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The civil unrest that erupted in Paris suburbs and spread to 200 French cities in October 2005 was touched off by the wrath of Arab and North African immigrants who had long suffered from poverty and discrimination. Mostly second-generation immigrants, they experience an acute lack of opportunities, a sense of alienation and mass unemployment, all of which fueled hostility toward the mainstream. The civil unrest sent alarm bells ringing worldwide, because more and more countries have to worry about racial and cultural integration due to the increasing number of foreign workers and immigrants.
Racial conflicts in multi-ethnic countries are especially troubling. Nearly 1 million people were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994 due to long conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis. Elsewhere, minority groups like the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka and the Chechens in Russia, are engaged in bloody wars against their governments. It's exactly for this reason that most military conflicts today are not wars between countries but of civil wars.
For Korea, a racially homogeneous country throughout its long history, the civil unrest in France may seem a remote concern, and civil wars fought along ethnic lines even more so. But ours is no longer really an ethnically homogeneous country. The number of foreigners living in the country jumped from 50,000 in 1990 to 500,000 in 2000 and exceeded 820,000 last year. The figure accounts for between 1.6 percent and 1.7 percent of our population and is estimated to reach 1.2 million in 2010, or over 2.5 percent of the population. Those are official statistics; there are many more foreigners living in the country illegally.
Though business leaders and English teachers make up a growing part of that, workers who came to Korea to earn money from China and Southeast Asia account for 83 percent of the total. The first group are treated well in Korea and earn quite a lot of money. But the migrant workers who have come here in search of the "Korean dream" often suffer social prejudice and institutional and legal discrimination.
Meanwhile, the proportion of international marriages is also on the rise. The ratio of international marriages in the total number of marriages rose from 1.2 percent in 1990 to 13.6 percent last year. Farmers or fishermen who marry foreign women account for 35.9 percent of men in rural areas. Considering the children born or to be born to these couples, it is high time for our government, too, to map out systematic and long-term policies. If the so-called ˇ°Kosians,ˇ± who are bound to increase in number along with foreign workers, take up the jobs shunned by "pure-blooded" Koreans and make up a greater proportion of the poor, class conflict will intensify and social unrest arising from greater unemployment and crime and fracturing families will accelerate. If discrimination extends to the second generation, it will create a political minority with an axe to grind. That is why France's civil unrest is no remote concern at all.
Parents make every effort to teach their children English, because they wish to give them more opportunities and greater competitiveness in the global age. It is crystal-clear that we Koreans can no longer live huddled together in the globalized world. If they want their children to live peacefully in a multi-racial and multi-cultural era, parents more urgently need to encourage their children in the art of living with others.
To do that, we need to cooperate in enacting laws and establishing institutions for foreign workers and foreign women married to Koreans and their children to adapt to our society. Accommodating and considering them in our daily life is not a choice but a duty that citizens of the multi-racial Republic of Korea need to fulfill for the sake of all our children.
The column was contributed by Prof. Lee Shin-wha of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University.
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