ATIK | Confederation of Workers from Turkey in Europe | AHM-ATIK News Center
Recognize the rights and welfare of Migrants!
APPM | 23 – 10 – 2009 | The Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM) deplores the ongoing crackdown on the 190,000 undocumented migrant workers in South Korea. This is in support of calls by the Migrant Trade Union (MTU) and other migrants groups in Korea against the massive arrest, detention and deportation of said workers going on right now.
The intent of the crackdown is to portray such workers as criminals and as scapegoats for the rising unemployment of local workers and the cause of the economic crisis.
The Korean government’s goal is to reduce the number of undocumented migrant workers to 10% of the total number of foreign workers by 2012. This means they would target at least 100,000 to be arrested, detained and deported by that time based on the number of all migrant workers issued by the Ministry of Justice in January 2009.
In the last crackdown from January to July 17,000 people were caught and deported and was marked with brutality on the part of arresting officers. Raids even in homes were made without any search warrants and there were a number of cases of physical violence against those who were arrested.
According to the MTU, this include a woman dragged by her hair and still wearing her underwear and in April in front of television viewers of a Chinese woman restaurant worker dragged the same way and then hit in the neck while inside the immigration vehicle among others.
The Ministry of Justice was forced to issue out instructions to arresting officers to follow due process and protect the human rights of those arrested. But still the abuse continues.
We call upon the Korean authorities to decriminalize undocumented migrant workers and stop using them as scapegoats for the economic hardships facing local workers. These workers are not criminals but are in Korea primarily to work for their families back home usually in exploitative conditions.
Many of them were forced to become undocumented because of the exploitative trainee system, the limits imposed by the Employment Permit System (EPS) on the number of years one can legally work in Korea and lately because of the economic crisis that led to the termination and even non-employment of foreign workers upon arrival because their employers became bankrupt.
At the same time, we are calling on the Korean government to legalize the stay of undocumented migrant workers and stop the crackdowns.
For its part the APMM is co-organizing a workshop in the 2nd International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR2) in Athens, Greece from November 1 -4 to deepen discussions on the criminalization of migrants worldwide. Likewise we will call on the members of the International Migrants Alliance (IMA) to launch protest actions to condemn the South Korean government for their continuing massive Arrests, Detentions, and Deportations of undocumented migrants.
