Existence Is Not Illegal

 

In the View from the Ark Column of the Catholic Times, a pastor gives the readers some help understanding Human Rights in Korea.

According to the “2023 Human Rights Awareness Survey Report” published by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea early this year, the response that their human rights are respected recorded 86.5%, down 1.9 percentage points from the previous year for the first time in an upward trend since 2019. The response that human rights across society are respected has declined since 2021, reaching 71.0%, while the reaction that the human rights of the socially disadvantaged and minorities are respected was only 50.3%, a decrease from last year. 

The results of a detailed investigation into whether human rights were respected for socially disadvantaged and minority groups showed that women's human rights were the highest at 81.2%, and immigrants' human rights were the lowest at 36.7%.

In particular, immigrants accounted for 14.9% and refugees 7.3% as targets of hate speech. Fortunately, the figure for refugees decreased by 3.6% compared to last year, but the figure for immigrants remained almost the same as last year. The numbers for women (31.2%), people with disabilities (27.6%), and the elderly (22.2%) may seem low compared to immigrants and refugees, but possibly due to a lack of attention to immigrants and refugees.

Fundamentally, hate speech originates from the unjust judgment that immigrants and refugees are inferior beings consisting of expressions that demean them based on their skin color, nationality, appearance, etc. There are also cases where hate speech leads to discrimination and even violence against them. To counter this, Amnesty International has been running the "Silence Hate" project since 2018, seeking ways to confront hate speech through education and discussion.

Terms commonly used in our daily lives begin to embody discrimination and exclusion, turning into hate speech. The most representative term is "multicultural". This word refers to "families composed of people with different nationalities, races, or cultures," but in Korean society, it has been commonly used to refer to families where Koreans have married migrants. However, despite the increasing trend of multicultural families, our society's capacity to accept immigrants has not been strengthened, leading to the term being degraded into an expression of discrimination and even hate. 

From the perspective of discrimination and exclusion, the term considered most problematic is "illegal overstayer." According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, illegal stay means "staying in another country without following proper procedures or beyond the allowed period." Using the antonym of legal, and illegal, to express a situation where legal residency qualifications are not obtained may not seem like a big deal. However, illegal stay and illegal overstayers have completely different contexts. The former refers to the legality of residency qualifications, while the latter degrades the existence of a human being to illegality.

The National Human Rights Commission of Korea has pointed out this context and recommended in 2018, following the usage of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to change the term "illegal immigrant" to "undocumented immigrant," and currently, activists related to immigrants and refugees are also using the term "undocumented immigrant."

Christianity confesses and believes that God created humans in His image, similar to Himself, and proclaims that all human existence is dignified. In the eyes of Christians, 'existence cannot be illegal'. Nevertheless, it is the reality of Korean society that the term "illegal overstayer" can still be seen and heard frequently in newspaper articles and videos. We Christians, at least, hope and wish that we can strive to create a society where the dignity of human existence is respected by avoiding expressions of discrimination, exclusion, and hate, including this term.