Korea's migrant regularisation is "experiment to follow carefully"

Korea is the first country in Asia to introduce a central immigration policy. The system present faults that the international community should help to fix, in view of its possible adoption by Beijing and Tokyo.

Seoul (AsiaNews) – The South Korean labour market introduced an innovative system to regularize immigration two years ago, but "it must be assessed by the global community" that "may suggest improvements for its adoption in other Asian countries", said a human rights worker.

Rajiv Narayan, East Asian regional researcher of Amnesty International, was giving his feedback about an Employment Permit System (EPS) introduced in Seoul in 2004. "Korea is the first country in the continent to introduce a central immigration policy and the global community is carefully watching this experiment," he said.

The EPS was born to help Korean companies short of manpower to supply stable jobs to foreign workers, with the main idea being to enable a government organization to run the recruitment process. This organization would be better placed to choose immigrants according to their capabilities.

Two years after the system was introduced, however, the system presents evident failures: immigrants can enter the country regularly but they are labelled as "modern slaves doing dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs". The system restricts a migrant worker from switching jobs more than twice. Workers on their second job who suffer from bad working conditions know they are destined to remain like that for good.

Moreover, some employers seize passports from their workers in order to prevent them from escaping. Women face an especially hard situation: about 12% suffer sexual harassment at work.

Narayan, who was sent to the country to monitor developments in the system, suggested some changes, including the freedom to choose one's own job.

"Britain has millions of migrant workers, and the government has learned how to tackle them throughout hundreds of years,'' he said. "Migrants are subject to English law but may form steady communities in the society where their traditions are preserved. They may be joined by their families and are only sent away for a valid reason."

The international community "must pay a lot of attention and give its own suggestions to Seoul, because other Asian countries do not have an immigration policy and could adopt this system, starting with the Chinese and Japanese."

According to government statistics, around 630,000 immigrants are working in the country, including 300,000 illegal ones.

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