After OFWs were summarily rounded up, detained and forcibly deported in Sabah, Malaysia and in Saudi Arabia, now it’s the OFWs in South Korea who are being chased, manhandled, and are languishing in detention cells. To fulfill their monthly quota of 3,000 deportations, immigration authorities and the police raid workplaces, train stations, and churches arresting, manhandling, and deporting even pregnant women and the sick.
BY ANGIE DE LARA
MIGRANT WATCH
Bulatlat
Volume VIII, Number 23, July 13-19, 2008
Now, it’s the overseas Filipino workers in South Korea who are being tracked down, detained, and deported.
An estimated 653,000 foreign workers are in Southern Korea, including more than 30,000 undocumented Filipinos.
Last February, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak ordered the deportation of unregistered aliens in their country. He even issued a monthly quota of 3,000 arrests and deportations for immigration authorities.
Pol Bar, president of the Katipunan ng mga Samahan ng Migranteng Manggagawa sa Korea (KASAMMAKO or Federation of Associations of Migrant Workers in Korea), a member organization of Migrante International, said, “Thousands of migrant workers have been forcibly deported in spite of their health and family conditions just to accomplish the deportation quota.” He cited instances where even pregnant women and sick persons were arrested, incarcerated and consequently deported by the police.
Connie Bragas-Regalado, chairperson of Migrante International, said, “Because of this quota system, South Korean authorities were emboldened to undertake Gestapo-like arrests – indiscriminately raiding work places, train stations and churches even without a
warrant.”
Bar said immigration authorities use electric guns and tasers, electro-shock weapons that can stun targeted subjects with electric darts from a distance, in rounding up migrant workers.
In its July 7 statement, KASAMMAKO said, “It is unthinkable that for several decades South Korean society has benefited from the labor of migrant workers who have supplied cheap labour for small and medium scale industries. But now the human rights of migrant workers are being violated. While only a handful of Korean citizens are willing to take on difficult, dirty and dangerous jobs, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers spend their lives in these jobs; and yet they are often maltreated and maligned by their employers and worse still, their salaries are not being paid, and they toil in sub-human conditions in their work places.
It added, “Many have languished in detention centers waiting for their unpaid salaries from delinquent employers. Worst of all, many migrant workers have to endure the anxiety of the continuing crackdown; some even died or were hurt escaping arrest and deportation.”
The group branded the crackdown as treacherous. “This systematic and calculated crackdown under a conservative government is a contradiction between its neo-liberal capitalist priorities and its need for cheap labor. This is also a contradiction to the well publicized notion that South Korean society is becoming a humane multi-cultural society.”
Horrors of the past
Regalado recounted that OFWs suffered the same fate when Malaysia launched a massive crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrants in 2002 and 2005.
The group conducted two fact-finding missions to investigate the abuses suffered by Filipino deportees from Sabah. She related that the Malaysian authorities used attack dogs, forcing thousands of OFWs to seek refuge in the mountains.
Regalado said that migrant communities were also razed to the ground to flush them out; others also had their houses demolished using chainsaws.
The Malaysian government even hired more than 500,000 volunteers who were given police powers to arrest suspected undocumented migrant workers.
“Deportees also had to endure hellish conditions inside detention centers where some were even raped and tortured. Packed like sardines in boats, where scores died of exhaustion, respiratory problems and thirst, deportees were caned before they were allowed to leave,” she said.
Nothing new
Philippine Ambassador to South Korea Luis T. Cruz said that there is nothing new with the deportation of Filipinos especially if their contracts have long expired. He even added, “This is not an unusual process where in some Filipino workers have a tendency to overstay after their three-year contract expires.”
