A Rant~ For Lelin

The Korean government just can't stop their repressive, abusive and threatening behavior. They seem an awful lot like an abusive spouse. They say they want foreigners to come here. Indeed, the government and the corporations who woo us give us mighty financial incentives to come here. They lure foreigners- 3D workers and English teachers alike- with the dream of financial and job security, a place to live, a visa and sometimes even plane tickets and signing bonuses. But once we get here, we find we are shackled to jobs we hate, with no rights and little or no opportunity to leave them, lest we lose everything we came here for in the first place. And then when we are brave enough to quit, we lose our visas and try to make it anyway. But then we are punished...

We are punished for trying to realize the things that were promised to us. We are hunted, followed, sometimes beaten by police or bosses, verbally abused and forced to leave the country. In short, we are made to feel that foreigners are merely a resource to be used up. We are not valued for our contribution to the Korean economy. We are not valued for our role in expanding the cultural horizons of the Koreans we meet. We are not appreciated in any way. Yet the Korean government pays decent lip service to building a new multicultural Korea. This, they are very good at. So while they break our backs in the workplace and send us into hiding from immigration officials, they celebrate us in cultural festivals which showcase fresh off the boat migrants who haven't yet had a chance for their dreams to turn into nightmares.

The whole charade is quite disgusting...Yet we can't stop coming here because as desperate as we are to have dignity in our workplaces, we are probably more desperate to have money to send to our families, to deal with our debt, to save for our futures... And so we continue to allow Korea, and other labor importing countries to abuse us for a small fee.

When are we going to end this? When are we going to stand up and say, "Enough!"? It's time for workers from developing countries to end the abusive relationships with bully countries like Korea. I don't mean stop working in them, but to meet them on the same level. Because they have something that we need, but those countries need us, too. Let's use our strength as workers to demand our rights... (* Man, at moments like this, I really want to call a general strike! If only people would follow me!)

*This was written for my Bangladeshi friend, Lelin, who keeps asking me to write something for his Bangladeshi newspaper. He asked me to write about my experience in Korea, yet I find that my personal experience in Korea is inextricably linked to the experiences of migrant workers in Korea. And so I don't really have anything to say about my life in Korea without talking about the lives of my friends who experience, in all seriousness, the same abuse from their employers as women who find themselves in abusive relationships. And today I just happened to feel enough anger to write a productive rant about why I dislike Korea so intensely. And I feel the same way about America, although I don't think American attitudes towards migrants or immigrants is as monolithic as they are here in Korea.

* I will probably add more to this article later. And I'll edit before I give to him. So if you have suggestions on how to improve my wildly angry writing, by all means, leave a comment...