[Opinion] One Asia

Hosting the Asian Games under the banner “One Asia,” it might be a good time for us to ask ourselves a serious question. Do we really want to become one with Asia? Do we really treat Asians as our neighbors in this global era? Anyone who wants to answer this question earnestly will have to touch on the sticky issue of migrant Asian labors in Korea. Even at this moment the country is hosting the Asia’s sports gala in a festive mood, they are working laboriously in the so-called 3D (dirty, dangerous and difficult) area in which most Koreans are reluctant to work.

I teach Korean language to migrant Asian workers once a week in Ilsan, Goyang-si as a part of the good-will program organized by civic organization “Friends of Asia.” Not a few students, working all day long and even during weekend, often miss the class. One of the students, a 26-year-old young man from Africa named Daniel, ended up injuring his muscle after working a week after another without a rest around Chuseok holidays. When he called last Saturday from his room to say sorry that he could come, I felt sorry that I could do nothing for him while he was suffering from the pain all by himself unable to go to see a doctor.

Awan, a 28-year-old Pakistani who finished a graduate school course in his country, said that he found out Koreans discriminate Asian labors more than any other country he has been. After two years in this country, therefore, he now chooses to stay inside the factory complex. When he gets on a bus, a Korean sitting next to him often move to another seat and people give him a suspicious look as if he were a criminal.

On top of this, the government plans to evict all the migrant laborers working without visa by March next year, paying little regard to their contribution to the economy. The policy has invited harsh criticism from human rights organizations, and further caused the concern over how to gap the hole in the so-called 3D area once all the workers are gone. By discriminating them for their skin colors, languages and customs that are different from ours and for that they are from poorer countries, we not only hurt them, but also confine ourselves in a short-sighted world that will lead to isolation of this society. To secure a decent place on the global stage, the country must learn to embrace those Asians as our neighbors.

An international sports event such as the Asian Games, then, will serve as a venue for public education by letting people realizing the distorted prejudice against foreign laborers they have and learn how to build a community where people of diverse backgrounds can live together in harmony. Back in the 1960s through 1970s when Olympic gold medallists were introduced in school textbooks, many Koreans left for industrialized countries such as the U.S. and Germany, where they worked hard in poor environments. We must remember that migrant workers we see today bear resemblance to our parents and brothers and sisters back in those hard years.