International Marriages and the Korean Government’s Multicultural Policies.

The main goal of this paper is to examine how the Korean government has corresponded to a sudden increase of international marriages. International marriages begun to increase sharply since the mid 1990s, and in 2005 international marriages reached 13.6 percent of total marriage cases. Such trend mostly results from marriages between Korean men and foreign women from China and South Asia. Most of foreign wives have settled in Korea. As a result, international marriages entail the matters of citizenship, national identity and social integration of foreign wives and their families. Therefore, international marriages are no longer a private issue, but a public concern in which the state needs to intervene. To cope with these challenges, the Korean government decided to move toward multi-cultural society despite it could have stuck to a tradition of single race and homogeneous society. The government revised the patrilineal Nationality Law, and began to give the right to vote in local election to permanent residents. Finally in 2006 the government announced the comprehensive policies for multicultural society including language support for foreign wives, support for children of international marriages in school, and provision of social welfare to foreign wives. In order to explain the incremental shifts from controlling policy to integration one, I would like to focus on the domestic political structures in terms of state-society relations, especially the dynamic process among the state and pro-migrant NGOs. I will argue that growth of Korean NGOS, the strong ties between the government and these civic groups as a consequence of democratization are the key factors to explain the changes of the policies ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]