October 1, 2009 – The Lee Myeong-bak administration has begun yet another concentrated crackdown against undocumented migrant workers, which is supposed to go on from October until November. In the past we have seen clearly just how filled with death and injury, violence and human rights abuses these ‘concentrated crackdowns’ are. Migrant workers have fallen to their deaths while trying to escape raids. They have ended their own lives due to fear and insecurity. They have been injured, beaten. The countless human rights abuses are almost inexpressible in words.
The cases in which crackdown officers make surprise attacks on factories without legal warrants and without the legal consent of employers, break doors and windows in dormitories and residences, enter without warning and drag people away are innumerable. The situation is so bad that migrant workers now rarely dare to go out to the bus station, convenient store or market for fear of being caught. Never knowing when immigration will raid their factories, they even go so far as to practice escaping.
Ignoring their dignity as human beings, the crackdown treats migrant workers as no more than hunted beasts. This policy of the government’s is creating a social problem and instilling grief and rage in the hearts of its targets, the vast majority of whom are innocent people trying their beast to live decent lives.
There are roughly 190,000 undocumented migrant workers in South Korea. The government calls their very existence ‘illegal’ and justifies hunting them down in the name of ‘maintaining order’ and ‘protecting the jobs of native workers.’ In this process the very ‘constitutional government’ that the administration has continuously emphasized has disappeared. The crackdown completely ignores due process. How is it possible to explain breaking the law in the name of constitutional government?
According to news reports President Lee himself has stated that, “illegal residents must not be given wings to fly around at will.” This order has lead directly to the large-scale crackdown we are now witnessing. Setting the goal of reducing undocumented migrant workers to 10% of the total migrant population by 2012, the Ministry of Justice has put in place quotas for each immigration office and called for year-round cooperation between the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Labor, police and coastguard in a joint measure to root them out.
The final result of this was the large-scale raid that occurred last November in Maseok. During this incident police blocking the roads leading to and from of an industrial complex, while crackdown officers went in and out of factories and houses arresting a total of 130 people. The violence was immense; traces are still left where locks were broken. The violence against women was particularly intense. One woman dressed only in her underwear was grabbed and dragged by her hair. Another woman was forced to urinate on the street in view of others. 10 people were injured and hospitalized in the course of this raid. These and countless other human rights violations took place.
During the Noh Moo-hyun administration some 20 to 25 thousand people were arrested and deported yearly. This is no small number. But Lee Myeong-bak arrested 32 thousand migrant workers in 2008 alone. This year from January to July 17 thousand people have already been forcibly removed.
The cases of violence have also not ceased this year.
In April we were all shocked when the videotaped scene of a Chinese woman who had worked in a restaurant in Daejeon being dragged out by her hair and then handcuffed and hit in the neck inside the immigration vehicle appeared on television. In the same month the skull of a Chinese worker, Simo, was cracked when he fell from a wall while trying to escape during a raid in the Ji-dong region of Suwon. He is still receiving treatment. Nonetheless the Suwon immigration authorities have made no apology nor offered any compensation.
In June at the Sihwa Industrial Complex in Ansan, immigration officers blocked a bus carrying migrant workers on their way home from work and arrested dozens of people at once. The following morning they came out again to make the rounds at factories and residential areas where migrant workers had not been caught the day before. In the process of this raid officers even lied saying they were there to collect garbage in order to get people to open their doors. They then entered to make arrests.
In July, Suwon immigration officers raided in the Wongok neighborhood in Ansan entering houses without warrants. One Chinese migrant worker was handcuffed before he could even put on his close properly. His ankle was broken due to the violence with which he was arrested. Recently, immigration officers entered the room shared by a couple in the Jeong-nam area of Hwaseong and broke into a wardrobe to arrest the husband who was hiding there.
We can see by these examples that the crackdown completely disregards due process and human rights. It is, by its nature, illegal. In response to countless criticism that the crackdown is violent and inhumane, the Ministry of Justice enforced instructions for “following due process and protecting human rights in the process of immigration procedures” on June 15. In reality, however, this set of regulations calls for no real change in the manner in which raids are carried out and continues to avoid requiring the presentation of warrants.
In order to stop this violence the perspective that sees undocumented migrant workers as criminals has to be fundamentally changed. Only a program of full legalization, and not a policy of arbitrary arrest, detention and deportation, can stop the vicious cycle in which we are trapped. The government must stop the concentrated crackdown immediately and begin to make a change by putting migrant workers’ human rights first.
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