A growing number of families in South Korea have members that were not raised in South Korean culture. This includes both families with non-Korean members and families with Korean diaspora or North Korean defector members.
Policy changes are being made to accommodate their life in South Korea.
Definition
Policies designed to support multicultural families in South Korea are aimed at families with people who have acquired South Korean nationality. It can be defined as a family type where two cultures coexist in one family through international marriage, but also includes the families of foreign workers, North Korean refugee families, and ethnic Korean families moving to Korea.
The first category, international marriage families, refers to a family consisting of a married Korean citizen and a foreign spouse. The second category, the families of foreign workers, includes those that foreign workers bring with them to Korea or new families formed by foreign workers in Korea. Most of those families include children. The third category, North Korean refugee families, is composed of residents from North Korea with the official registration. These people have left North Korean society with various motives. In some cases, refugees escape North Korea with their family members, but policies are also designed for those who start a new family in South Korea. The final category includes ethnic-Korean families who were born and raised in China or Russia with a unique Korean culture, and settled in South Korea for the purpose of immigration, employment while their ancestors left Korea with various background.
Children of multicultural families are defined as children born between spouses of Koreans and foreign residents with different cultural background. At first, children of multicultural families were called Kosian or mixed-blood. Later, people started to use value-neutral term 'international marriage children' or 'children of international marriage immigrants'. More recently, people began to use the term 'children of multicultural families'.
Classification of children
Children of international marriage immigrants
First, there are children of international marriage immigrants. These are children with one of their parents having Korean nationality and another parent having foreign nationality. Second, there are children of foreign worker's families. Immigrant worker bring their children over Korea or birth their children in Korea. Most of them have their own country's nationality, live in Korea as foreign. They cannot receive support based on Multicultural families supporting policy. It is a service for multicultural family to adapt to Korea and to support economical self-reliance. But the number of them has been increased and some of them acquired Korea nationality. Third, children of North Korean refugee family called 'saeteomin' as a defector. They acquire Korea nationality through naturalization. They have cultural problem because South Korea and North Korea have been formed different culture after the division of Korea into north and south.
Immigrant Youth
Immigrant Youth is an adolescents who come to Korea after growing in their own country because of their parent's remarriage with Korean or a children of International marriage families who come to Korea after growing in one of their parents country in adolescence. In other words, Immigrant youth is school age teenagers who have foreign nationality, and children who settle down to Korea in the middle of growing in their mother country. They are different with children of multicultural family who have Korean nationality, and who learn and use Korean language since birth in aspects of nationality. In perspective of law of multicultural family, immigrant youth is just ‘foreigner’, so that immigrant youth cannot be subject to the law about multicultural family.