As more people have migrated globally, nations have felt growing racial tensions that show different patterns from the past ones. To address this issue, governments around the world began to adopt “multiculturalism” as their policy ideas for the c...
As more people have migrated globally, nations have felt growing racial tensions that show different patterns from the past ones. To address this issue, governments around the world began to adopt “multiculturalism” as their policy ideas for the coexistence of increasingly diverse races and cultures in their territory. Korea now also experiences more rapid influx of races from developing countries than ever before. However, Koreans are very homogenous, and thereupon unfamiliar with immigrants. For this reason, for Korea, the process of entering into a multicultural society is challenging. What is worse, multiculturalism that was hastily adopted has done more harm than good, causing confusion, unnecessary competition among ministries, and duplicated policies. So now is the time to diagnose Korean multicultural policies and to find the influence factors affecting policy orientations. If not now, it will be more difficult to respond to issues derived from diverse races. Meanwhile, because government officials’ policy ideas strongly influence multicultural policy, this study focuses on their policy ideas and looks into the factors affecting their multicultural policy orientations. And based on the examination on the factors, this study aims to predict how the Korean multicultural society will develop and how the influence factors in policy orientations will change, and to present the development directions of multicultural policies.
To achieve such aims, first, this research systematically classified the discussions on Korean multiculturalism and multicultural policies and tried to clearly define related concepts. Second, this study examined the developmental process and the characteristics of Korean multicultural policies. Finally, this study investigated the influence factors affecting Korean public servants’ attitudes and their policy orientations and verified relative influences among the factors to gain the validity. In this process, a model was built by gathering all the influence factors that had been suggested by existing literature and studies. This model was also considered that Koreans’ unique perceptions, such as the belief about single-ethnic group and national identity, could be key influence factors in studying Korean multicultural policies.
In order to verify the model, the study surveyed 610 middle- and high-ranking officials in the central government and analyzed the questioned data through SEM (structural equation modeling) that utilized AMOS 16.0. Additionally, for practical analysis of the results of the study, in-dept interviews with 12 government officials in charge of foreigners were also conducted.
The results of this study are as follows:
First, as a result of measuring the characteristics of multicultural policies and policy orientations, my findings suggest that Korean multicultural policies are close to a differential exclusionary model. It reveals that Korean multicultural policies do not reflect the values of “multiculturalism” and severely discriminate foreigners, depending on their social instrumentality. Such exemplary policies include the foreign labor policy that has prevented short-term laborers from settling down in Korea, the assimilation policy that has unilaterally forced marriage immigrants to adapt to the Korean culture, and the discriminative immigration policy that has given favor to the foreigners with expertise. However, because multicultural policies and discussions in Korea began with the influx of marriage immigrants who were seen as the subject of cultural amalgamation, the policies designed for them have been thought as the typical scheme for the multiculturalism, thereby causing conceptual confusion among those surveyed. Although the level of assimilationist orientations of public servants is shown higher than that of differential exclusionary orientations, the assimilationist orientations are limited to marriage immigrants and the level of multiculturalism orientation is low.
Second, while the belief about single ethnicity-that most Koreans have and that is identified as the main cause of racial discrimination-greatly influences public servants’ attitudes toward multiple cultures, it hardly affects their policy orientations. However, the belief is shown to affect differential exclusionary orientations when attitudes toward multiple cultures mediate. This means that the single-ethnic view can be strong, if negative aspects, such as social conflicts and the perception of the threat derived from multicultural society, clearly emerge; however, this can be also translated that this view can be weakened, if positive awareness of multiple cultures are encouraged. Therefore, by focusing on change in the belief about single ethnicity, it needs to develop various measurement tools and to conduct time-serial analysis in order to find influence factors.
Third, the level of public servants’ perceptions of threat, among other attitudes toward multiple cultures, is quite high, leading to negative influence on policy orientations. In particular, officials are increasingly aware of the national threat involved with Korean-Chinese, marriage immigrants, and the children from multicultural families. The more real and specified their perceptions of the threat become, the more greatly the threat perceptions affect officials’ policy orientations: threat perceptions lead to high level of differential exclusionary orientations, and low level of assimilationist and multiculturalism orientations. Specifically, as a result of in-dept interviews, interviewees think that potential danger coming from maladjusted children from multicultural families will loom up. This means interviewees also acknowledge that maladjustment is an inevitable consequence of the immature social atmosphere and infrastructure that are not prepared yet to embrace the diverse cultures and races. After all, the growing perceptions of threat, the most decisive influence factor in affecting multicultural society, is inescapable, indicating that there remains great challenges to be solved through policies.
Fourth, public servants’ intrinsic values, such as civic component of national identity and sense of progressiveness, greatly influence multicultural policy orientations. In particular, the study shows that officials see civic factor much closer to the principal source of nationhood than ethnic factor; and that the civic factor has a greater influence on differential exclusionary orientation than ethnic factor does. In other words, because differential exclusionary orientations are affected by civic factors-the intrinsic values that are hard to change and be formulated-the discriminatory, exclusionary attitudes of government officials are highly likely to be reflected in future policy ideas.
Fifth, public servants’ contact experience with foreigners differently influences attitudes and policy orientations. In other words, work experience controls the cause and result among variables. Specifically, depending on work experience, there is big difference in attitudes toward multiple cultures and policy orientations among those with experience in regulating foreigners, those with experience in supportive jobs for foreigners, and those with no experience of foreigner-related jobs; another big difference is also found depending on where officials belong to-whether the regulating authorities (the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Labor) or the supportive ministries (the Ministry for Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism). The fact that attitudes toward foreigners and policy orientations of government officials are different depending on where they work shows well the characteristics of Korean government system and how organizational characteristics affect policy characteristics, and helps to concrete the existing theory that organizational climate determines its members’ judgment about certain events or situations.
Based on the five results, this study suggests three development directions of Korean multicultural policies. First, various strategies should be designed for improving government officials’ understanding about multicultural society to help them to shape and implement future-oriented, balanced multicultural policies. Second, it needs to make all-out efforts to positively change the awareness of multicultural society among all class of society including public servants, because, along with the deeply rooted belief about single-ethnicity, the growing perceptions of the threat derived from foreigners may lead to racist issue. Therefore, it is essential to draw up strategy on how to change social perceptions, including the belief about homogeneous nation and perceived threat. Third, by taking a lesson from other countries’ experience, it needs to overhaul the basis for multicultural policies and to formulate long-term prescriptive measures. For instance, both the government and civil society should resume their discussing anti-discrimination law and mull over to develop more open immigration policies that conform to global trends.