Migrant Workers Amidst the Waves of Volunteers: Participation and Empowerment in South Korean Migrant Advocacy

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Volunteering Migrants, Kimpap halmoni, and the Society of Interdependence1On December 14, 2007, after one of the worst oil spills in South Korean history hit the Taean Peninsula about 95 miles southwest of Seoul, a newspaper ran the headline To Restore Foreign Workers Too Rolled Up Their Sleeves (Newsis 2007, emphasis added). This article covered the 30-some migrant workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Russia who participated as volunteers with the Korea Migrants' Center to help restore the damaged areas. following day, under the headline The Waves of Volunteers Clear the Damage of Taean, another article described how 70,000 volunteers, including children with their parents, the residents of Yeosu who also experienced similar damage, and workers, provided their support in the collective effort to clear the sludge (Hankyoreh 2007, emphasis added). article added that the wave of volunteers emotionally moved the clearing experts dispatched from the US and Spain. It then ended with an interview with Reverend Kim Hae Sung from the Korea Migrants' Center, who remarked on the volunteers as follows: Half of them are undocumented migrants and are busy from hand to mouth. However, they willingly joined to help by saying they also received Koreans' help in the time of the tsunami and earthquake (Hankyoreh 2007).2I would like to begin by intervening in the complex affects the above narratives mobilize. Here, one is faced with an extraordinary scene of civil responsibility and solidarity. While Samsung Heavy Industries, the party most responsible for the oil spills, was trying to evade paying out compensation, 500,000 volunteers actually cleaned up the damaged areas. It is this victory of civil solidarity and responsibility over corporate selfishness and irresponsibility that the above accounts seek to emphasize. figure of the migrant worker is put to an interesting use. First, the very adverbs that are used to emphasize the given occasion-as in foreign workers too and even workers-show how migrants' participation in this wave of volunteerism was unexpected and unsolicited. On a deeper level, then, the surprise points to the symbolic exclusion of migrant workers from the imagined community of South Korean civic participation and responsibility. biopolitical hierarchy and exclusion implied here place migrant workers in the category of those least expected to participate in the given wave of civic benevolence. Yet, it seems, the power of the story of the volunteering migrant workers lies in that it breaks expectations and, in so doing, has a strong social effect. Now, anyone who is better off than those undocumented migrant workers from hand to mouth is urged to participate in the collective giving.The recognition of volunteering migrant workers is taking place within what has been named topulo sanun sahoe (interdependent society), a discourse of an active, self-caring community that does not exclude the poor and the marginalized from its decree of giving. Rather, it is a discourse that has been fueled by episodes of exceptional giving by the poor and the excluded. figure of kimpap halmoni (granny) typically captures how this discourse works. By the kimpap halmoni, I am referring to cases of senior women who lived by selling kimpap3 and the like for most of their lives and who received publicity for donating their entire life savings (usually accumulated by leading incredibly frugal lifestyles) for the education of needy youth. dominant discourses that emerged around the phenomenon heavily moralized it, highlighting the sacrificial quality of the grannies' giving that was accentuated by their own difficult living (opnun salrimedo). social lesson of the kimpap halmoni discourse focused on emphasizing how one's poverty and personal difficulties could not be a pretext for not sharing. …