(외국인 - Waegukin = Foreigner)
Over the last two years we lived in Korea the number of foreigners has apparently increased dramatically. Even where we live, a rather local place where we were the only strangers in the beginning, a few foreigners have moved in the district in the meantime.
The media say that the number of foreigners has exceeded 1 million recently. It sounds like good news for this very homogeneous country's diversity, but needs to be put in perspective.
In Korea's 40-something million population, 1 million is still only some 2%. Compared to Switzerland with 20% plus foreigners the proportion is still puny.
Moreover, the biggest foreigner communities are Korean-Chinese and Korean-Japanese, i.e. ethnic Koreans who grew up in China or Japan. Although they tend to be more culturally Chinese and Japanese than Korean in their behavior, most of them are perfectly bilingual and familiar with Korean customs. According to a recent newspaper article, about half of the foreigners are Chinese, of which about 90% are Korean-Chinese. I would assume proportions with Korean-Japanese would be similar, and we haven't talked about the vast number of Korean-Americans yet. This doesn't leave much room for "real" foreigners, i.e. non-ethnic Koreans. Probably the percentage will shrink below 0.5% when accounting for this fact.
Switzerland has many non-ethnic Swiss who obtained the Swiss citizenship or are second generation immigrants who have Swiss passports, such as myself, which means they are not counted as foreigners in the statistic. So 20% plus foreigners is effectively underestimating the population's diversity, whereas 2% in Korea tends to be an exaggeration.
Nevertheless, Korea has been making great efforts to integrate and make foreigners' lives easier, which I appreciate highly. In only two years time, I've seen quite some improvement e.g. in the supermarket shelves. Many more foreign brands and products are available now. The number of foreign restaurants serving authentic food has also increased. Many people such as waiters and clerks at least try to speak a few words of English now.
Although I complain a lot about this country's protectionism, I must admit that they've come a long way since we first moved here. If they keep up this spirit, I am quite positive that Korea could one day make it to become a more diverse country.
As I mentioned in my earlier post about foreigners in Korea, more non-Koreans have moved into our building lately. As one of them got into trouble when he couldn't read a notice about window cleaning, he complained to the building management that they should post important notices also in English.
