10 - Filipina Wives and “Multicultural” Families in Korea

Summary

Background

It was a Filipina marriage migrant who delivered a speech on TV supporting presidential candidate Lee in December 2007. It was also a Filipina who was given the third rank candidate seat in the National Assembly for proportional representation of the Renewal of Korea Party in April 2008. Do these events show that monocultural South Korea has been transformed into a multicultural society? Furthermore, does it show that Southeast Asian housewives could politically represent multicultural sectors in Korea? At the least, it presents the situation that “multicultural society” is politically and socially the crucial issue in Korea now. In this chapter, I would like to discuss how “multicultural Korea” began, why marriage-migrant women are highlighted among other groups, and what would be the effect of marriage migration on the patrilineal family system and ethnic nationalism in Korea, based on my existing interview data on Filipina and Korean couples and their family members.

With the acceleration of globalization since the 1990s, human interchanges between Korea and Southeast Asian countries have increased in number. In 1991, 209,747 Koreans — 9.7 per cent of the total number of outbound Koreans — travelled to Southeast Asian countries. However, fifteen years later, in 2005, those numbers had jumped to 1,891,812 and 20 per cent respectively (MOJ 1991, 2005). On the other hand, 117,549 Southeast Asians, or 4.7 per cent of the total number of inbound foreigners, came to Korea in 1991; those numbers had increased to 372,078 and 7.2 per cent respectively in 2005. These figures indicate that more Koreans are going to Southeast Asia than vice versa at the moment.

Koreans have already been ranked as the biggest group of visitor arrivals in the Philippines and Cambodia in 2006 (DOT and MOT). The majority of Korean visitors in Southeast Asia are tourists; others are language students, businesspersons, employees of Korean companies, missionaries, retirees, etc. On the other hand, most Southeast Asians in Korea are unskilled migrant workers; others consist of tourists, Koreans' spouses, university students, invited relatives, etc. So the statistics on long-term sojourners who stay more than ninety days abroad deliver a different message.