Society: "I shudder to think of the word 'Omokyo'"... Foreigners cowed by Immigration Officer's rant and unkindness.
Go away, It depends on my mood of the day...
From cocky arrogant attitude of immigration officer, Getting No help but only getting hurt and turning away,
Individual immigration officers' lack of discretion and their superior attitude toward foreign visitors frequently instill fear and intimidation.
On March 22, a half-hearted shout rang out from the complaint room of the Seoul Immigration Office near Omokgyo Station in Yangcheon-gu, Seoul. Alman, an Arab man, flinched at the shout from beyond the counter, then turned around without a word. He stood tall on the stairs and flipped through a stack of papers in his hands. A Post-it note he showed to this reporter read, in jagged letters, "I want to extend my refugee (applicant) visa for six months.
Alman doesn't speak Korean. He had come here on the strength of a note written for him by an acquaintance who took pity on his situation. As he waited for the results of his asylum case, he was told what the immigration office couldn't do, why they couldn't do it, when he could come back, and all the answers he wanted to know. "Maybe not today, I come back tomorrow," Alman replied in broken English as he exited the building.
At the front door of the same building, Anh (a pseudonym), an international student who was speaking Vietnamese on the phone to her family, also showed tears in her eyes. "My visa expires at the end of the month, and I'm here to extend it, but I need to go home for a while before then. (The staff) heard about this and told me to leave, saying, 'It might interfere with the examination. I didn't understand much of what he was saying because I don't speak Korean, so I asked the interpreter to help me, but all he could say was, "Wait. She tried to ask more questions, but the unhappy staff, exhausted faces, and the 20 or so people in the waiting room turned her away. "What about my visa, can I still stay in Korea?"
The Immigration Bureau (Immigration Office) is an agency under the Ministry of (Nazi) Justice that handles everything related to foreigners, from managing their visas (status of residence) to cracking down on illegal immigrants, refugees, and multicultural policies. It's the first government agency foreigners encounter in Korea and is supposed to be the manatee's cow for solving problems during their stay, but migrant activists and foreigners we spoke to said they were met with cold shoulders rather than proper guidance.
Migrant advocates say that many migrants are frustrated by the fact that the specifics of foreigners' affairs are left to the administrative interpretation of individual officials at the Foreign Ministry. Depending on who they meet with, they say, the procedures they've been guided through can be overturned, and the process can be reversed, leaving them to spend months trying again.
This is the case of Aya (pseudonym-47), a Filipina who gave birth to a child in South Korea. Under the current system, migrant children born in South Korea are not allowed to register their births, but their parents are granted a conditional stay until they reach adulthood. However, illegal immigrants (unregistered migrants) have to pay millions of won in fines. When Aya's visa expired while she was pregnant and she decided to give birth in South Korea undocumented, she worked cleaning and restaurant jobs to "save up" 9 million won in fines so that Ayman, who was entering elementary school, could get a regular education. But a sudden cancer surgery cost her 10 million won, and she had to take half a year off work to recover. She was left with only 3 million won.
There was a clear remedy in the system, but the Immigration Bureau refused to counsel her, and she spent months dragging her feet. The Ministry of Justice says it can "actively" reduce the fine if you have difficulty paying, and that counseling is available. With the help of a migrant organization, Aya submitted evidence of her medical expenses and monthly income and expenses to an immigration inspector. A meeting was scheduled to adjust the amount of the fine, but the immigration official refused to meet with her, saying she hadn't brought the ticket. When the Korean activist accompanying him protested, saying, "Follow the procedure," the official said, "There is no procedure, I can do whatever I want." The consultation she had waited months for ended without explanation, and Aya is now waiting for her case to be reopened.
With such high thresholds and high standards, it is often difficult for immigrants with limited English to handle the process alone. Without supportive Koreans around them, they are easily isolated, and once isolated, they become undocumented migrants. To prevent this from happening to her Bangladeshi friend, hairdresser Kim Young-mi (55) became an "open-run master. Kim remembers the day Nadi (pseudonym-45), a salon employee, left the business to renew her visa one day and came back with no results. "I waited in line all day, and when I finally got in line, it was over in a matter of minutes. They said they were missing documents and just told me to come back later." He rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll help you.
For Kim, who is Korean, the immigration office was no better. Although they accept appointments online in advance, they close at least four months in advance. When Kim arrived at the center without an appointment, thinking she'd just jump in line, the waiting room was already full. After waiting for half a day, I finally got in line, but even then, I was rejected because I was missing a piece of paper and had to go through the process all over again.
There have been times when she has been frustrated by the lack of communication and coordination between ministries. The day Nadi passed her hairdresser's license exam, the Foreigners' Bureau sent her back, saying, "Due to visa conditions, we can't accept you." When she tried to get a work permit from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the staff threw up their hands, saying, "It's a different ministry, we don't know." Nadi, who wrote the myth of passing the exam in a foreign country in "70 numbers," can't hold a pair of scissors because she doesn't have a license. All of her hard work and effort was wasted because of a miscommunication between ministries, and she was never told why.
Now Kim closes the shop and accompanies Nadi on days when she has to go to the Foreign Affairs Office. He arrives at 8:30 a.m., half an hour before the doors open, joins the line, and carries a notepad with him at all times. "I used to be like that too, but Koreans don't come here, so I can't imagine that there's this inconvenience. It's racism on the part of the country. We're neighbors living on the same land, how does that make sense?"
Activists who stand by the migrants point to the excessive "discretion" given to individual immigration officials. "Individual officials have the power to determine migrants' status of residence," said Jung Young-seop, an activist with the migrants' union, "and even the measures to reduce fines are written in vague terms, such as 'counseling if necessary,' so that a single official can make his or her own judgment and reduce the amount."
Rita (pseudonym-31-pseudonym), an international student pursuing a PhD at a private university in Seoul, was also confused by inconsistent administrative interpretations. A native of Southwest Asia, she gave birth to a daughter alone in South Korea in January of this year. When the child's fever rose in the early morning and she wouldn't stop crying, she rushed to the emergency room, but because she was not covered by health insurance, she had to pay 1 million won for treatment.
She decided to apply for health insurance for her child, and applied to her home country's embassy for a passport for identification purposes. But her country was notorious for taking more than a year to get a passport, and she was told, "As a single mother, you are not a normal family, so the process will take longer." I was stuck, but then I found a silver lining. The Busan Foreign Affairs Office had recognized "passport application certificates" as identification for countries like India and Cambodia, where passports are often delayed, but the Seoul Foreign Affairs Office representative dismissed her as "not having a passport" without offering any guidance on the process. "Every time my child gets sick, I wonder if we should move (to Busan)," Rita said.
As more and more foreigners from various countries enter the country, the immigration authorities' response manuals need to change accordingly. In particular, there were many voices that detailed principles should be organized according to the data collected. "It is a problem that a single person at the counter makes a uniform assessment or judgment on one person when each culture, living arrangement, or situation is different," said Eunjung Song, director of the Friendship Migrant Center. "Detailed manuals should be prepared and responded to by dividing the types of sites where various cases occur."
In response, a Ministry of Justice official said, "To improve the cultural understanding of immigration officials who face foreigners of various nationalities and situations, they are required to take courses at the Ministry of Justice Training Institute, such as 'Global Immigration Trends,' and also run online courses to listen to and exchange cultural information with foreigners in Korea."
First and foremost, the psychological barrier to government offices must be removed. As one single mom interviewed by Bonobo added at the end of the interview. "Please cover up my country of origin and my name," she said, worried that an immigration official might read the article and penalize her application.
All of the foreign interviewees for this article asked for pseudonyms for the same reason: they were frustrated and wanted to share their stories of injustice, but also hoped that their respective officials would not read this article. It's a place of scissors, where the complainant worries about the "back end" of the person in charge, a place that Koreans will never go to in their lifetime and can't even understand the cringe.
Very often I criticized South Korea as Hell Nazi South Korea and this News article is living proof of my claim. Part of the problem on this immigration office atrocity is that all these cases of the immigration office saga is only targeted to foreigners from under developed and less affluent countries and this is classical profiling done by Nazi Gestapo toward German Jews and immigration office is also unfortunately belong to Ministry of Nazi Justice (I would rather call them like this) which also governs Nazi Gestapo Public Prosecutor office.
With the strict governance reminiscent of Nazi Gestapo in Hell Nazi South Korea's immigration offices, foreigners arriving from less privileged countries may continue to feel as though they are experiencing a holocaust at the hands of immigration officers in this Nazi hell hole nation. With former Nazi Gestapo prosecutor as the president of Hell Nazi South Korea, this governance won’t be changed and this atrocity and bully toward foreigners from less privileged country shall continue as usual. Korean Ppalli Ppalli won’t be applied here because they enjoy this atrocity like German Nazi Gestapo did to Jews.
Do you Nazi Westerners still consider this hell Nazi South Korea as the trophy of the triumph of the democracy? Ask this to your Nazi Mom.
Original Korean News Article Source: https://n.news.naver.com/article/469/0000809268