Here Comes The (Migrant) Bride: South Korea Offers Marriage Scholarships to Bachelors Worst-Off In Marriage Market

It may strike one as a curious fact that prostitution is illegal in South Korea yet Korean bachelors can apply for up to $8,600 in financial support from the government to assist them in buying a foreign wife.

According to Dr. Hyun Mee Kim, Chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, 60 cities and local governments have recently implemented similar acts offering over a quarter of a million dollars worth of marriage scholarships to middle-aged bachelors in farming and fishing industries. The bulk of each “scholarship” is used to pay a broker fee and fund a 5-day marriage tour to a third world country in Asia or Eastern Europe where the bachelor selects his future wife, typically by way of finger pointing at a line-up.

Prior to the 1990s, South Korea enforced population control through the distribution of free birth control and other, more ethically murky, tactics such as guaranteeing low-interest housing loans for parents who agreed to undergo sterilization (502,000 South Koreans were sterilized in 1984, up 80,000 people from the previous year when governmental incentives were not available). Of course, there have long been numerous occurrences of state-imposed family planning programs, but in some cases the projects were too successful. Among those was South Korea, where a distorted sex ratio (there are 105 men to every 100 women) and low birth rate (one of the lowest in the world) resulted as long-term consequences.

As powerful as this one factor has been, however, the government’s plan to import foreign women was also a response to something quite different. The Asian Economic Crisis of 1997 galvanized Korean women into exodus with the aim of bettering their careers and avoiding joblessness and poverty. Many Korean women intended to temporarily migrate to build global capital, e.g. learn English, and then return to Korea. Korean women were further prompted by non-economic factors such as a desire to escape the oppressive cultural (read: patriarchal) environment of South Korea and break free of traditional roles based on their sex.

From 2000 onward, the concept of marriage for Korean women shifted to one more akin to mutual companionship. Time, however, did not erode the strength of conventional attitudes towards marriage throughout the rest of Korean society. Korean men, whose identity is forged in a culture of son favoritism, continued to be instilled with strong patriarchal notions of family framework. The Korean women who opted to temporarily venture abroad discovered less overtly male-dominant family relations in Westernized countries. Hence, many ended up staying overseas and the sex ratio squeeze in Korea worsened. To this day, more Korean women go abroad than men.

Based on the demographic trajectory created in part by these political, economic and cultural factors, South Korea’s population is expected to permanently plateau in the year 2023. 

The international marriage brokerage system is a government production, from scripting to editing. Facing a similar dilemma (extinction), Taiwan was first to develop a state-led matchmaking, or so-called “mail order bride”, system in the 1990s. Korea summarily followed suit by devising its own quick-fix strategy to import foreign ‘reproducers” as a means to boosting the country’s population. This nationalistic state-building plan was committed to paper as “The Getting Rural Bachelors Married Project” and first carried out by government-funded research associations that began to recruit rural bachelors for marriage tours to China. 

At its inception, the project targeted rural bachelors because countryside communities were at most risk of vanishing as residents flocked to urban centers in search of work; men who remained in the villages were considered undesirable in terms of marriage due to their poverty. Today, however, only 30% of men entering into international marriages come from rural areas, the remaining 70% are urban. This swap notwithstanding, 52% of these bachelors live under the national poverty line-- that is, half of the men who apply for wives are poor.

Be that as it may, international marriage broker agencies go to great lengths to deceive future wives into believing that their Korean husbands are wealthy and reputable businessmen. Indeed, the entire “matchmaking” process is mired in deception. Korean brokers (registered with the government) call in an order for, say, 100 women to their network in a given country. The local contact gathers up this order from its network of smaller contacts. The smaller contacts are typically guised as job placement agencies that recruit women to work in factories in Korea but then convince the women that getting the factory job is too difficult a process and it would be easier to marry a Korean man (in cases of marriage, Korean men pay the exorbitant agency and visa fees). The women are told that, once married, they can easily reclaim their skill levels in Korea and find high paying jobs. These promises are seductive because the women are extremely desperate. Consider, for example, that each Filipina woman who applies to these agencies is supporting an average of 8 to 10 family members and 60% of these women have children. If she is lucky enough to be employed in the Philippines, her daily earnings may be no more than $2 or $3. No doubt many women decide to take this chance as a last option for uprooting their families from poverty. 

The women are then made to stay for one month at a boarding house owned by the agency until Korean men arrive on the marriage tour. During the women's stay, some may be requested to undergo medical examinations to verify their virginity. If women want to back out of the process, they are told that they owe money for their time, shelter and food, at the house. Without the wherewithal to repay this debt, the women are trapped.

According to the Migrant Womens Human Rights Center, a non-governmental center for immigrant women, there are marriage tours every week. When the Korean men arrive, usually in groups of ten, the women are made to face them, standing in a lineup. Most men select the wife after this one meeting. Later that day, the women are taken on agency-arranged shopping sprees to upscale department stores. This is another ploy to dupe the women into believing that the men who have selected them are rich.

One day after "the selection", they get married. And after the wedding, the men go back to Korean allegedly to see to their businesses, while the women remain in their home countries to process their visas. The women are not allowed to return to their families and are made to work as domestic servants for the agency until they leave for Korea. The average price that Korean men pay for a foreign wife is $10,000 to $15,000 – Chinese woman being the cheapest and women from the former Eastern Bloc, the most expensive. Broker agencies pocket $4,000 to $10,000 per woman.

The rankest example of deception is the effort agencies undertake to conceal personal information about the women’s future husbands. In Korea a larger percentage of disabled men marry migrant women than marry Korean women. Many of the Korean bachelors who apply for international marriages are physically and mentally disabled, some with mental faculties so low that they cannot live independently. Foreign women are often used by these men’s families as caretakers, relieving families of sons with low intelligence levels or severe physical handicaps. One Cambodian woman got into a marriage with a seriously mentally ill man and so wanted out. But her husband’s father, had paid $9,000 for her and demanded his money back from the agency. Forced to reimburse their dissatisfied customer, the agency asked the woman to marry a second guy to make up for the money they had lost.

To cover up the backgrounds of their clients, agencies often claim that a man is “just a quiet guy” or that his behavior is a result of the couple not speaking a common language.The problem, however, has become so titanic that Vietman now rigorously screens Korean men trying to apply for marriages to Vietnamese women. Vietnam requires Korean bachelors to undergo a series of verbal psychological interviews after numerous complaints from women who had been married off to husbands who were mentally retarded. 

"Nine out of the ten men who came when we were matched had physical disabilities. One was even in a wheelchair," a Filipina marriage migrant recounted. Another famous, although typical, example involves a Filipina woman who was told that her 55-year-old husband was an executive at Samsung. Promised by her husband (via the agency) that she would be able to remit $300 a month to her family in the Philippines, she later learned that he had only finished the third grade, was unemployed, and still living with his mother. She was not allowed to send money back to her own family even though she earned it independently, doing sundry work when available.

As run-of-the-mill broker activities---coercion, false promises of escape from poverty, lies about the husband’s background--- become known, supplier countries are beginning to take measures to regulate marriages to Korean men. During the course of my research, one headline across The Korean Herald proclaimed that Cambodians were officially banned from marrying Koreans.

In the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children trafficking is defined as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation".

The Protocol also notes that, “Victims often consent to their initial recruitment based on deception or misinformation about…what will happen when they arrive. The reality is that any initial consent is usually rendered meaningless, if not by the initial deception, then by use of forces or other coercive or abusive conduct…”. Under this most-widely accepted definition, it would not be wrong to regard marriage migrants in Korea as victims of trafficking.

Marriage migrants are not treated as individuals. To apply for residency in Korea and the renewal of their alien certificates, women must be accompanied by their husbands – women cannot file for extensions if they are alone. Adding to their frail legal status, women must renew their visas every year and must obtain a “fidelity guarantee” to ensure that they are faithful to their Korean husbands. Not surprisingly, husbands are not made to sign any such guarantee.

Dual citizenship is illegal in Korea, meaning that women must relinquish their own nationality to obtain permanent legal status. It is no wonder that many women consider this decision almost impossible to make. “Women cry a lot because if they have property in their homeland they will lose it if they give up their native citizenship,” said Young Sug Heo, Representative of the Women Migrants Human Rights Center, “Plus, they won’t be able to go back home (as citizens) when their husbands die or divorce them.”

And it is not all that unlikely that their husbands will expire ahead of them. The de facto average age difference between Korean husband and foreign-born wife is 15 years. Most if not all of the women counseled at the Women Migrants Human Rights Center are married to men who are 25 years older than them. One former client was only 18-years-old and her husband is 65. To say that age disparity causes the older husband look down on his partner because she is younger would be a gross understatement. The younger wife is treated and thought of as a child. Women are disciplined to recoil at the lifting of their husband’s hand. They are often forbidden from leaving the house, interacting with other wives or even calling their families back home.

As important, is the racist component at play. Some women are forced to get abortions because their husbands do not want a “mixed blood” child. Add to this racism, the foreign-born wife’s inability to speak Korean. It takes an average of four years for marriage migrants to learn Korean, during which they are reproached for being “lazy” and “stubborn”. Until the woman gains fluency, couples communicate through hand gestures and body language. “In couples who [are] not able to communicate verbally, their husbands seem more likely to resort to beatings to express displeasure and frustrations” reported an intern at Durebang, counseling center and shelter for trafficked women.

Drum roll please for the damage control. In a jarring break with the past, the Korean government, which had hitherto used the racist terminology of “mixed blood” in reference to biracial Koreans (note: all Korean men are required to enlist at age eighteen but are prohibited if they look “mixed blood”), began to publicly promote “the multicultural family”. This sunshiny about-face redirected public attention from the broker-involved trafficking of foreign brides to the forward-thinking process of social integration of foreigners into an ethnocentric Korean society.

For the Korean government, “multiculturalism” is not about promoting equality but about promoting inclusiveness. There is to be no mutual coexistence of cultures but rather the absorption of the wife’s culture into a dominant Korean. The husband’s family puts pressure on the foreign-born wife to not pass on her mother tongue to their children and the government supports this atmosphere. In media representations, migrant women have become a symbol Korean inclusion. The women are considered culturally inferior so there is a general feeling of sympathy towards them.

During my stay in Korea, I ran across several “inside-the-lives-of” news segments featuring Korean husbands and their foreign-born wives. The programs carried a nationalistic air and seemed to be saying that Korean culture can incorporate – swallow – foreignness. Most of them showcased the migrant wife’s almost unbelievable rapidity in picking up Korean ways of cooking and childrearing (and throwing away her own culture). One 30-minute segment followed a “multicultural” family’s goings-on over the course of one week: the wife staying up until the wee hours of the night to chat with her family in Moldova, reading recipe books in Korean, and preparing kimchi and other Korean national dishes while her husband watched on. Despite the week’s diverse footage, the woman had her apron on the entire taping. She and her teenage son from a previous marriage communicated only in Korean; she and her husband did not directly address each other once. 

What these late-night exposes fail to mention is that 100% of the marriage migrants interviewed in any given report published about them claim that they are physically abused, often on a daily basis, by their Korean husbands and in-laws. The much-publicized picture of the idyllic marriage between Korean men and foreign-born wives has proven to be demonstrably false. Many women are raped by their Korean husbands: the men wanted a sex slave not a nuclear family. In interviews with Durebang, Filipina marriage migrants said they are “treated like animals in bed”. Having spent their or their family’s life savings on broker fees, men feel entitled to do whatever they want with their new wives – including sexually assaulting them. Women report that their Korean husbands treat sex as a tension release, not a moment of intimacy.

The rate of divorce among mixed race couples is just as high as divorce rates between Korean nationals. However, once migrant women are divorced they lose their legal status. Their names are erased from the family registry of their husbands thus making them undocumented. Since last year, there has been a crackdown on undocumented migrants so now the trend is to deport women who are divorced from their Korean spouses. The government promptly expels any woman who fails to live in submission to her Korean husband and reproduce Korean babies.

Because the International Marriage Broker Regulation law in Korea is based on consumer law (it protects the men), 72.9% of government-registered agencies offer warranties. The warranties are no different than a warranty on a stereo from Best Buy. If a foreign wife initiates divorce within the first 6-months to one year, the agency will replace her at no extra charge. 

By any reckoning, the collusion between the government and these agencies is beginning to pay off despite the gross abuses occurring within the marriages. There are now 150,000 female marriage migrants in South Korea. Experts predict that by 2020, 20% of the total number of households in Korea will be made up of families created by the international marriage brokerage system, that is, households with migrant women who have come to Korea through international marriage.

The ethnic breakdown of Korea’s marriage migrants is as follows: 55% Chinese or Han Korean, 25% Vietnamese, 15% Filipina, Japanese or Cambodian, and 5% are from former Soviet satellites (e.g., Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan). Unlike other groups, the percentage of Filipina marriage migrants has always hovered at around the same number. The number of Vietnamese women, however, has skyrocketed in recent years jumping from only 100 in 2000 to 10,000 in 2006. Within these same years, the overall number of marriages between Korean men and foreign women tripled. There are also now 20,000 undocumented children of marriage migrants who have fled their marriages; these children are not registered with their own governments or the government of South Korea and have no birth certificates. 

It is time to sound a clarion call for dignity and freedom for women forced to perform emotional and sexual labor under the guise of marriage. The international marriage brokerage system is nothing less than the wholesale prostitution of women. Of men taking personal advantage of an inherently unequal capitalist system.