural policies, but these distinctions have been blurred through the prioritization of individual immigrants’ civic and economic integration. The difference between focusing on the group and focusing on the individual is analogous to whether the multiculturalism umbrella is transparent, so that different ethnic groups remain recognizable, or opaque, rendering group identities invisible. This brief discussion of examples from Western countries is useful as a reminder that policy shifts do not necessarily follow a linear trajectory of progressive evolution from opening up to multiculturalism to further embracing it; rather, a vacillation between openness and exclusion may be observed. It also illustrates what a robust version of multiculturalism can look like, in contrast to Korea’s relatively diluted version of multiculturalism.

The situation in Korea is by no means directly comparable to those seen in the Western countries mentioned above. The Korean context is characterized by late industrialization and late migration, and Timothy Lim (2014, 32) has argued that late migration pushed [Korea] onto a multiculturalist path much sooner than may otherwise have been expected. Korea’s turn toward multiculturalism, which began fairly recently—around the beginning of the twenty-first century, has fascinated scholars and pundits because it was not only swift but also antithetical to the country’s nationalist ideology of danil minjok (monoethnicity) and sunsu hyeoltong (pure bloodline), which had long been ingrained in people’s minds. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, multiculturalism has become a ubiquitous buzzword, and the state has actively promoted a campaign to redefine Korea as a multicultural society. The two main policies associated with Korea’s multiculturalism are the 2008 MFSA and the 2009 First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy.³ Both policies were created as a response to the growing population of immigrants in Korea—first the MFSA, primarily addressing marriage immigrants, and then the Immigration Policy, which applied to all immigrants.

We will look more closely at these policies later in the chapter. At this juncture, it is pertinent to raise two issues regarding Korea’s multicultural policies. The first concerns the timing of Korea’s multicultural turn. Building on the notions of late industrialization and late migration, wherein countries undergoing these processes later consider the experience of countries that developed earlier, Korea can be said to be going through late multiculturalism, taking on a learner role in their turn toward multiculturalism (Lim 2014), which presents its own challenges. When Korea began to receive migrants, according to Joppke and other scholars, Western countries had already weakened or retreated from the explicit multicultural stances they had previously taken. Although it is difficult to say whose multicultural model Korea followed, its current path appears similar to the downscaled versions of multiculturalism in which multicultural policies are add-ons to the broader immigration policy, emphasizing the incorporation of individual immigrants rather than recognizing specific ethnic group identities.

Second, as Korea’s multiculturalism focuses on immigrant incorporation specifically for those who have arrived since the 1990s, ethnic minorities, such as hwagyo (ethnic Chinese people in Korea) and multiracial Koreans born prior to the 1990s, are not included in these policies’ purview. Presumably, this focus was based on the premise that, despite these groups’ ethnic and racial distinctions, they are linguistically and culturally similar to the majority population. This narrow application of multiculturalism is concomitant with the policy exclusion of native minorities and the lack of policy measures addressing racial and ethnic discrimination.

More importantly, the limited scope of multiculturalism covered by the Korean state does not reflect immigrants’ multiculturalist demands and identity-based mobilization. Immigrant workers and marriage immigrants in Korea have established voluntary associations and organized grassroots activism since these groups began to arrive in Korea (Kim and Kim 2021; Lim 2014). Labor migrants have challenged restrictive migration laws and demanded better treatment and opportunities, and marriage immigrants have spoken out about domestic violence. These immigrants have voiced criticism of the Korean state’s assimilationist policies, deep-seated ethnonationalist ideology, and racism. They have come together with co-ethnics to celebrate their shared identity, but they have also worked with other groups of immigrants, envisioning a multicultural Korea. Nevertheless, these immigrants have not been invited to participate in the state’s multiculturalism policy planning; instead, they have been marginalized, either solely as recipients or as fully excluded populations living on the fringes of Korean society. An important question here is how the policy direction of the government can be aligned with the immigrants’ movement to realize a multicultural Korea.

Before describing the contours of contemporary immigration in Korea and discussing the government’s multicultural family policies in more detail, we provide an overview of Korea’s ethnoscape in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is admittedly a rather shallow look at the complex processes involved, but, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the Korean context, we felt it would be useful to include this snapshot of ethnic and racial diversity in Korea beyond the limited scope of Korea’s multiculturalism (and beyond the focus of our volume). Here, we highlight three groups: biracial Koreans and hwagyo—arguably two of the most identifiable ethnic minority groups in Korea—and white immigrants whose presence became more public in the 1990s and who have been treated much more favorably compared with other ethnic and racial minorities.

Precursors of Contemporary Multicultural Families

In the neighborhood where the second co-editor of this volume, Hyeyoung Woo, spent her childhood, lived a woman whose sister, Ms. Nam, worked at the United States military base in Moonsan, near the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea. In the 1980s, one of the privileges for Koreans working at U.S. bases was easy access to tax-free American items referred to locally as PX (post exchange) goods. These items (canned food, cigarettes, liquor, and candy) were highly sought after because of their superior quality as authentic imports, so many base employees would obtain goods not only for themselves but also for others. Hyeyoung once went to Ms. Nam’s home to pick up PX goods that her mother was expecting. As she approached her destination, Hyeyoung noticed several young multiracial children playing in the alleyways. Hyeyoung had known that Ms. Nam was married to an American soldier and that they had a child together. Hyeyoung also learned from Ms. Nam that these children playing in the alleyways also had Korean mothers and white or black fathers, who were assumed to be American soldiers. Yet, Hyeyoung was surprised to stumble upon a residential area for these interracial families, tucked away from mainstream Korean society.

John Lie (2014, 15) has contended that, in late twentieth-century Korea, where the belief in monoethnic and monocultural Korea was hegemonic, ethnic minorities and biracial Koreans were oppressed not necessarily by the state’s physical violence but by the state’s exertion of symbolic power through enunciating its vision of monoethnic nationalism and enacting a state policy to realize that goal. The ideological construction of Korean society as one nation denied the historical reality of a multiethnic Korea, as well as the legitimate societal membership of diverse ethnic and racial minorities.

Following the Korean War (1950–1953), the Korean/non-Asian biracial population grew out of the U.S. military presence, which facilitated most encounters between Korean women and American men. There were also off-base opportunities for Korean women and American men to meet, involving, for example, Korean women college students or American missionaries, but the majority of women who had children with non-Asian men—especially in cases where the Korean mothers and their children remained in Korea—were from low-income families and were socially ostracized because of discrimination against biracial people (Yuh 2002). A 2006 newspaper article reported that 83 percent of mixed-race children of Korean and American parentage in Korea were raised by single mothers (Nadia Kim 2014). Under the nationalist ideology of danil minjok and the patriarchal system in Korea, biracial Koreans were seen as the embodiment of violated moral, social, and sexual norms. The public enjoyed the performances of biracial entertainers, especially popular singers such as Insooni, Park Il-joon, and Yun Soo Il. In everyday life, however, biracial Koreans were called pejorative names, such as tuigi (originally a term for animals of mixed species), and were subject to institutional discrimination (Gage 2014). For example, under universal conscription, biracial Korean men were automatically disqualified from mandatory military service because of their physical differences (H. Kim 2016).⁴

Individual Koreans may have viewed those with mixed Korean/other Asian ethnicity as more racially similar to Koreans, compared with Korean/non-Asian biracial people, whose appearance often makes them stand out. This does not mean, however, that these non-Korean East Asian ethnic minorities were embraced or treated equally. For example, hwagyo have long been recognized as an ethnic minority in Korea, with established enclaves in Seoul and Incheon (Shin 2016). The monoethnic nationalism of the 1970s led to the hwagyo people’s displacement from central Seoul, and exclusionist policies limiting hwagyo ownership of property and businesses forced many of them out of the country (Shin 2016).

In the 1990s, new faces began to appear in Korean public media, including immigrant professionals (often white people) and labor migrants (mostly from Asian countries). Different from non-Korean East Asian ethnic minorities and biracial people, whose presence was largely born out of political contexts and historical conditions, these new faces were newcomers whose move to Korea was propelled by the wave of segyehwa (globalization). Several white naturalized Koreans originally from Europe and the United States became popular in the media. Lee Charm (from Germany, previously known as Lee Han-woo), who later even served as president of the Korea Tourism Organization from 2009 to 2013; Ida Daussy (from France); and Robert Holley (from the United States), referred to as Koreans with blue eyes, captivated Korean television viewers’ attention with their fluent Korean language skills and quick wit (Oh 1997). All three were married to Koreans, which gave them legitimacy in the eyes of the Korean public. For Koreans, who were riding a high point of economic development, middle-class professional white immigrants from more developed countries openly expressing their affection for and loyalty to Koreans and Korea appealed to their nationalist pride at this time, which turned out to be the eve of the 1997 economic crisis.

In the same decade, Korea opened its doors to migrants from less developed countries in Asia, resulting in a rapid increase in the foreign-born population. About 40,000 foreign-born people lived in Korea in 1980, and this number continually increased, as shown in figure I.1, reaching approximately 100,000 in 1990, 500,000 in 2000, 1,000,000 in 2007, and 2,000,000 in 2016 (4% of the total population) (Statistics Korea 2020a). The changes in the governmental policies and the expansion of transnational ties and businesses can explain the relatively large number of recent migrants arriving in Korea en masse. In this regard, recent migrants differ from the nonnormative individuals and families described above, such as biracial Koreans born in Korea, hwagyo whose ancestors migrated from China generations ago, or white immigrants who set their courses individually. More importantly, as these recent migrants make up the majority of immigrants in Korea, they are at (in the case of marriage migrants) or adjacent to (in the case of labor migrants) the center of contemporary multicultural family discourse in the country.

FIGURE I.1 Trends in foreign residents in South Korea (1998–2018).

Source: Statistics Korea 2020a. Notes: Foreign long-term residents are those who have stayed at least ninety days since their arrival in South Korea and are registered as foreign residents. Foreign short-term residents are those who have stayed fewer than ninety days and thus have not registered as foreign residents. Undocumented refers to those who have stayed more than ninety days without registering as foreign residents.

Labor and Marriage Migration to South Korea

In the early 1990s, increased wages and rising levels of educational attainment among Koreans left more than two hundred thousand low-skilled jobs unfilled; the Korean government, under pressure from the owners of small- and medium-sized businesses in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, implemented the Industrial Trainee Program, which brought in foreign-born workers from other countries, mostly in Asia (A. Kim 2009; N. H. Kim 2008; Seol and Skrentny 2009). Through this program, foreign-born workers could be employed in Korea during a one-year training period, followed by an optional one-year extension. However, for many labor migrants, a one- or two-year stay was not sufficient to make money while learning new skills as a trainee. These labor migrants often needed to earn enough to repay the cost of their migration, including brokers’ fees, and to bring a good amount of money home with them when they returned to their home country after completing the trainee program. Because Korea was geographically distant from many of these migrant workers’ home countries and the trip was too costly for a circular migration pattern to be feasible, many overstayed their visas and became undocumented. This resulted in an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants in Korea, who were estimated to make up almost 80 percent of all foreign-born workers in Korea in 2002 (Seol and Skrentny