An Unexpected Pioneer in Asia: The Enfranchisement of Foreign Residents in South Korea

Abstract

Since 2005 South Korea is the pioneer state in Asia to extend voting rights at the local and regional levels to foreign residents. The few explanations of this unlikely reform remain partial and contradictory. With this research, we contribute to a fuller understanding of the political process that led to this electoral reform. We take a middle-range perspective that emphasises the role of the construction of these rights and negotiation about them between political groups along a decision-making process. We find that some characteristics of the Korean enfranchisement of non-citizens render it indeed a special case, but that it also confirms the explanatory power of the factors proposed by the more specific comparative literature dealing with this phenomenon.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their appreciation to the anonymous reviewer for thoughtful comments and suggestions on the submitted draft. They also thank participants at the IMISCOE 11th Annual Conference on ‘Immigration, Social Cohesion and Social Innovation’ (Malmö, August 2013) and the Central European University's conference on ‘Polarization in Divided Societies: Korea in a global context’ (Budapest, September 2013) for their insights and suggestions. The authors are grateful to Rainer Bauböck and Dirk Jacobs for their encouraging comments on earlier versions of the draft. Likewise, they express their gratitude to Eun-Jeung Lee, Ayako Komine, Hak-jae Kim and Zsolt Enyedi for reading through the draft and providing useful suggestions.

Funding

The work on this paper was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies of the Republic of Korea [AKS-2009-MA-1001].

Notes

1. A year earlier a Public Referendum Law had legally allowed their potential participation in resident plebiscites (chumint'up'yo), resident suits (chuminsosong), and resident recalls (chuminsohwan).

2. That is, that enfranchisement succeeded mostly as a diplomatic strategy to get voting rights for Koreans living in Japan, but also as a migration policy for coping with marriage immigrants in Korea.

3. It is important to emphasise that these categories are imperfect analytical/inductive constructs for the purpose of simplifying the presentation of an overly complex process of debate (see Table 1).

4. The principle of reciprocity applies to migrant's welfare rights: these apply in different degrees to immigrants according to the welfare agreements with their countries of origin (Seol, 2012, p. 129).

5. The 2010 Nationality Act of May 4 presents a departure from the strict adherence to jus sanguinis as a principle governing the acquisition of nationality, but remains strongly tilted against letting less-skilled workers access nationality (Seol, 2012, p. 119).

6. Civil society organisations that congregated migrants and pro-migrant Korean advocates seem to have woken up only after the first failed attempt to enfranchise foreign residents to demand a better integration of migrants into the Korean society, realising that the precondition for it was to create a permanent residence status. In the history of Korean migration policy this status came as late as 2002 through the Immigration Control Act, which addressed mostly the ethnic Chinese with the F-5 visa. This visa required the fulfillment of at least one kind of investment (economic, cultural, academic, professional, familial, etc.), either of which was defined in rather demanding terms in combination with years of legal residence in the country, in such a way that the lower their upfront investment in Korea is valued, the higher the residence requirement would need to be, with a minimum of 5 years. In 2008, the initial limit of legal stay for foreign workers was reformed to allow a stay of 4 years and 10 months. According to Lim (2012), this was the government's cynical response to demands of business leaders to be able to hire foreign workers for longer: extending the maximum stay to just less than 5 years in order to prevent the acquisition of the F-5 visa.

7. Bureaucracies responded quickly to these political demands; the Ministries of Administration and Self-Government and of Justice swiftly produced long documents with strong endorsements for the proposal (Segyeilbo, September 9, 1999, p. 1; So˘ulsinmun, September 21, 1999, p. 28).

8. Minbyo˘n had become active in advocating for the ethnic Chinese minority in Korea since it organised the first workshop on the issue on 4 July 2000, entitled ‘Globalization & Human Rights: Improvement of the legal status of ethnic Chinese’, which preceded this one.

9. The first law proposal on the introduction of the permanent residence status was a joint effort of parliamentarians in both major parties with a clear link to Minbyo˘n, Song To-hwan, stated that in the process of ‘cooperating with MP Chung Tae-cho˘l and Yi Pu-yo˘ng [ … ] we realized that the domestic issue was interconnected to human rights issues of overseas Koreans’ (Conference Proceedings, 2001, p. 3).

10. South Korea's policy on overseas Koreans began to develop only under the Kim Young-Sam-administration in the mid-1990s in the context of government programs on internationalisation and globalisation, and was deepened under the Kim Dae-Jung-administration in the late 1990s, beginning with the enactment of the Act on the Immigration and Legal Status of Overseas Koreans in 1999 (Jeon, 2008, p. 177ff.).

11. The NMDP succeeded the NCNP. The main Korean parties have changed their names, split and reorganised in the last three decades, making it difficult to observe ideological continuities in them across legislatures. However, the overwhelming plurality component of the Korean electoral system for most of its history has formed a bipartisan system that makes it easier to recognise the genealogies of each party, despite the changes in names and slogans. Today's New Frontier Party was formerly the GNP, which has its roots in Park Chung-hee's Democratic Republican Party and—for its orientation—stands in the same conservative tradition of the Liberal Party (1951–1960) of the then-President Syngman Rhee (1948–1960). On the other hand, the Democratic Party (DP) also has a history of at least 50 years: it was named DP when it opposed President Syngman Rhee and fought for democratisation under Dictator Park Chung-hee (1961–1979), Chung Doo-hwan (1979–1987), and Roh Tae-woo (1987–1992). The NCNP and NMDP belong in this line of DP-parties. The OOP was established by a group of MPs that split from the NMDP and other progressive politicians in 2003, but reunited with the other part of the NMDP (which meanwhile had renamed itself into DP) into the United DP in 2008. After having changed its name once more in 2012, in 2013 it restored its name to DP. There were smaller parties that could have been interested in the reform: the Alliance for Liberal Democracy headed by Kim Jong-pil, and, from 2004 onwards, the Leftist Democratic Labor Party. However, none of them had representatives in the committees that negotiated the reform.

12. They were mostly occupied with restricting voting rights for foreigners as much as possible. They explicitly demanded the exclusion of industrial trainees (e.g. Sub-Committee for Election Law of the Special Committee for Political Reforms of the Korean NA, April 16, 2005, p. 19), demanded not to allow passive voting rights (Special Committee for Political Reforms of the Korean NA, June 24, 2005, p. 15), and insisted on limiting rights to the ethnic Chinese minority (e.g. Sub-Committee for Election Law of the Special Committee for Political Reforms of the Korean NA, April 16, 2005, p. 19; Sub-Committee for Election Law of the Special Committee for Political Reforms of the Korean NA, June 9, 2005, p. 9; minutes Sub-Committee for Election Law of the Special Committee for Political Reforms of the Korean NA, June 14, 2005, pp. 11–12).

13. There were several other changes to electoral laws that drew far more attention. This is evident in the fact that before putting the law to the vote, when the representative of the Special Committee mentioned the ‘most important’ novelties he did not even include these rights (General Assembly of the Korean National Assembly, July 6, 2005, pp. 28–30).

14. While this demand has not been met until today, recently the Korean NA adopted another resolution universally ‘demanding from countries in which Koreans have settled to give them with regional political participation rights’ (e.g. General Assembly of the Korean National Assembly, June 27, 2013, p. 25). The proponent of this resolution was MP Wo˘n Yu-cho˘l of the DP (formerly OOP), who already in 2001 had strongly argued for the election rights for foreigners in Korea as a strategy to demand the enfranchisement of Korean residents in Japan. Also, he had signed the law proposals by the OOP and by the GNP for the Referendum Law in 2003 that explicitly included foreigners.

15. This line of argumentation is later repeated amongst others by MP Cho Sun-hyo˘ng (DP), who stated that equating these two groups would reflect a legacy of colonial thinking (Standing Committee for Legislation and Judiciary, February 28, 2002, pp. 10–11).

16. Available in http://www.courts.go.jp/english/judgments/text/1995.02.28-1993-Gyo-Tsu-No.163.html; accessed on February 9, 2014.

17. Connecting Smend's theory of integration to constitutional issues, Huh (2001) argued that foreigners could be bearers of fundamental rights as long as that would not harm ‘assimilative integration (tonghwa-cho˘k t`onghap)’. He argued that political participation rights for foreigners ‘may give a wrong influence to the assimilative integration on that society strives for’, so foreigners should not be enfranchised (p. 234).

18. This is why the formally inclusive reform cannot be related to a more integral policy. In Europe, similar reforms have been justified in debates (and portrayed in the media) as ‘immigration policy solutions’ to greater demographic and economic problems. While it is true that that the ageing profile of Korea's working population resembles European cases, there is hardly any reference in general discourse to a possible solution by attracting foreigners; and there is even less evidence on this for the particular case of debates on voting rights extension. On the contrary, we found many instances where actors showed clear opposition to letting in ‘too many foreign workers’ into the country (see footnote 12). The prerequisites for obtaining a migrant status that allows applying for a visa that in turns allows to vote have not changed much. In other words, there is not much effort on the side of the government or lawmakers to attract foreigners by improving immigration procedures; not to speak of voting rights.

19. We have shown how legislators found a way to technically restrict the enfranchisement of non-citizens to a few thousands, and to exclude most resident migrants who resided in Korea under schemes other than the F-5 visa. Foreign residents with F-5 visa have been estimated at 11,239 in 2005 and 19,276 in 2008. The latest statistics show that in 2011, there were 64,979 foreigners with F-5 visas out of a total of 982,461 foreigners that stayed for longer than 90 days in the country and were, respectively, registered (NSO, 2012, pp. 58f.). It is estimated that over 50,000 will be able to exercise their voting rights in local elections in 2014 (National Election Commission).