Migrant Workers, Kosians, and the People of Wongok-dong: The Making Of A “Borderless” Story
Borderless Village
Text and photos by Bak Chaeran, Drawings by Han Sungwon
First publication: 11/20/2004; 208 pages; 8,500 KRW
ISBN 89-7483-231-3 03810
Road to the Borderless Village
Kyunggi-do, Ansan-si, Wongok-bondong, “Borderless Village”. Located behind the Wongok Bondong Office across from Ansan Station, the “Borderless Village” is not that different from any other residential street in a small town. But what is a little different are the foreign children one sees everywhere and the foreign signs hanging on the storefronts for the nearly 20,000 foreigners who live here.
Located right in the middle of this village is the Ansan Foreign Workers Center, where mi-grant workers often come to seek help. Here, Kosian children, volunteers, workers injured in indus-trial accidents, and unemployed Koreans are living in and creating an alternative, borderless village.
“Borderless Village” is both their story and our story. Like us, they are sometimes discouraged by life’s difficulties, and sometimes they succeed at finding new hope... but they are known by a different name: “foreign workers”. We use this term to describe migrant workers from countries that are economically weaker than ours, other than countries like Korea or Japan. The Borderless Village is one of the places where they have formed a community.
First story: Dian, the six-year-old daughter of a Korean mother and an Indonesian father, always wonders: “Why do my father and uncles speak Indonesian, but I only speak Korean? Why do other people get to eat pork, but I can’t?”
Second story: I teach at a private institute. I believe it is my calling to teach children. One day, I saw a television show about a Bangladeshi boy who was only allowed to attend school as an auditing student. On top of that, he was even ostracized by the other kids. The next day, I came to the Ansan Foreign Worker’s Center.
Third story: My name is Nurikki, and I am a carpenter from Uzbekistan. My closest friend, Chori, works in a factory operating a press. He injured his hand in the press.
Fourth story: Jaeho used to farm in the country before coming up to Seoul and drifting from one city to the next. For seven years he has been living with foreign workers as the shelter caretaker for the Ansan Foreign Worker’s Center. Having lived the life of an urban migrant, he al-ways treats the shelter’s foreign migrants like family.
Fifth story: I started high school at a late age. I first came to Korea with my mother. I was the first foreign migrant in Ansan to graduate from middle school, and now I am the first foreign high school student in Ansan.
Sixth story: We are Korean-Chinese. We came to Korea to work because we speak the language. But we were not even here for a full year before both my husband and I were in accidents at the construction site.
Seventh story: Jackie is a young man who dreams of becoming a movie director someday. He is so full of passion, he even took a plane to Jeju-do to cheer during the 2002 World Cup games. As a Muslim, he sometimes visits a mosque. He always says, “God has already given me everything. I am so thankful for that.”
People of the Borderless Village
Through television and newspapers, we have become familiar with cases of discrimination against foreign workers, and we are beginning to hear stories of discrimination against their children.
Kim Juyeon, one of the voices in this book, says she decided to become a teacher for the children of migrant workers after feeling outraged by the story of an ostracized Bangladeshi child who was just barely allowed to attend school as an auditing student. “For the children of foreign workers, not being able to attend school or walk around freely and being confined to their homes all day to avoid the police is an everyday occurrence. On top of that, they’re discriminated against by Korean children.”
That was the moment she witnessed the painful truth that Korean children naturally adopt the discriminatory attitudes of adults. That said, migrant workers should not simply be looked at vaguely as “kind, vulnerable people who need help”.
“Borderless Village”. Jaeho, an older gentleman who also appears in this book, says, “They are people just like us. There are those who obey the rules, and those who would rather die than listen. And there are those who show up and help out without even being asked... If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working here for seven years, it’s that good people are good and bad people are bad, regardless of whether they’re Korean or foreign!”
Migrant workers and their children are our neighbors. For this reason, we must change the discriminatory attitudes we carry within us. We can begin by taking a step closer to them and greeting them with a simple hello. By doing so, like the author, we will be able to learn each of their nationalities, remember each of their names, and hear each of their stories. Then we will find our-selves with neighbors with unique cultures of their own. The hope is that this book will serve as an-other road to their village, the “Borderless Village”.
Coming out of the Borderless Village
Over fifteen years have passed since migrant workers first came to Korea. But how much do we really know about them? Are we accepting them as our neighbors? Of course, the main reason they came to Korea was to earn money through short-term employment. And though not fully prepared to accept them, Korea brought in migrant workers as “cheap labor” merely to strengthen industrial competitiveness. However, before they were “cheap labor”, they were people who came to Korea to make a living in this world with us. Now, they live in groups in specific areas, and they are forming communities.
When the book was published, the author noted, “This is not a story about human rights. Nor is this about discussing a system for human rights policy. I just wanted to tell a story about people who are no different from us--people who are nice, lazy people who like to take it easy, peo-ple who are genuine, people who are coarse, people with lots of dreams--in other words, people who are only different in nationality. I hope that those we call migrant workers will instead be called by each of their names, and that they will be accepted as our neighbors who live with us and stand by us.”
Perhaps within the author’s words a solution that is at once easy and difficult can be found to today’s migrant worker issue.
Sample Text
From “Six-year-old Dian and her Father”
When my father and uncles were talking, I kept interrupting to talk to my father. I did this because they were speaking Indonesian, and I can’t understand a single word of it.
“Daddy, why do you all speak Indonesian instead of Korean?”
“Because your uncles and I are Indonesian.”
“Then what am I?
“You’re Indonesian, too, of course.”
“But why don’t I speak Indonesian?”
“Because you live in Korea.”
“Ah, that’s right.”
I think I understand, but then again, I really don’t.
It’s true that I am Indonesian. My father is Indonesian, and I don’t eat pork. Therefore, I am Indonesian. But I don’t speak Indonesian. I speak Korean. He says that if we go to Indonesia, I will have to speak Indonesian. But, can’t I just speak Korean?
From “Kim Juyeon’s Kosian House”
With a wondering look, he picks it up then sits back down again.
It is his midterm exam. Not all of the subjects are included. Korean language, social studies and other subjects that require strong Korean skills are left out. The very first page of the test is math.
78 points. For ordinary Korean students who attend several private institutes even after school lets out, a 78 might not be a very good score. However, for Jinsu, who is still unfamiliar with school and the Korean language, a 78 is enough for him to feel proud. When other children his age were attending school, Jinsu had to stay at home. But this year, he was just allowed to join the third grade to study with children younger than him. Seeing the test paper he turned in was very moving for me.
From “Jaeho: Shelter Caretaker for the Ansan Migrant Worker’s Center for Seven Years”
Even when we can’t communicate, it is still our nature to want to help those who show us good will. Jaeho doesn’t speak English or Chinese, and not all of the people who come here speak Korean. However, they have almost no communication problems. This is because they communicate by saying “okay” and using a mixture of Korean and body language.
If he wants to know if someone is hungry, he mimics eating and asks, “Okay?” If his arm hurts, all he has to do is knead it and say “ouch” with a pained expression. Even when they answer in their own language, Jaeho understands almost all of what they are saying.
“What do people need? Something to eat, a place to sleep, something to wear? For that, hand gestures and even foot gestures are enough to communicate. Even when they’re speaking their own languages, you can tell right away whether they’re cursing or praising you.”
With a half-pleased and half-worried expression, Taejo watches a Moroccan man hammer some nails. As the wind blows stronger, the tapping sound of the hammer spreads through the air.
The Author
Writing and photography: Bak Chaeran
Bak Chaeran was born in Seoul and studied Korean Literature at Soongsil University. She has worked as a guest reporter for “Walking Together”, published by the Research Institute of the Differently Abled Persons’ Rights in Korea (RIDRIK). As she enjoys reading books, writing, and meeting new people, she is currently working as a freelance writer specializing in interviews. “Borderless Village” is her first book.
Pictures: Han Seong-weon
Han Seong-weon studied painting in college and currently works as an illustrator in vari-ous mediums. He is currently producing illustrations for “Chagun Chaek”, a publication for work-ing people.
Source: http://www.koreanbooks.or.kr/lib/down.php?file=../pds/trs/trs_407_eng.doc
Monday, October 13, 2008
Kosian is the word not politically correct?
I came across the article below trying to find out how this blog stand from among the web/blogsites. This link was taken from the Marmot Hole's Blog.
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on February 23, 2006 at 2:21 pm,
So my question : is the word Kosian then not politically correct?
Readers it is up for you to decide
We’re ‘Koreans,’ not ‘Kosians’: multicultural families
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2006/02/23/were-koreans-not-kosians-multicultural-families/This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on February 23, 2006 at 2:21 pm,
So my question : is the word Kosian then not politically correct?
Readers it is up for you to decide
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Assessment of Multi-Cultural Policy and Future Tasks
Lee Ji Hun
It is estimated that migrant population to other countries leaving home country reaches about 200 million out of total 6.5 billion in the world population. According to one survey about ‘the present status of foreign nationals' conducted by the ministry of government administration and home affairs in last May, the number of migrant foreigners who currently reside in Korea amounts to 722,696. This sum of amount is occupying 1.5% of registered population. This figure shows 35% increase compared to last year, and the former figure was estimated as 535,627. Besides, this statistics reflects the calculation except the number of short-term and illegal immigrants. If they're included, the number of foreigners would reach beyond 1,000,000.
Recently, Korean society is turning into new phase of change with the increase of international marriages. An existing value based on homogeneous culture is modified and various attempts are turning up to understand other cultures. The homogeneous value is converting into the situation which needs to accept a new value, called as ‘multi-nationalism'. Now, Korea is developing into multi-cultural and multi-nation society surpassing multi-national society. Just a few years before, the term ‘multi-culture' was unfamiliar and odd to all of Koreans, but now it can be found everywhere. The frequent use of ‘multi-culture’ reflects the transformed society, while it means new class exists in our society and unprecedented problems are deriving from this class.
An important subject of multi-culture is immigrants. They are defined as those who settle in Korean society, such as migrant workers, migrant women by marriage, overseas Koreans and someone else. In this paper, a distinctive view for the immigrants is examined in a brief and then ‘migrant women by marriage' who got married with Koreans and constitute the majority of local community are mentioned.
◦ Social and Political Background of Local Community
There is a unique historical background in Jeonnam and Kwangju. The 5.18 Kwangju democratic uprising was the pain of our period, and horrible spring of Kwangju and Jeonnam. At that time, the historical experience of 5.18 was the resistance of Kwangju and Jeonnam citizens against non-democratic dictatorship. The resistance had to focus on the concerns of physical survival on the matter of how to overcome the presented crisis before defining the value of ‘democracy'. Under such circumstances, Jeonnam and Kwangju were a deputy and comrade who expressed the anger of Koreans in a full spirit against the dictatorship.
In this context of historical pain and experience, Kwangju and Jeonnam was titled to the sacred ground of democracy, and the people of there could have a regular consolation in the midst of pains, but their emotion fell into the certain afraidness for advocating the progress among the subtle intersection.
After that, they pursued the stability rather than change, and decided to keep silence rather than disclosure. Slowly, they were being involved in the tendency of conservatism. This may be explained that they returned to the initial conservatism of local community. Their resistance against the dictatorship would match with the protest and struggle against the power which killed their family and colleagues, before the resistance against non-democratic power. After the 5.18 uprising, they would have formed the atmosphere that controls mentioning of pains for themselves under the situation which they had to hurriedly hide their pains.
Presently, Kwangju and Jeonnam seem to have a progress, but the frame of conservative idea appears to be rooted in everywhere of the community. Along with a particular experience of Kwangju, conformism and patriarchal toadyism in Korean society came into friction or short-term amnesia through a certain incentive, but it can be explained that they restored the overall sentiment of Korea by tracing back to the expression of conformism and patriarchal toadyism as the basic order.
They are showing a weakened constitution in disclosing the human rights and developing it into the organized form. This works out as the same when mentioning the multi-culture.
It's undesirable to interpret ‘multi-culture' simply saying that various cultures are circulated in the society. More than it, the fundamental background and condition should be formed to provide immigrants stable settlement in the society not infringing their basic rights. In meantime, it needs the proper awareness and perception of people in community to treat the immigrants as an equal personality.
However, the basic rights of immigrants and concerns for human rights are currently driven into the minor concerns, and under the assimilation policy of local community for the immigrants, the concerns are biased to the education of Korean language and traditional culture for their social adaptation. This means that the local emotion and fear for the change are combined with conformism, patriarchal toadyism, and discriminative chauvinism. The former is focused on the attempts of extreme stabilization and the latter is deeply rooted in the local community.
◦ The Subject of Multi-Culture in Our Society
As the migrant workers began to inflow after the late 1980's, and more recently, the number of migrant women by marriage has increased after the mid 2000's, they brought the new social issue and social judgement concluded a term, ‘multi-culture' to call this society after considering how to call them, how to coexist with them and how to call this society. Now, the ‘multi-culture' is expected as the hot issue of Korean society after the mid 2000's.
To settle the ‘multi-culture’ in a desirable manner, it needs a serious social question of who is the subject to develop ‘multi-culture’. Understandably, this subject might be not only ‘Koreans' who have settled under the background of history with thousands of years, but also ‘immigrants' because they could form and developed a new culture in that the native people who had originally settled is the people in ‘homogeneous culture'.
As for the idea of taking Koreans as the subject, it's true that the immigrants formed a new culture, but rather than immigrants, ‘Koreans' lead the current Korean society and promote ‘multi-culture' through the institution and policy. Therefore, the subject of ‘multi-culture' is only Koreans and ‘immigrants' should be understood as inducing the active incorporation in forming ‘multi-culture' under the allowance as they started from the exterior source.
On the contrary, as for the idea of taking immigrants as the subject, it's the old issue to accept the new culture by leading ‘the policy and institution' and the immigrants contributed to form a new culture and multi-culture under the current society. Therefore, the immigrants should be the center of policy and institution as the member of society from now on.
It doesn't matter to define who is the subject but the focus is on who should take the initiative. Anybody can be the subject if various people consist of a certain society express their different opinion and habit in a various cultural way.
It's no doubt that ‘migrant workers' and ‘migrant women by marriage' are those who enabled our society to step into the ‘multi-culture' These people can be the subject of ‘multi-culture' along with Koreans. However, Korean society doesn't regard them as the subject and committing an infringement of human rights and discrimination considering them as a ‘guest'. Our society doesn't recognize ‘immigrants' as a social subject, yet.
◦ Distinctive Multi-Culturalism
The number of migrant workers who settle in Korea is now more than 400,000, and the number of migrant women by marriage is estimated as approximately 100,000. The concerns for immigrants started from the migrant workers. From the late 1990 to the early 2000, the social concern for the migrant workers reached its peak. Such a high concern was mostly originated from broadcasting various situation of migrant workers and prevalent discussions of the rights infringement and discrimination of them in the public opinion. However, such thing was just temporary and the issues of migrant workers faded away as time passed by.
Abruptly, Korea fell into the concerns for race mixture children of migrant workers. The public opinions were heated with the beating story of Hines Ward, a US football player who is born between American father and Korean mother, in that he overcame the adversity and won the MVP. In meantime, our society focused to find out the race mixture children and created the background that evokes the social concerns by broadcasting various problems and social adaptation of them. It was followed by the concerns for the migrant women who is the mother of race mixtures. This kind of social concerns were very cheerful and brought the opportunity to coordinate the basic rights of the children under multi-cultural family and migrant women.
Particularly, the concerns began to increase for the Asian migrant women who got married with Korean. In that sense, the problem of migrant women by marriage and their children was unique concern. This was obviously different from the view of migrant workers. The concerns for migrant workers and their children are different from that of migrant women by marriage and their children. If the latter were called as ‘multi-cultural family', they arranged a social system while central department of government showed a significant and organizational concerns along with supporting budget.
Though both of them are defined as the immigrant, they make significant difference and form a conspicuous gap. Observing it more in detail, the migrant women were interpreted as those who intend to settle as the spouse of Korean in the long-term and this made the background that they were targeted on the social concerns to arrange the social system for them. Conversely, the migrant workers have no ground to be a Korean even if they form a family. However, the migrant women have a Korean husband and this is the point that they're considered as Koreans. Both of migrant workers and women are the member of ‘multi-culture', and have an equal personality which can be or cannot be distinguished from our society, but the concerns for them varies from the significant difference whether they can develop into kinship with Koreans.
The 2006 UN convention of international immigrant was signed by 20 countries and enacted a legal arrangement. This convention was designed to ensure various rights of immigrants and their family, such as the right of residence and education and something. However, Korea neither ratifies this convention nor discuss it.
Multi-cultural society cannot be built only based on the kinship. Regardless of their kinship, all of migrants should be the target of concern, and freed from the isolation or discrimination. It is hard to say that the ‘multi-cultural society' can be brought just by the current concerns for migrant women by marriage. ‘Multi-cultural society' should allow every immigrants including the migrant workers to have an equal rights as Koreans in education, labor, residence, culture and like that.
◦ Background of Migration
The migrant women can be classified as those who settle on the purpose of work, and those who settle to get married. As for the former, they are confined to their expectation or requirement for Korean society, because they cannot stay in Korea more than 3 years. Their major hope is to stay longer in Korea and get better wages. On the contrary, as for the latter, they want to carry on a happy life as the spouse of Korean. Their hope as a ‘marriage immigrant' is simple, but makes difference from that of the latter because they have to settle in Korea for their whole life. The migrant women by marriage has a difference from those for work. They aim to live in Korea for all of their life rather than staying for a certain time. However, their actual marriage is mostly ranged from the late 19 to the early 20's. It is difficult to interpret their marriage background in a simple sense because they tend to get married for the breakthrough of their crisis or relieve the hardship of their parent's home rather than thinking over their marriage. The migrant women by marriage have a certain degree of fantasy for Korea through drama based on Korean wave. For marriage, some migrant women follow their judgement, but most of migrant women fail to have a rational and objective decision because they are misguided or cheated by the temptation and false information from the international marriage agency. In the past, Japanese and Philippines women got married through the distorted belief like unification church or they conversely took advantage of it to get married. Now, the international marriage agencies are extending the marriage migration in a similar way. Though it's not a religious belief, they use the Korean wave and there appears women who use this kind of agency conversely.
Similarly with a type of immigration that foreigners plot to achieve an economical purpose by employment violating the initial approval after they enter Korea through tour visa or student visa, the marriage migration is also losing its initial purpose. Because the marriage migration is arranged by the structure of marriage agency which seek for the profit. Therefore, it is required to remove the profitability of international marriage business and have the proper alternatives to solve various problems. The marriage mediation which can be interpreted as commercial or even trafficking sometimes makes the migrant women have unclear and suspicious view keeping them from the desire to achieve a good married life with a real marriage intention. Also, it causes a discrimination of them in some intervals. To settle the proper trend of marriage migration, it needs the concerns of how to deal with the marriage agency which seek for profit and how to develop a transparent marriage migration including the effort of those women.
◦ Process of Marriage Migration
According to the data of national statistical office, 'the actual status of international marriage over the recent 3 years', the marriage between Korean and foreigner in 2006 was totally 309,700, which increased 3 times more than 12,300 of 2000, but decreased by 8.0% (3,400) compared to 43,100 in 2005. In case of the number of marriage with Korean male, it turned out to be 25,594 in 2004, 31,180 in 2005, and 30,208 in 2006. The number in 2006 was decreased by 972 compared to 2005. However, in case of 2007, the number is expected to be high by the increase and intervention of marriage agencies.
In addition, as for the actual status of residence of marriage immigrants under nationality, it is currently 93,786 in the late December, 2006. (male 10,958, female 82,828). And the order of nationality is Korean-Chinese, China, Japan, Vietnam, and Philippines. In the past, Vietnam was ruled out of ranking, but its current increase is consistent with the movement route of international marriage agency. Recently, its route transits into Cambodia, Raos from Vitenam. In Vietnam, the cost has been increased by the intervention of women alliance committee and the fact that Korean male had to visit to Vietnam twice, which becomes the reason of reducing profit earning. Also, the increase of marriage with Vietnam women causes the discussion of marriage intention, and the failure of marriage after women's entrance to Korea brings the problems such as male's defect and woman's leaving from home and something. In this context, objective factor is working out to increase the profit and make image through the development and migration of other marriage counterpart country.
Actual Status of International Marriage Over the Recent 3 years
(Unit：Case)
200420052006Korean male＋foreign female marriage25,59431,18030,208China18,52720,63514,608Vietnam2,4625,82210,131Japan1,2241,2551,484Philippines9649971,157Mongolia504561594Uzbekistan247333394America344285334Thailand326270314Others 9961,0221,192foreign male＋Korean female marriage9,853 11,941 9,482Japan3,378 3,672 3,756China3,621 5,042 2,597America1,348 1,413 1,455Canada230 285 308Pakistan103 219 152Australia136 102 139England120 106 138Germany11085129Others8071,017808※ Data：National Statistical Office, demographical status (marriage, divorce)
Actual status of residence of marriage immigrants under nationality
(Unit：Case)
NationalityTotalDistribution
RatioMaleDistribution
RatioFemaleDistribution
RatioTotal93,78610010,95810082,828100Korean-Chinese35,801384,6184231,18337China20,485221,9441818,54123Vietnam14,83116630.514,76818Japan6,546756955,9777Philippines4,306513814,1685Mongolia1,6411.72701,6142Thailand1,5811.62601,5552America1,3351.47797.15560.6Uzbekistan1,0561.1320.21,0241.3Russia9771.0360.39411.2Pakistan5160.5509570Bangladesh4550.44304250Indonesia3610.3390.33220.4England1950.21781.6170Nepal1580.1931650.1Australia1530.11201330Korean-Russian1080.1301050.1Iran780.175130Others3,2033.41,279121,9242.3※ Data：Ministry of Justice
The social analysis that Korea is moving into the low birth and aging society links the increase of migrant women with the birth of Korean children, and evaluates that migrant women plays a significant role. In meantime, the analysis asserts that the international marriage is solving the problem of marriage failure due to the age gap between low-income people in farm and city. It also supports for the positive assessment of its role in the society. However, the international marriage reflected by the migrant women in Korea is causing various problem as much as it can be said 'trafficking' over the commercialism. The international marriage agency expels 'the human rights' by following examples.; Quick marriage under 3 days and 2 nights or 5 days and 4 nights, force to have sexual intercourse before the marriage, meetings like a beauty contest, false and exaggerated information, invalid career letter, group lodging of women, violence to women and something.
On the inspection of the actual condition of Vietnam on September, 2007, we visited to Hipong and Genjang distant from Hanoi and Hochimin. In case of Hipong, women tended to give the mediator 1000 dollars to 2000 dollars through the private loan. Those who take the money were called as big madam and small madam. They were looking for those women who want to get married and running marriage-related business over rural area according to Korean marriage agencies. The business system is that big madams order small madams to find a right woman in the rural area. In case of Korean mediators, if large and medium, they have sub structures adding to their pure marketing network, which increases the cost of Korean males. Though there lies in somewhat difference according to the nature of marriage agency and the target country, women in rural area must pay the big madam or small madam for their arrangement.
◦The basic rights infringement of migrant women and problem of supporting their human rights
The 'family' is the basic structural system of a certain country. The wellbeing of family means the health of society. The fitness of family can be accomplished by the efforts of every member not by one person. The marriage migrant women, so-called ‘multi-cultural family', are increasingly situated in the strange structure of seeking for one-sided happiness which their family and husband can feel not by the bilateral communication in making the family. If one person is unhappy while the other is happy, this is called as unhealthy family.
The family must be the valuable and important concept to anybody on the earth. For Koreans, this concept of 'family' is occupying more importantly affected by the Confucianism. The family community is the most basic form of organizing the society and nobody will be able to deny its importance. However, the family is evoking many problems as the non-democratic and non-humane contents are getting slipped away and spreading in spite of its positive role. The most fundamental element of our society is 'family'. Also, it is the family where is the most non-democratic and non-humane. A sense of homogeneity for the same blood under the same parent, and the blood tie have a good reason of making tremendous feeling of concentration and membership. However, the family members should abandon their private profit because of their family, and sometimes give up their future goal by the demand of their family, and otherwise put up with the bad words or whipping. We need to succeed to the strong merit, but still get rid of the negative aspect of the 'family'.
The family of migrant women is under situation which their freedom is more restricted under the oppression by the patriarchal order and non-humane types of impairment. They should unconditionally adapt to the Korean culture and language. And they should not give other opinions about the saying of their husband and mother-in-law or sister-in-law. They should be obedient and follow the word without their will. If they don't keep the rule and talk back, they would be often shamed and disadvantaged. This kind of order based on the patriarchal order makes the migrant women more troubled and tired, and often the migrant women are exposed to the frequent family violence. However, this exposure to the violence is looked down as just a trivial matter, and if the third man intervened in, they would say, 'it's none of your business', which shows a strong rejection for the move that aim to terminates the infringement of human rights
As the migrant women are exposed to various family violence such as the discrimination by the family members, husband's violence, the level of their human rights infringement is situated in the level of danger. Human rights must not be threatened or limited by other man regardless of gender and generation. Even if the subject were their family, the human rights must not be infringed. However, the migrant women are living with their rights infringed or violated by the close family who have to protect them, and they are undergoing pains everyday.
It is obvious that the exclusive nationalism would be the background of violence of Korean males to the migrant women. The males who do the violence to the migrant women often think wife's country as the poorest and inferior country and put away from it. Males spit words like, “The beggar land, Philippines, You sucks, XX Bastard" This kind of expression were common, and they frequently said, “Get away from here, I will send you back to Vietnam. Stay away from me". Violent males can't have a view of understanding wife's country. Unconditionally, such males emphasize their wife to learn only Koreans as soon as possible. Those who ignores the wife's country has already lost their respect for the wife, and are expected to turn into the violence.
Recently, as the concerns for the marriage migrant women are increasing, the central government and local communities have been trying to be engaged in the business related with them. However, the actual benefits to them seem to be little. The budget is running quite short, though they operate the various program like Korean language education, cultural experience and something directed by them or other agencies. The 100% reserved budget of local government is arranged for their social adaptation. In contrast, the budget for human rights protection is not considered. They just urged the migrants to have one-sided assimilation and adaptation, but seem to have no concerns for the human rights infringement by the national, cultural prejudice and discrimination. The business for the marriage migrant women is getting degraded into just an exhibition of local communities. They seem to have no concern for social activity or employment necessary for their settlement in Korea. Rather than, they are focused on the short-term Korean language education, assistance for the temporary event, cultural business and social adaptation. The migrant women is called on their superficial business to bring a doubt that they're used for stacking up the records of head of local community.
Consultation Cases (Client Migrant Women of Asian Migrant Woman Center)
Disadvantaged Migrant WomanNationality (age)Details of Disadvantage Woman A Vietnam
(26)-She had no option to immigrate to Korea on her husband's urge to compensate for the marriage cost as her husband has a mental disorder.
- Lowering of husband's social adaptability
(even unable to deposit or withdraw the money)
- When she takes a rest on her pregnancy, people around her husband interfere with her scolding that she is lazy. . Woman B Vietnam
(26)- Husband's alcohol addiction
- Her mother-in-law scolds her everyday. She doesn't know why she's degraded.
- She was hit in the marriage agency.
- Her passport is torn up in the marriage agency. Woman C Vietnam
(24)- Cheated by the marriage agency, she was married with the husband with a mental problem.
- Husband has been on 10-year medication for mental disease.
- He doesn't sleep in the room but in the warehouse.
- He shows odd behavior like wearing her clothes. Woman D China
(33)- Husband has a mental problem.
- She is hospitalized in the mental hospital.
- Her husband committed a suicide by hanging. Woman E Vietnam
(23)- Husband's alcohol addiction
- Family violence
- Migrant woman is hospitalized for schizophrenia Woman F Philippines (45)- Husband's alcohol addiction
- Husband's violence
-Migrant woman is diagnosed for illness, such as diabetes, pneumonia, and hepatitis.
-She spends most of her day in the monthly rental room which is dark and infected with bacteria-smell.
- She has a mental problem. Woman G Philippines (30)- Husband's violence
- She shows a sign of schizophrenia Woman H China
(36)- Husband's frequent violence
- His 4th marriage. Husband says he'd divorce with her again and plan to marry the woman from other country.
- Alcohol addiction Woman I Philippines (26)-Marriage agency cheated the age of husband (husband's age)
- Husband's violence and threat Woman J China
(50)- Husband's violence
- Husband turned out to have a mental disorder. Woman K Philippines (45)- Husband's alcohol addiction
- Family violence Woman L China
(28)- Husband's violence Woman M Vietnam
(25)- Husband's violence
- She was hit in her belly on pregnancy. Woman N Vietnam
(22)- Her husband hit her in her belly on pregnancy.
- Husband's inability or irresponsibility Woman O Vietnam
(23)- She was hit in the marriage agency.
- Her husband's frequent drinking Woman P Philippines (47)- She testifies that she doesn't know why her
mother-in-law is always angry with her.
- Her mother-in-law unilaterally drives her away.
- Husband claims for the marriage invalidity. Woman Q Vietnam
(31)- Sexual battery from the son of husband
- She is worn out by the assistance of her
mother-in-law and husband in the hospital.
- Husband's impotence Woman R China
(46)- Husband's addiction to gambling, financial inability
- Husband's delusion of infidelity
- Husband strangled her neck after a quarrel. Woman S China
(36)- Husband depreciates her in a male-dominance idea.
- Husband's violence in a quarrel from the gap of
language Woman T Vietnam
(19)- Conflicts with mother-in-law in the married life Woman U China
(44)- Husband's inability
- Husband's frequent violence
- He begins to hit her as having another family
with other woman. Woman V China
(45)- Husband's delusion of infidelity, frequent drinking, He hits her in the eyes, neck after a quarrel. Woman W China
(26)- Husband's frequent drinking.
Her hair is caught and she is thrown to the floor by the conflict with her mother-in-law or sister-in-law.
◦ Problem of the Supporting From Central Government And Local Government
In May, 2006, government suggested measurements and support plans for the migrant women. Compared that a rough measures and supports under the unsettled situation among departments with no clear points through the program collection, this has very developed form and contents. The government has made efforts to coordinate the repetition of the business and roles by clearly distinguishing the specific task working with ministry of leisure, welfare, justice, education, labor, police agency, and civil service commission.
(Figure-1) Government's measurement for building the division of labor among
departments and cooperative system on the marriage immigrants
ContentsManaging DepartmentSubjectAssistance∙Protection of the international marriage in parties. Language and culture education. Assist to settle a life base of the family. Support a victim of family violence. Improve social awareness. Build the communicative system
(marriage immigrant assistance center)Ministry of LeisureMinistry of Justice, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Welfare, Ministry of Information and Communication, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs∙Supervise and monitor the international marriage agency. Assist the medical or living conditions and provide the life information. Set up the infra system for volunteer work activity. Ministry of WelfareMinistry of Justice, Ministry of Leisure, Local Government∙Prevent the international marriage caused by human traffic. Settle the unrest of residence qualification. Monitor the illegitimate actMinistry of
JusticeMinistry of Leisure, Police Agency∙ Support children's adaptation to school lifeMinistry of EducationMinistry of Leisure, Ministry of Welfare, Local Government∙Encourage the employment and support trainingMinistry of
LaborMinistry of Leisure∙ Monitor the illegal actPolice
AgencyMinistry of Justice∙Train officials in the related business Civil Service
CommissionAll Ministries,
Local Government
The coordination for the comprehensive tasks between departments was gained, but the government had the lack of managing it in combination, and fell into the repetitive untidiness which was revealed before suggesting the overall measurement for the migrant women. Recently, the name of ministry of justice has been changed into the 'foreigners policy headquarter' managing the overall affairs of policy, and there have been a controversy that the ministry is inappropriate for the overall management as its main purpose is to sentence through the law implementation. The center of the controversy was the question whether the ministry of justice previously occupied into monitoring for the human rights infringement of unregistered migrants can fulfill its mission to protect the migrant women's rights. Based on the utterance of president, Noh Moo-hyun's 'immigration ministry', the foreigners policy under the ministry of justice were created, and then developed into the 'immigration committee', and it has the possibility of transforming into the immigration ministry.
The ministry of gender equality and family called the multi-cultural family as ‘marriage immigrants', and built the applicable system for them. The number of ‘marriage immigrants family assistance center' is currently 38 nationwide in 2007, and it's predicted to reach 80 in 2008. Also, its budget would be increased from 3. 9 billion won to 22.3 billion won. The major task of ‘marriage immigrants family assistance center' is the social adaptation and education for the migrant women and their family. Though it also handles with the consultation between Korean male and migrant woman, it has the limitation that approaches in the aspect of human rights protection. The utterance for 'human rights' to male is burdensome, because they believe the patriarchal awareness as the major principle of life.
Therefore, the ‘marriage immigrants family assistance center' is postponing the valuable rights protection not to stimulate Korean males.
Budget Comparison Table for Marriage Immigrants Policy
(Ministry of Gender Equality and Family)
Contents20072008(-)(+)Rate Total Budget3,900,000,00022,300,000,000471.8% Visiting Han-geul
Education Service200,000,0005,600,000,0002,700% Visiting Child Caregiving
Assistance Service1,900,000,00011,100,000,000484.2% Marriage Immigrant
Family Supporting Center
(The number)1,300,000,000
(38)2,800,000,000
(80)115.4%
(110.5%) Marriage Immigrant
Child Caregiving
Information Share Space
(New Business)200,000,000Pure Increase
The division of work between departments was distinguished by the certain underline, as for what understanding should be based on the assistance for the migrant women, it would be changed by the degree of the task manager. The ministry of gender equality and family has a different view from the ministry of welfare, justice, agriculture, only if considering the issue of commission with marriage mediation from the local communities and marriage agency. Also, it's poorly communicated between the central government and local communities. In case of the ministry of agriculture, it seems that it has poor communication in the unfairness and illegality of marriage mediation business through the communication with the managers of local community.
Though it is the important issue of where the assistance for the migrant women would start and what contents it would contain, the lack of communication between central and local governments including the constant exchange of managers show the limitation of finding the problem of the migrant women, and applying the right assistance.
The social adaptation and education for the marriage migrants from the central and local governments showed a large range of increase, the budget for the human rights and protection of the basic rights show the lack except that the family violence resting place would be doubled and the woman emergency call 1577-1366. The budget structure of requiring the one-sided adaptation and assimilation in Korea is showing its problem as well as the limitations in the protection of human rights of the migrant women. In case of local communities, the business for the marriage immigrant women is actually being lowered into the exhibition business of them. They seem to have little concerns for social activity or employment necessary for their settlement in Korea. Rather than, they are focused on the short-term Korean language education, assistance for the temporary event, cultural business and social adaptation. The migrant women is called on their superficial business to bring a doubt that they're used for stacking up the records of head of local community.
Coming to this year, each local communities are planning to give 4,000,000~ 5,000,000 won per 1 male in the farm or fishing village on its budge, under a title of 'international marriage subsidy support'. It's not oriented toward the case of the marriage with Koreans, but to support the case when it's recognized as the international marriage. It seems that they perceived unmarried males in the farm or fishing village are unable to get married with Korean female. Eventually, the formula that 'the migrant women are inferior to Korean women' is followed by the background of this awareness that ‘marriage is hard to make a goal in Korean society, and mediation with the international marriage is essential'. Neither the migrant women nor males in rural area will be the beneficiary of supporting business of local communities related to the marriage migrant women. It's the local community itself which get the most benefit in the election.
Recently, the placard 'the international subsidy support for the city worker in farm and fishing village' is often found on the street. It includes that 4,000,000 won is supported by Jeollabuk-do. On the placard, the name of its supporter, Jeonju Ilbo is specified, and the information call is also written as the same number of the newspaper company. After calling them to get more information, we found that they support 4,000,000 won per 1 person, and the local community supports 5,000,000 won. They estimated the target to support as 1,000, and commit an agency for the marriage mediation promotion.
These days, each local communities are exerted to the movement of ‘marriage for countryside males' It's true that many local communities arrange the relevant budgets. However, this kind of international marriage implies bunches of problem. Followings are examples continuously pointed out as non-humane.; false and exaggerated information, large meetings like a beauty contest, force to have sexual intercourse before the marriage, group lodging of women which ignores the voluntary will, and Quick marriage under 3days and 2 nights or 5days and 4 nights. Vietnam and Philippines prohibit the profit-oriented marriage by the law. However, Korean local communities including the regional newspaper firm mediate even such kind of marriage, and this reflects that our local society doesn't take the problem into consideration in a serious manner at all, despite the international society perceives it. A few days ago, there was the incident that one county headman was taken to the Vietnam police for the international marriage mediation of the local community. This reflects the lack of such awareness, and it's really shameful before worlds. Vietnam government even designated Korea and Taiwan as the special country for monitoring as the case increased with their women damaged by the non-humane international marriage. Currently, America designated Taiwan as the country for monitoring the human rights trafficking, and more recently, international society is monitoring Korea for the issue of non-humane international marriage.
The international marriage serves as one hope that unmarried males in rural area and low-income workers can make a happy family. However, the unprepared marriage causes to the family disruption. Recently, 3 families out of 5 families in a town where the international marriage took place came into the disruption. The unmarried men in this town is becoming a victim not a beneficiary by the international marriage. The background of international marriage among the males in rural area starts from the biased view that they're unable to get married with Korean women. They are also a victim of the rural policy failure in Korea, and the low-income workers are a victim of the policy failure for relieving the financial polarization. These people are the first victim of Korean institution and policy failure, but they are now secondarily disadvantaged by the international marriage.
The public opinions repetitively point out many problems of the current international marriage. Both of Korean men and foreign women are raised into the victim, and the damage is worsening. Under this circumstances, local community is expanding the international marriage business rather than stopping it. Even the local newspaper firm gets into it to promote the international marriage subsidy. This trend will severely lower Korean status in the international society. The local community must cease the international marriage mediation and related subsidy. It must focus on drawing the policy and instrument to substantially make the rural area vigorous and provide the low-income workers with the stable position as well as supporting the marriage migrants with the social settlement and protection of their rights.
◦ Problem in the civil support
As for the civil support for the migrant women and their family, there are the ‘marriage migrants family assistance center', welfare center, migrant worker's supporting organization, and religious group in a various way. Recently, the type and contents of assistance for the migrant women are almost similar. Its major contents consist of training program which requires them to accept Korean culture and language as soon as possible, and it is followed by one-time contests. Imitation for one-time program is repetitively administered. The big problem is that it has lack of the contents which can constitute the trade and exchange of culture but focuses on the superficial imitation. In these events, passive participation is more plausible rather than subjective participation. And the migrant women who joined an event is likely to participate in an event with the same level. This is just repetition of one person rotating in turns. The business must be proceeded in cooperative manner, but the migrant women are tired of the business which has the type of borrowing.
As it has a prevalence of the temporary business with events, the migrant women tend to expect only the benefit. Some migrant women question, “Can I get the money on the event? What can I receive?” This trend reflects the abuse of uncontrolled donating business to mobilize the participation in such events.
Recently, some organizations put their strength for the localization with the various background like religious background. As the native organization in the region, the appearance of organization which has the system of centralization, not designed to support the migrant women, should be based on the purity and social morality to support the migrant women. But, as the market is formed where the capital lies, the rough appearance of civil organizations which seek for the purpose of support by the economic order of market will be a serious challenge to the identity that they should have and similarly give a rise to the ruin.
◦ Problem of Residence Stabilization Like Immigration Law
When the marriage migrant women come to Korea, they should register as a foreigner within 90days. In case they don't follow that, they are classified as the illegal stayers and must pay for the fine as much as prolonged terms. But there are some marriage migrants who don't know the right order of registration, and after that, if they are involved in the problem with their husband, they often end up as a status of illegal staying. The foreigners can stay in Korea if they report to prolong their stay before the staying period is terminated. So does the marriage migrants. However, the main reason is not attributed to the husband when they faced with no allowance to the residence extension as the husband keeps the passport and the certificate of foreigner. Therefore, the responsibility for the fine depends on the migrant women. It is most common that husband or his family distrain the passport and certificate of foreigner. The family on male side says that they don't return such documents in fear of her runaway. However, according to the immigration law, the passport and certificate of foreigners must be retained by the migrant women. As the fine is charged on the person who doesn't have it, the family member who seized is not defined as having fault, even though he or she seized the passport and certificate of foreigner. In case of the marriage migrant women whose human rights was infringed, they must submit a copy of their family register to the immigration office to demonstrate that they are the spouse of Korean. However, if they have no passport and certificate of foreigner, they get in trouble because the town office, township office and village office don't issue the copy of family register. One migrant woman happened to face with an incident that her passport was torn away in the marriage agency, and she went to the Vietnam embassy in Seoul to reissue her passport. But, the embassy required her to pay 300,000 for issuing the passport. This woman couldn't help but return to her local residence.
A passport and certificate of foreigner are the belongings of the migrant women, and they can understandably claim their rights, but our reality is not like that. If one way is possible, she will have to accuse her husband and family members of the theft, but this is very reluctant way to take for her. This procedure about owning the certificate or passport by their family should be clearly specified in terms of fault, and the provision of penalty will be modified.
◦ Problem of Ordinance
The draft made by the ministry of government administration and home affairs of central government has been distributed in each local communities relating to the ordinance of foreigners support. Each local governments established 'resident alien supporting ordinance' based on that.
The ordinance leaves a pity that it didn't keep the procedure of democracy even in formative way. The ordinance contains various contradictions and problems. The overall contents of this ordinance is related with the social adaptation and assistance of resident aliens who occupy the realm of our society. The ordinance puts its weigh on helping the resident aliens to adapt to the society, but doesn't describe any line about the human rights of foreigners, which is recently making a social issue and causing a social abnormality. This ordinance focuses on the social adaptation of resident aliens, but it is just a part of wheel which must be accompanied by the 'human rights'. Under the circumstances that human rights are infringed and discriminated, the social adaptation program is just like the broken wagon which rolls with one wheel.
Also, this ordinance omits the part of assistance in the provision of 'assistance for the independent life of resident aliens' which is specified in the objectives scope. And in the function of committee which specifies the object of assistance, it describes about the assistance for the 'alien' but omits the category of aliens who attained the nationality, resulting in the expression of inconsistent contents on many parts.
The ordinance had no procedures like asking for civil advice who assists for aliens, omitted the important part of 'human rights', and showed numerous inconsistency in the context. The important purpose for the resident aliens should be at least centered on the isolated aliens out of aliens who stay in Korea. If there were aliens isolated from our society, most of them would be the migrant workers or women. The migrant workers are the workers who entered by the working visa, and the migrant women mostly consist of Asian women who entered by the international marriage. In addition, this ordinance doesn't mention about the part of assistance for the aliens whose human right are infringed and who suffer from the discrimination, but only focuses on the social adaptation in Korea. The social adaptation and 'human rights' must go together, and none of these can be looked down. Currently, the human rights of migrant women and workers is being infringed by the violence and cheat of Koreans, and they are standing on the center of discrimination. In spite of such fact, it's a pity that this ordinance has no mention about the part of mentioning 'human rights' which is making a social issue. Accordingly, it's hard to expect the protection and improvement of human rights of immigrants like a migrant woman even in the local governments.
◦ Problem of Ensuring the Economic Activity
According to the data by the ministry of health and welfare in 2005, despite more than 50% is suffering from the minimum cost of life, only 13.7% was benefited by the policy of basic life subsidy. The total rate of households under the minimum cost of life was 52.9%. 57.5% was for the households having less than 18-year-old child, and 15.5% was for the case of having the experience of skipping the meal due to the lack of money. The participation rate of the migrant women's economical activity was 60%, and the reason for their economic activity was to keep living (51%), and children education fee(17%). The majority type of occupation was service industry like a restaurant employee(52%). The reason for unemployment was children rearing(43%), followed by the failure of employment(21%).
In case of the multi-cultural families by the international marriage, most of them suffer from the financial poverty. The financial poverty forces the women to do the economic activity passively, and the migrant women are restricted in their economic activity because of the exclusive nationalism and statism. It's hard for the migrant women to be employed in Korean society. Along with the basic exclusive awareness for the Asian migrant women, our society can't figure out their understanding, demand and background in the aspect of institution and structure. It's true that most of people married with the migrant women are mentioned as the poor who cannot be ensured with their status in Korea, like the unmarried old men in rural area or low-income workers. Such people solve their problem of marriage even by giving the marriage agency a good deal of money and get married with the migrant women. In fact, the problem of unmarried men in rural area and low-income workers in city can be called as the structural disruption caused from the failure of Korean society, and the problem of polarization caused from the misguided policy. Under the serious circumstances that even husbands are unable to do a desirable economical activity, the migrant women put on the street to do the economic activity instead of husband, but there is little place where employs them. The common works that migrant women choose are the assistant at the textile firm, washing the dishes or serving at the restaurant. Some of them who came from Philippines work as the lecturer at academy, after school elementary teacher, and English tutor, but these works are just partial and their return is much smaller than Koreans. The migrant women has poor guarantee in their rights of labor. The basic wage doesn't reach to the minimum wage.; they get 400,000~500,000 won and if maximum, it would be 600,000 won. To get the retirement grants is still more difficult. So far, the migrant workers have been centered on the issue of workers but afterwards, it may be the social problem that their rights of labor would not be ensured in their economic activities. In addition, Korean emotion based on the exclusive nationalism would give a rise to various problems of human rights to the marriage migrant women such as, sexual battery, violence, bad words and something.
The social activity for migrant women is almost cut off. What takes the majority is the economic activity, but it's very hard for them to carry on the economic activity with the occupation. Because the view of Koreans is not smooth but works out discriminatively not placed in equal situation. The majority of the migrant women with international marriage is Asian, who came from the inferior country in finance. Even if the same case with the international marriage, Koreans have so different treatment for the women who came from Europe, America not Asian. In addition, though it's in the same Asian belt, the treatment for migrant women from Japan has more advantages than that of Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia. This may be because Japan is more developed than Korea in economy. These problems derive from the exclusive nationalism which longs for just western society, and wrong viewpoint which show off themselves before the poor, while lowering themselves before the rich, which may be the original problems which threaten the social activity and financial business activity.
For long time, the Korean society has taken the education which emphasize the superiority of homogeneous nationals, which makes Koreans stand so exclusive to other nationals. The past experience of being ruled by Japan was enough to root us with anti-colonial resistant nationalism. This resistant nationalism was the primary driving force to make our nation independent country. However, this 'resistant nationalism' has been transformed into 'exclusive nationalism'. It was natural that the education and emotion of our society under this background accepted 'homogeneous nationalism' without question.
This exclusive nationalism of us is producing many complaints and discrimination in Korea. For the reason that immigrants have a different face color or language, they are put under the discrimination and isolation. However, something peculiar is that, there is a significant difference between treating the white from west and those from the East Asia. Particularly, it's more largely varied from the English speaking country and those not. For the whites who speak English, Koreans want to get along well with them attempting to make a word. However, for those who came from Cambodia or Philippines with rather dark face and skin, Koreans discriminate them as much as directly seen. This kind of phenomenon may be rooted in the exclusive nationalism, the evil effects of capitalism which judges everything by the money, and reflexed pro-American awareness which was changed disgracefully after the division of Korea.
It brings out the big challenge and unrest that the person who had been in other cultures speaking other language moves into another fresh culture. As Korean society, the difference between the language and culture would be even harder problem when the democracy works out strong and patriarchal familism is firmly situated.
According to the data surveyed by the ministry of health and welfare, the general language is Korean, but the level of Korean proficiency is very low in the women from Japan, Vietnam except the overseas Koreans. And the major conflict factor with mother-in-law turned out to arise from the difference of communication and culture(45%).
The Korean family members urges the migrant women to acquire Korean language as soon as possible, and learn how to cook Korean food to serve the delicious food for them. Their ask for the migrant women applied the culture of 'hurry hurry', and form a sense of unrest by scolding their poor Korean, though it's not passed long since they entered Korea.
The migrant women have lived with different cultural way and idea for long time. In this context, their cultural way and idea cannot immediately change by staying in Korea. To settle in Korea with a good manner, their culture must be firstly understood and they should be helped with overcoming the hardship. The concerns for the migrant women which lasted so far was centered on the demand to be a homogeneous national by learning Korean language and culture as soon as possible rather than understanding their culture and way of thinking. However, this is to insist on the exclusive attitude under this mulit-national society which stands for the multi-culture and might cause to worsen the conflict with women.
The Korean families demand the migrant women to learn Koreans quickly, but othertimes block them not to settle in Korea, which is the contradictory behavior. The factor of family disruption can be found in controlling their life in Korea and demanding them to quickly assimilate, as it keeps them from adjusting to the Korean society. Thus, it doesn't need one sided assimilation but bilateral one. But, such a thing is still far from the reality.
◦ Children problem of multi-cultural family
According to the 2005 survey by the ministry of health and welfare, it was discovered that the children under the multi-cultural family had poor rearing conditions. The majority of such children showed problems in the education of home and school due to the low social and economical status of their parent, difference in languages, culture, and education. For the preschool child, the use rate of kindergarten or nursing facility (child home, playing room) was 27.3% under the international marriage and 56.8% under the normal family. Considering the problem between the cases to adopt the kindergarten or not, the imbalance would be well noted. They have low understanding of class lecture because of the language development retardation and maladaptation to the culture. Othertimes, they are too passive or too violent with ADHD(attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). As the attitude of teachers doesn't embrace the multi-culturalism, and their 'distinction' and 'exclusion' are likely to cause a social isolation.
The children problem of multi-cultural family is related with that of migrant women. Therefore, if it's failed to solve and prevent the problem derived from the migrant women, it's also impossible to solve the problem of their children. Thus, what is precedent should be focused on the problem in the migrant women. The problems to the children under the multi-cultural family, it is often misinterpreted and magnified over the wholel multi-cultural society. However, under actual condition, there show no big problem of children in the multi-culture. They're likely to have more outgoing and explicit skills than Koreans. As mentioned above, if the children of migrant women were committed earlier to kindergarten education, and the integrated atmosphere formed to get along well with Koreans, it doesn't bring about the problem.
Followings are the problematic cases with children of multi-cultural family who make problem.：when their father's addicted to alcohol; when the family violence is prevalent; if he migrant women show lower level of language proficiency and develop into cultural maladaptation, their children would also have the same problem. However, in this case, when the Korean children is fixed with incorporated education, it turns out to have no problem. It shows a difference based on whether they give their children a kindergarten education or not
Children problem of multi-cultural family can cause more serious problem when it's met with so sensitive view of discrimination and independent education. More natural concern is needed. Currently, the type of education is based on the culture of father's country, but it's required that they should have a pride in their mother through the education of culture and language of mother's country. Concerns and program are needed to form a self-respect in a smooth and natural way. Excessive concerns could form another group which were separated, and keep the multi-cultural family from right placement.
The children problem of multi-cultural family has many fundamental scope which can be settled through the solution of problem that's common to migrant women. It needs the measurement to solve this problem in both of political and instrumental way, while the society should make efforts not to magnify the fact and clear view not degraded by the discrimination.
◦ Epilogue
There are many groups and people who cry and support for ‘multi-culture'. It reflects that the concerns for it in our society reached as much as such an increase, and actually, this kind of ‘multi-culture' is often understood as a ‘multi-culture' in the view of one-sided assimilation for the Korean culture. As the majority of local immigrants is the married women with Koreans, the subject of ‘multi-culture' must be the married women with Koreans. However, the ‘multi-culture' should include the issue of migrant workers, overseas Koreans, and those who may concern. To make the ‘multi-culture' as the wholesome multi-culture not ceased to the partial one, we should be focus on the multi-national awareness and value by throwing up those based on Koreans. Korean society is still exclusive. When calling for the multi-culture, Koreans seem to allow it for the migrant women as the spouse of Koreans and their children. Because the majority of Korean spouse can be recognized as the subject of multi-culture, It cannot help but to concentrate our concern on them, multi-cultural policy and alternatives should be come out based on them who mostly constitute the local community. However, if our view were only calling for the multi-culture ignoring the minority of migrant workers and other migrants, it would need to be modified.
The marriage migrant women are our neighbor and friends. The kindness and concerns for our neighbor would be the great strength to those who should settle in Korean society for all of their life. However, the concerns should be expressed as the respect for others and humans. It's undesirable to show off new things or advocating the superior culture and financial status than others. Yet, the ceremony, several business and events for the marriage migrant women have the subtle tendency of expressing such a superiority.
The level of our awareness is the measuring stick of how to establish the institution and policy. With a respect to the marriage migrant women, we should not take some attempts like distinguishing something or to distinguish. The attempts which aimed to classify the migrant women and their children hinder them from settling in Korean society, including the factor which makes them isolated group or discriminated group. Therefore, we should have a pertinent view of the marriage migrant women and the attitude to get along with them.
Another new alternatives must be considered through the monitor, control, and activation of legal requirement and non-profitability to get rid of the problem among marriage agencies which have a moneymaking scheme and cause a problem of human rights. In addition, it's suggested that the human rights of marriage migrant women would be strengthened by the reinforcement and closure of various legal support, such as the immigration law, support law of multi-cultural family, and related ordinance for foreigners. Along with ensuring their rights and valuing their culture, the true multi-cultural society would be formed.
(This document includes the written agenda presentations from the 'International Multi-Cultural Seminar' in Daegu and Gwangju co-hosted by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, British Embassy in Korea, Yeungnam University, and Chonnam National University on November 8 - 9, 2007.
The International Multi-Cultural Seminar was held to raise awareness of migrants' rights and further their social integration in Korean society, where the number of migrants now exceeds one million. Michael Keith and Leonie McCarthy (Commissioners, British Commission on Integration and Cohesion), and Ji-Hun Lee (Human Rights Solidarity for Women and Migrants) made agenda presentations. Among the participants in the panel discussion were human rights experts from Gyeongsang and Jeolla Province. This document contains only the greetings by the hosting organizations and written agenda presentations by those who made presentations on the main topic.)
New migration brings poses inevitable challenges,
New migration brings poses inevitable challenges, but a healthy dose of imaginative, strategic thinking and action can overcome most.
Peterborough became a dispersal area under the government’s refugee policy in 2001. It is a city which had seen new communities establish themselves over many years in the past, including East Africans, Pakistani, Poles, Italians and Lithuanians. But over a very short time it found itself hosting 80% of eastern England’s asylum population and receiving over 60 different nationalities at one time. During the same period a sizeable number of Portuguese people arrived in the city in exercise of their European Union free movement rights, followed by people from eastern European after the accession states joined the EU in 2004.
Local services, organisations and residents were not prepared for an influx of so many new communities at once. The public perception of illegal/bogus/benefit grabbers’ was widespread and local officials were often wrongly informed about what the migrants could and could not do. There were incidents of asylum seekers being sent to the Job Centre to claim benefits they were not entitled to receive, and migrant workers directed to the National Asylum Support Service for help. City Council services, health officials and the police did not know who was entitled to what, why people were here, or whether the services they were providing met the needs of the new communities. Tensions between the new arrivals and settled communities began to increase to a point where there were a number of significant disturbances.
To tackle these issues a bid was put into the Home Office under the ‘Invest to Save’ programme and a partnership of police, council and health trusts asked for £2.2m for three years to run nine projects which would work for the smooth integration of new arrivals into the life of Peterborough. The projects included the establishment of aone stop centre, New Link, where new arrivals would come for information or assistance about a variety of matters which concerned them as individuals.
The centre looked at how new arrivals (and New Link) could contribute to Peterborough’s needs as a growing city. The need for specific advice was used as a point of first contact with the client, and a process of enquiry was initiated which involved questions about what they did in their home country and what skills they have, and to map this against the skills and languages gaps that existed in the city. The intention was to encourage the newly arrived to move out of the ‘picking, plucking, and packing’ work most were engaged in, to work for a better fit for their skills and abilities.
In addition, the centre encouraged public service organisations to provide information about the way they were runto ensure new migrants were aware of their services, so that people were provided with as much important information as possible on arrival in Peterborough. Early contact also allowed checks to ensure that children were enrolled in school, which anticipated the complaints of some settled residents about noise and commotion on the streets. Migrants would be urged to register with a GP, dissipating the concerns of some health professionals that the health needs of the newly-arrived translated into blocked accident and emergency departments.
The complaints of settled residents that migrants ‘loweredwages’ by working for less than the minimum wage, were dealt with by ensuring they knew about their rights under employment law. The belief that they were all living in overcrowded accommodation was tackled by assisting new arrivals in getting rent books and decent living conditions.
The benefit of having information across the 20-odd questions asked of people on their first visit not only helped collated statistics on things like migrant skills (confirming that many are highly qualified), but also helped equip New Link with evidence that the newcomers were not ‘abusing hospitality’ and this has proven invaluable in busting myths and misconceptions.
Another project is run by a community development officer based at the centre. It tackled the need to engage with the new communities in a more holistic way and be less reliant on dealings with community ‘gatekeepers’,who tended to be those who had resided longest and had the best English. To do this we asked new arrivals if they would they would be interested in getting together with friends to set up a group. This proved to be incredibly successful and 20 groups have been established from amongst the different nationalities. Whilst some participants had taken years to consider getting a group together, others ran with the idea much more quickly. The groups have democratically elected representatives and a new arrival forum has been established where 10 of the groups are represented and discussions take place on issues around integration and access to services in Peterborough.
Our aim is for this group to feed into the Local Strategic Partnership – the multi-agency forum which brings together the different parts of the public, private, community and voluntary sectors to support one another and work together more effectively.This forum has enabled services to access information and advice on how to best meet the needs of the new migrants. It has assisted the police in recruiting Police Community Support Officers from amongst the new communities, tackling such issues as the best way to advertise and market the role to these communities.
The community development work has also played a role in engaging the local media with the newly- arrived. Community-based events have involved the press, and, because the groups have received media training, they have been able to convey the right type of messages.
It is the case that there are tensions between communities, in particularly amongst groups coming from regions where there is inter-ethnic and national conflict. When this has happened the projects have been able to involve mediation and to get community leaders to discuss issues and address the need to resolve conflicts.
Sometimes the authorities in Peterborough have not been sufficiently sensitive to issues which motivate the different communities. An example of this occurred recently when the local Iraqi Kurdish community celebrated the victory of the Iraq national football team in the final of the Asian Cup. The local police who, like most people in Peterborough, did not know of the Iraqi team’s achievement and were unaware of the reason for eruption of celebratory young men onto the streets of the town, acted by booking many of the Kurds for unruly behaviour. The Kurdish men felt they had been discriminated against unfairly and their community leaders brought their complaints to the New Link development worker. He arranged a meeting with the police and they agreed that had they known in advance about the match they would have been less inclined to book people for their celebrations. A mechanism for ensuring this wouldn’t happen again was put in place and peace was resumed between the parties.
Housing conditions in the private rented sector have also generated friction. Residential areas dominated by family homes have seen properties leased out to shared households of young men, with overcrowding being common. The impact on the settled residents in those areas has been very negative. Complaints have been made about mattresses thrown in back yards, bins made overflowing, cars parked on the pavement and drives, houses without curtains in the windows, and unkempt gardens, etc.
It is vital that a joined up approach be taken by all agencies working on the ground on these very sensitive issues. Overcrowding is an offense which arises because of the activities of unscrupulous landlords and there is a need to identify who they are and enforce the public health laws against them. This can be a lengthy and difficult process. Another way to tackle them is through the use of mediation services, and New Links is currently using one of these to training up individuals from the newly arrived communities to be ‘community facilitators’. Local residents are encouraged to let us know when a problem exists and then a facilitator from the nationality of the people concerned goes to the houses to discuss what the issues are. This enables the settled resident to realise that not all new arrivals from that community are not anti-social neighbours and also help them to see the importance of interaction. The facilitator will have an ‘when in Rome’conversation with the perpetrators of the misdemeanours and will advise them if they need help they may need in settling into Peterborough - letting them know of English classes, or the work of New Link etc.
The experience of new migrant settlement in Peterborough certainly shows that problems do arise when people of different cultural backgrounds first come into contact as neighbours in settled communities. But New Link has shown that we do not need to be overwhelmed by such problems, and that strategic thinking and joined-up actions can make a huge difference to community relations. What is needed are public authorities which in the first instance value the contribution of new migrants in their local area, but are also imaginative enough to anticipate the sort of issues which can generate friction and tension, and put in place structures to deal with it when it happens. New Link is just one such example of how this can happen, but one which very definitely illustrates the potential for success for such a strategy.
Education for diversity
Pupil Voice
1. All schools should have mechanisms in place to ensure that the pupil voice is heard and acted upon. Schools should consider the use of forums, school councils, pupil questionnaires or other mechanisms for discussions around identity, values and belonging.
Leadership
2. Headteachers and governing bodies in all schools should ensure they meet the statutory requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment)Act 2000 and use the Community Cohesion Guidelines 2 as a check for their accountability.
3. Within all leadership training, the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) should ensure that training in diversity and citizenship is an essential component. In particular, the revision of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) should include understanding education for diversity in relation to the curriculum, school ethos, pupil voice and the community.
Education for diversity in the curriculum
4. All ion across years and subjects and ensure that coverage is coherent.
5. Subject associations, in conjunction with QCA (who will be developing case studies and guidelines alongside the revised curriculum), should compile databases of the best resources and develop new resources.
6. More research should be commissioned on how good practice in delivering exciting and innovative education for diversity can be captured and transferred from classroom to classroom and school to school.
Harnessing local context
7. DfES should actively encourage schools to take up the Non‐Statutory National Framework for Religious Education so that the good practice for education for diversity it promotes continues to be spread.
8. Schools should build active links between and across communities, with education for diversity as a focus.
a.This might range from electronic links (local, national and global), to relationships through other schools (for example as part of a federation), links with businesses, community groups and parents.
b.These links should be encouraged particularly between predominantly monocultural and multicultural schools.
c.Such links need to be developed in such a way as to ensure they are sustainable.
d. Such work between schools must have significant curriculum objectives and be incorporated into courses that pupils are studying. This will help avoid stereotyping and tokenism.
9. In planning for extended school provision, schools should seek to make contact with as wide a range of diverse community groups as possible, including supplementary schools.
Teacher training
10. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) should evaluate the effectiveness of education for diversity across initial teacher training (ITT) providers.
11.Local authorities should be encouraged to develop lead Advanced Skills Teachers(ASTs) with a specific brief for education for diversity. This should be disseminated across the authority as part of outreach.
12. Schools should be encouraged to use the flexibilities in the teaching and learning responsibility points of the teachers ’ pay structure to promote excellence in education for diversity within the school.
Systems infrastructure
13. The DfES and Ofsted should ensure that schools and inspectors have a clear understanding of the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion, of its implications for schools ’ provision, and of schools ’ accountability through inspection.
14. Through performance management assessments, the training needs of School Improvement Partners (SIPs) should be identified to ensure that all SIPs fully understand the importance of education for diversity. Local authorities should support creative pairings of SIPs and headteachers.
15.The QCA should work closely with awarding bodies to ensure, wherever possible, that education for diversity appears in syllabuses and exam questions. QCA should also seek to embed education for diversity in curriculum subjects and make links to show how education for diversity can be promoted across the curriculum.
16.Consideration should be given to which organisation or organisations should develop the help and support schools need in advancing the education for diversity agenda. In this process, full account needs to be taken of the current position of the National Strategies; and of the importance of support for education for diversity being fully complementary to the wider context of support provided to schools and local authorities.
Citizenship：
17.Given that the evidence suggests Citizenship education works best when delivered discretely, we recommend this as the preferred model for schools. We recommend greater definition and support in place of the flexible, ‘light touch’ approach.
18.If demand for Citizenship teachers rises as a result of recommendation 17, we would ask the DfES to review the number of initial teacher training (ITT) places available for Citizenship teachers. In line with other statutory National Curriculum subjects, it is important that continuing professional development (CPD)is not seen as a substitute for ITT.
19.Headteachers and senior management should prioritise whole‐curriculum planning across the school and develop ways of linking Citizenship education effectively with other subjects, with the ethos of the school, and with the community.
20.ITT and CPD should explicitly address and develop clear conceptual understanding, in part by focusing on and strengthening treatment of issues relating to the ‘political literacy’ strand.
21.A full GCSE in Citizenship should be developed, alongside the currently available half GCSE. The full GCSE should comprise a range of topics that link Citizenship to other relevant subjects. We suggest these be developed to include issues of identity and diversity as outlined above, in addition to a number of other options. This would allow for the development of a number of joint GCSEs, for example, a joint Citizenship with History GCSE, a joint Citizenship with Religion GCSE, a joint Citizenship with Geography GCSE.
22.A fourth ‘strand ’ should be explicitly developed, entitled Identity and Diversity：Living Together in the UK. This strand will bring together three conceptual components：
∙ Critical thinking about ethnicity, religion and ‘race ’
∙ An explicit link to political issues and values
∙ The use of contemporary history in teachers ’ pedagogy to illuminate thinking about contemporary issues relating to citizenship
The following areas should be included：
∙ Contextualised understanding that the UK is a ‘multinational ’ state, made up of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
∙ Immigration
∙ Commonwealth and the legacy of Empire
∙ European Union
∙Extending the franchise (e.g. the legacy of slavery, universal suffrage, equal opportunities legislation)
(ⅰ) Any new changes or additions to Citizenship must be presented clearly and explicitly, with a clear rationale, alongside appropriate support for schools and teachers.
(ⅱ) There should be explicit links between the Programmes of Study for History and Citizenship education.
(ⅲ) QCA’s revisions of Programmes of Study at Key Stage 3 should include ‘Identity and Diversity：Living Together in the UK’. In addition, Programmes of Study at Key Stage 4 will need to be revised to account for this fourth strand.
(ⅳ) The QCA’s Citizenship stakeholder discussions should continue to be supported. Their role should include establishing the structure, content and delivery of this new strand. QCA must ensure that any such discussions include teachers and other experts in the educational fields of History and education for diversity as well as Citizenship.
23. To support this work, we recommend that DfES commission a review of existing resources covering issues that explicitly relate to the new strand (i.e.linking identity /diversity, political and historical contexts). This should tie in with the case studies developed by QCA as part of the curriculum review. A subsequent commission of further additional resources may be required.
Who Do We Think We Are?
24.Our conclusion is that in order to develop the recommended approaches in our report, and to encourage all schools to be involved, there needs to be a focus on whole‐school exploration of identities, diversity and citizenship. We suggest that time dedicated to Who Do We Think We Are? has the potential to excite schools to get involved.
This could include：
∙ Whole‐staff (including support staff) involvement in training, preparation and delivery
∙ Local authority support
∙ Local projects e.g. History, Geography fieldwork
∙ Investigations of Who Do We Think We Are?, with a local/national focus
∙ The cross‐curricular concept of diversity explored through subject ‘join up’, e.g. collapsed timetables, extensive enrichment activities
∙ Links established between schools
∙ Cultural celebrations
∙ Debates around values, Identities and diversity
∙ Accessing a range of resources including museums, archives and libraries
∙ A national media focus on Who Do We Think We Are?as a nation
Leonie McCarthy
Peterborough became a dispersal area under the government’s refugee policy in 2001. It is a city which had seen new communities establish themselves over many years in the past, including East Africans, Pakistani, Poles, Italians and Lithuanians. But over a very short time it found itself hosting 80% of eastern England’s asylum population and receiving over 60 different nationalities at one time. During the same period a sizeable number of Portuguese people arrived in the city in exercise of their European Union free movement rights, followed by people from eastern European after the accession states joined the EU in 2004.
Local services, organisations and residents were not prepared for an influx of so many new communities at once. The public perception of illegal/bogus/benefit grabbers’ was widespread and local officials were often wrongly informed about what the migrants could and could not do. There were incidents of asylum seekers being sent to the Job Centre to claim benefits they were not entitled to receive, and migrant workers directed to the National Asylum Support Service for help. City Council services, health officials and the police did not know who was entitled to what, why people were here, or whether the services they were providing met the needs of the new communities. Tensions between the new arrivals and settled communities began to increase to a point where there were a number of significant disturbances.
To tackle these issues a bid was put into the Home Office under the ‘Invest to Save’ programme and a partnership of police, council and health trusts asked for £2.2m for three years to run nine projects which would work for the smooth integration of new arrivals into the life of Peterborough. The projects included the establishment of aone stop centre, New Link, where new arrivals would come for information or assistance about a variety of matters which concerned them as individuals.
The centre looked at how new arrivals (and New Link) could contribute to Peterborough’s needs as a growing city. The need for specific advice was used as a point of first contact with the client, and a process of enquiry was initiated which involved questions about what they did in their home country and what skills they have, and to map this against the skills and languages gaps that existed in the city. The intention was to encourage the newly arrived to move out of the ‘picking, plucking, and packing’ work most were engaged in, to work for a better fit for their skills and abilities.
In addition, the centre encouraged public service organisations to provide information about the way they were runto ensure new migrants were aware of their services, so that people were provided with as much important information as possible on arrival in Peterborough. Early contact also allowed checks to ensure that children were enrolled in school, which anticipated the complaints of some settled residents about noise and commotion on the streets. Migrants would be urged to register with a GP, dissipating the concerns of some health professionals that the health needs of the newly-arrived translated into blocked accident and emergency departments.
The complaints of settled residents that migrants ‘loweredwages’ by working for less than the minimum wage, were dealt with by ensuring they knew about their rights under employment law. The belief that they were all living in overcrowded accommodation was tackled by assisting new arrivals in getting rent books and decent living conditions.
The benefit of having information across the 20-odd questions asked of people on their first visit not only helped collated statistics on things like migrant skills (confirming that many are highly qualified), but also helped equip New Link with evidence that the newcomers were not ‘abusing hospitality’ and this has proven invaluable in busting myths and misconceptions.
Another project is run by a community development officer based at the centre. It tackled the need to engage with the new communities in a more holistic way and be less reliant on dealings with community ‘gatekeepers’,who tended to be those who had resided longest and had the best English. To do this we asked new arrivals if they would they would be interested in getting together with friends to set up a group. This proved to be incredibly successful and 20 groups have been established from amongst the different nationalities. Whilst some participants had taken years to consider getting a group together, others ran with the idea much more quickly. The groups have democratically elected representatives and a new arrival forum has been established where 10 of the groups are represented and discussions take place on issues around integration and access to services in Peterborough.
Our aim is for this group to feed into the Local Strategic Partnership – the multi-agency forum which brings together the different parts of the public, private, community and voluntary sectors to support one another and work together more effectively.This forum has enabled services to access information and advice on how to best meet the needs of the new migrants. It has assisted the police in recruiting Police Community Support Officers from amongst the new communities, tackling such issues as the best way to advertise and market the role to these communities.
The community development work has also played a role in engaging the local media with the newly- arrived. Community-based events have involved the press, and, because the groups have received media training, they have been able to convey the right type of messages.
It is the case that there are tensions between communities, in particularly amongst groups coming from regions where there is inter-ethnic and national conflict. When this has happened the projects have been able to involve mediation and to get community leaders to discuss issues and address the need to resolve conflicts.
Sometimes the authorities in Peterborough have not been sufficiently sensitive to issues which motivate the different communities. An example of this occurred recently when the local Iraqi Kurdish community celebrated the victory of the Iraq national football team in the final of the Asian Cup. The local police who, like most people in Peterborough, did not know of the Iraqi team’s achievement and were unaware of the reason for eruption of celebratory young men onto the streets of the town, acted by booking many of the Kurds for unruly behaviour. The Kurdish men felt they had been discriminated against unfairly and their community leaders brought their complaints to the New Link development worker. He arranged a meeting with the police and they agreed that had they known in advance about the match they would have been less inclined to book people for their celebrations. A mechanism for ensuring this wouldn’t happen again was put in place and peace was resumed between the parties.
Housing conditions in the private rented sector have also generated friction. Residential areas dominated by family homes have seen properties leased out to shared households of young men, with overcrowding being common. The impact on the settled residents in those areas has been very negative. Complaints have been made about mattresses thrown in back yards, bins made overflowing, cars parked on the pavement and drives, houses without curtains in the windows, and unkempt gardens, etc.
It is vital that a joined up approach be taken by all agencies working on the ground on these very sensitive issues. Overcrowding is an offense which arises because of the activities of unscrupulous landlords and there is a need to identify who they are and enforce the public health laws against them. This can be a lengthy and difficult process. Another way to tackle them is through the use of mediation services, and New Links is currently using one of these to training up individuals from the newly arrived communities to be ‘community facilitators’. Local residents are encouraged to let us know when a problem exists and then a facilitator from the nationality of the people concerned goes to the houses to discuss what the issues are. This enables the settled resident to realise that not all new arrivals from that community are not anti-social neighbours and also help them to see the importance of interaction. The facilitator will have an ‘when in Rome’conversation with the perpetrators of the misdemeanours and will advise them if they need help they may need in settling into Peterborough - letting them know of English classes, or the work of New Link etc.
The experience of new migrant settlement in Peterborough certainly shows that problems do arise when people of different cultural backgrounds first come into contact as neighbours in settled communities. But New Link has shown that we do not need to be overwhelmed by such problems, and that strategic thinking and joined-up actions can make a huge difference to community relations. What is needed are public authorities which in the first instance value the contribution of new migrants in their local area, but are also imaginative enough to anticipate the sort of issues which can generate friction and tension, and put in place structures to deal with it when it happens. New Link is just one such example of how this can happen, but one which very definitely illustrates the potential for success for such a strategy.
Education for diversity
Pupil Voice
1. All schools should have mechanisms in place to ensure that the pupil voice is heard and acted upon. Schools should consider the use of forums, school councils, pupil questionnaires or other mechanisms for discussions around identity, values and belonging.
Leadership
2. Headteachers and governing bodies in all schools should ensure they meet the statutory requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment)Act 2000 and use the Community Cohesion Guidelines 2 as a check for their accountability.
3. Within all leadership training, the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) should ensure that training in diversity and citizenship is an essential component. In particular, the revision of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) should include understanding education for diversity in relation to the curriculum, school ethos, pupil voice and the community.
Education for diversity in the curriculum
4. All ion across years and subjects and ensure that coverage is coherent.
5. Subject associations, in conjunction with QCA (who will be developing case studies and guidelines alongside the revised curriculum), should compile databases of the best resources and develop new resources.
6. More research should be commissioned on how good practice in delivering exciting and innovative education for diversity can be captured and transferred from classroom to classroom and school to school.
Harnessing local context
7. DfES should actively encourage schools to take up the Non‐Statutory National Framework for Religious Education so that the good practice for education for diversity it promotes continues to be spread.
8. Schools should build active links between and across communities, with education for diversity as a focus.
a.This might range from electronic links (local, national and global), to relationships through other schools (for example as part of a federation), links with businesses, community groups and parents.
b.These links should be encouraged particularly between predominantly monocultural and multicultural schools.
c.Such links need to be developed in such a way as to ensure they are sustainable.
d. Such work between schools must have significant curriculum objectives and be incorporated into courses that pupils are studying. This will help avoid stereotyping and tokenism.
9. In planning for extended school provision, schools should seek to make contact with as wide a range of diverse community groups as possible, including supplementary schools.
Teacher training
10. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) should evaluate the effectiveness of education for diversity across initial teacher training (ITT) providers.
11.Local authorities should be encouraged to develop lead Advanced Skills Teachers(ASTs) with a specific brief for education for diversity. This should be disseminated across the authority as part of outreach.
12. Schools should be encouraged to use the flexibilities in the teaching and learning responsibility points of the teachers ’ pay structure to promote excellence in education for diversity within the school.
Systems infrastructure
13. The DfES and Ofsted should ensure that schools and inspectors have a clear understanding of the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion, of its implications for schools ’ provision, and of schools ’ accountability through inspection.
14. Through performance management assessments, the training needs of School Improvement Partners (SIPs) should be identified to ensure that all SIPs fully understand the importance of education for diversity. Local authorities should support creative pairings of SIPs and headteachers.
15.The QCA should work closely with awarding bodies to ensure, wherever possible, that education for diversity appears in syllabuses and exam questions. QCA should also seek to embed education for diversity in curriculum subjects and make links to show how education for diversity can be promoted across the curriculum.
16.Consideration should be given to which organisation or organisations should develop the help and support schools need in advancing the education for diversity agenda. In this process, full account needs to be taken of the current position of the National Strategies; and of the importance of support for education for diversity being fully complementary to the wider context of support provided to schools and local authorities.
Citizenship：
17.Given that the evidence suggests Citizenship education works best when delivered discretely, we recommend this as the preferred model for schools. We recommend greater definition and support in place of the flexible, ‘light touch’ approach.
18.If demand for Citizenship teachers rises as a result of recommendation 17, we would ask the DfES to review the number of initial teacher training (ITT) places available for Citizenship teachers. In line with other statutory National Curriculum subjects, it is important that continuing professional development (CPD)is not seen as a substitute for ITT.
19.Headteachers and senior management should prioritise whole‐curriculum planning across the school and develop ways of linking Citizenship education effectively with other subjects, with the ethos of the school, and with the community.
20.ITT and CPD should explicitly address and develop clear conceptual understanding, in part by focusing on and strengthening treatment of issues relating to the ‘political literacy’ strand.
21.A full GCSE in Citizenship should be developed, alongside the currently available half GCSE. The full GCSE should comprise a range of topics that link Citizenship to other relevant subjects. We suggest these be developed to include issues of identity and diversity as outlined above, in addition to a number of other options. This would allow for the development of a number of joint GCSEs, for example, a joint Citizenship with History GCSE, a joint Citizenship with Religion GCSE, a joint Citizenship with Geography GCSE.
22.A fourth ‘strand ’ should be explicitly developed, entitled Identity and Diversity：Living Together in the UK. This strand will bring together three conceptual components：
∙ Critical thinking about ethnicity, religion and ‘race ’
∙ An explicit link to political issues and values
∙ The use of contemporary history in teachers ’ pedagogy to illuminate thinking about contemporary issues relating to citizenship
The following areas should be included：
∙ Contextualised understanding that the UK is a ‘multinational ’ state, made up of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
∙ Immigration
∙ Commonwealth and the legacy of Empire
∙ European Union
∙Extending the franchise (e.g. the legacy of slavery, universal suffrage, equal opportunities legislation)
(ⅰ) Any new changes or additions to Citizenship must be presented clearly and explicitly, with a clear rationale, alongside appropriate support for schools and teachers.
(ⅱ) There should be explicit links between the Programmes of Study for History and Citizenship education.
(ⅲ) QCA’s revisions of Programmes of Study at Key Stage 3 should include ‘Identity and Diversity：Living Together in the UK’. In addition, Programmes of Study at Key Stage 4 will need to be revised to account for this fourth strand.
(ⅳ) The QCA’s Citizenship stakeholder discussions should continue to be supported. Their role should include establishing the structure, content and delivery of this new strand. QCA must ensure that any such discussions include teachers and other experts in the educational fields of History and education for diversity as well as Citizenship.
23. To support this work, we recommend that DfES commission a review of existing resources covering issues that explicitly relate to the new strand (i.e.linking identity /diversity, political and historical contexts). This should tie in with the case studies developed by QCA as part of the curriculum review. A subsequent commission of further additional resources may be required.
Who Do We Think We Are?
24.Our conclusion is that in order to develop the recommended approaches in our report, and to encourage all schools to be involved, there needs to be a focus on whole‐school exploration of identities, diversity and citizenship. We suggest that time dedicated to Who Do We Think We Are? has the potential to excite schools to get involved.
This could include：
∙ Whole‐staff (including support staff) involvement in training, preparation and delivery
∙ Local authority support
∙ Local projects e.g. History, Geography fieldwork
∙ Investigations of Who Do We Think We Are?, with a local/national focus
∙ The cross‐curricular concept of diversity explored through subject ‘join up’, e.g. collapsed timetables, extensive enrichment activities
∙ Links established between schools
∙ Cultural celebrations
∙ Debates around values, Identities and diversity
∙ Accessing a range of resources including museums, archives and libraries
∙ A national media focus on Who Do We Think We Are?as a nation
(This document includes the written agenda presentations from the 'International Multi-Cultural Seminar' in Daegu and Gwangju co-hosted by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, British Embassy in Korea, Yeungnam University, and Chonnam National University on November 8 - 9, 2007.
The International Multi-Cultural Seminar was held to raise awareness of migrants' rights and further their social integration in Korean society, where the number of migrants now exceeds one million. Michael Keith and Leonie McCarthy (Commissioners, British Commission on Integration and Cohesion), and Ji-Hun Lee (Human Rights Solidarity for Women and Migrants) made agenda presentations. Among the participants in the panel discussion were human rights experts from Gyeongsang and Jeolla Province. This document contains only the greetings by the hosting organizations and written agenda presentations by those who made presentations on the main topic.)
Local government, local governance and the new vocabulary of cohesion and integration：British experience and contemporary Korea
Local government, local governance and the new vocabulary of cohesion and integration：British experience and contemporary Korea
Michael Keith
1. Context
Britain is a country shaped by migration over centuries. From the countless invasions of the first millennium to the sometimes buried links with mainland Europe emphasisied by the historian Norman Davies the ‘insularity’ of the island race has frequently hidden flows of people and culture across national boundaries. The uneasy balance between the Celtic fringe (including the movements of people from Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and the ‘nation‐state’ of the United Kingdom has also left complex legacies.
From the second half of the 20th century the country has experienced two major ‘moments’ of international migration. In the wake of the second world war the shattered infrastructure of the country, the growing welfare state and the declining old industrial base all displayed chronic labour shortages and Britain looked to current and former colonies for the people that would answer this need. Frequently told that the ‘mother country’ would welcome them the experiences of the first generations of settlement – principally from the ‘New Commonwealth’ was in reality less hospitable; populist sentiment and institutional intolerance often setting the tone for the early decades of settlement in Britain.
The origin of this much needed migrant labour was complex. Symbolically associated with the arrival at Tilbury Docks of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948, bringing former servicemen and people looking for work from the Caribbean this wave of ‘New Commonwealth’ migration tended to come from tight networks in particular islands of the Caribbean and sub regions of south Asia. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinaidad (and Guyana) were the source of many of the Caribbean migrants, although there were strands of migrations from the smaller islands as well. Gujerat and Punjab (in the old India), Mirpur (in the old west Pakistan) and Sylhet (in what is now Bangladesh) all provided sources of labour that was frequently recruited explicitly by the British. The National Health Service recruited directly from the Caribbean, Wolffs rubber company, staffed by colonial Raj military officers, recruited Sikh’s from the Punjab to work in their plant close to the emerging site of Heathrow airport.
So the nature of this wave of British multiculturalism always bore the imprint of old colonial pasts and new patterns of settlement. Concentrated massively in London, Birmingham and some of the declining manufacturing areas outside London, particular parts of specific cities became identified with particular communities in the post war decades. Southall was known for the Sikh faith and Punjabi cultures; Brixton and Notting Hill the iconic hearts of Jamaican and Trinidadian settlement, and Brick Lane was long famous for the ‘curry capital’ of Sylheti (Bangladeshi) settlement, long before Monica Ali’s eponymous book and the recently released film of the same name.
And the story of these settlements is one that is also characterised by long and intense struggles by those communities against various patterns of systematic discrimination, overt and covert patterns of racism in allocating resources (such as access to housing to rent and to buy, schools, social centres) and in recognising particular cultural needs (such as the right to worship together, cultural imperatives of diet and dress, the need to recognise the life cycle cultural particularities of naming, growing up, marrying and dying). So the extent to which these communities – themselves the products of struggle and contest – would become part of a large whole, British society in the late 20th century was frequently the object of policy and journalistic concern. The extent to which assimilation of the Windrush generation was either desirable or achievable, the extent to which spatial separation of one community from another marked patterns of undesirable ‘segregation’, the ways in which ‘separation’ represented a resource and a strength for the second and third generations of these communities or a form of exclusion and isolation, were all at various times from the 1960s to the early 1990s subject of extensive debate. And whilst by the late 20th century most popular surveys tended to recognise that most people welcomed the new diversity of Britain’s cities the history was no simple story of Whiggish progress; moments of violent attacks and racist murders and occasional outbreaks of civil unrest and rioting marking the uneven path of the last decades of the century.
So the multiculturalism of late 20th century Britain was very much a hybrid product. It tended to be discussed in ways that in part recognised cultural differences, and had built up a legislative history combating racial discrimination in particular areas, particularly around employment and the provision of public services. Legislation also placed particular responsibilities on British local government to promote ‘good race relations’ and combat discrimination and so the town hall became in turn both the site of some of the most fiercely contested moments of municipal policymaking (for example around education and policing in the 1980s) and the vehicle of some of the more prominent policy changes (for example in the ‘ethnic monitoring’ of who was and was not getting access to municipal welfare state services such as subsidised ‘social housing’)
From the late 1960s to the early 1990s major international migration into Britain declined massively. Papers were given regularly by academics stressing that the age of mass migration to Britain was over. Some of the debates around multiculturalism focused increasingly on the uneasy relationship between cultural diversity and economic restructuring in the UK as postindustrial parts of the country and sectors of the economy went into steady decline. Migration became principally made up by the growing flows of professional and managerial groups, small in scale but reflecting the increasing globalisation of the economy and growth of financial services as the single most significant driver of the UK economy.
But from the early 1990s onwards the new and stronger ‘long trend’ of economic growth has been identified with new streams of migrant labour, our second principal ‘moment’ of mass migration to the UK. Frequently from areas with no old colonial links to the UK this migration is again the product of labour scarcity in key areas of the economy. Again the boom in London’s economy from 1993 onwards becomes the largest single engine of these new forms of demand in catering, leisure and other service related trades but also new parts of the country experience significant inward migration for the first time in living memory as rural areas, growing new towns and places where refugee populations are ‘decanted’ host migrants, with numbers growing exponentially at rates that at times prompt local concerns.
This second major wave of migration was also identified with the freedom of movement in the old ‘Iron Curtain’ countries in the East of Europe and the expansion of the European Union, sometimes referred to by the shorthand of ‘A8’ migration (referring to the accession of 8 new countries into the union). It is important nevertheless, to understand that again the increasingly complex demographies of Britain relates to the economic drivers of globalised, liberalised labour markets in which flows of people, capital and culture are increasingly international in their nature.
And how the British multicultural model either does or does not work has again been the subject of sustained controversy. The year 2001 saw both the attacks on the twin towers in the USA and the ‘milltown’ riots in northern British cities, at times setting one community against another. And in 2005 the first suicide bombings in the UK on ‘7/7’ (the 7th July 2005) provoked a storm of consideration internationally about whether or not the British multicultural model was working. And again the very diversity of experiences across the country means that a focus is again cast on local governance, below the level of the nation, sometimes in ways that are progressive and aimed at developing new solutions and sometimes with the rise of populist xenophobic politics in growing support for the British National Party and other groups from the far right of the political spectrum.
In this context integration and cohesion are both terms that are becoming increasingly common. In social policy, in serious journalism and in academic analysis of societies in Britain and across the world the terms have gathered a power unrecognisable ten or even as little as five years ago. Why is this? Is it that the circumstances on the ground have changed so much that we need a new vocabulary to describe them? Or is that the powerful have chosen to hide some agendas and prefer others to be accepted?
2. Korea and Britain
The British trajectory is clearly significantly different from that in Korea. But once we understand that the flows of labour, culture and values are directly related to general economic trends then we might expect that the burgeoning experience of globalisation will begin to speak to the experiences of multiculture, cohesion and integration in both countries. Though in no way an expert I understand that there is a developing debate in Korea about the growing numbers of people migrating to the country, again linked to the labour demands of a successful globalised economy and the demographic transitions associated with this, particularly between town and country. The projections reported in the press of a population of 800, 000 ‘foreigners’ rising to about 1.5 million in next five years and a growing number of mixed marriages, particularly in rural areas again focuses attention on the diversity of the experiences in different parts of the country. One study has suggested that international marriages now make up 13 percent of all marriages in Korea and that more than 30 percent of international marriages are unions between rural men and foreign brides：
The term "mixed‐blood people" was changed to "people of international marriages" in future government documents.
Furthermore, the government is reviewing plans to give citizenship or residency status to those who marry Koreans and to their children. And school textbooks that describe Korea as a "nation unified by one bloodline" will be changed to one that has a "multiethnic and multicultural society."
Such changes have prompted North Korea`s Rodong Shinmun (the Workers Party`s paper) to fiercely criticize the South Korean government.
It said, "South Korea is denying its national race and its 5,000‐year history by professing to be a multiracial nation. Such moves will Americanize Korea, ruin its past history and weaken the power to combat dominative U.S. forces." http：//yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=7918
And clearly there is at least some discussion of the links between the emergent patterns in Korea and the processes of globalisation and diasporic sensibility that is central to the British experience. One Korean academic Kim Mun‐cho has even suggested that we are seeing the rise of a new Korean cosmopolitanism where
“In particular, the idea of hybrid associations seems most promising, in terms of fostering cultural cosmopolitanism because, in the process of cultural globalization, the key significance resides in the notion of hybridity. Jan Nederveen Pieterse defines cultural globalization as a creation of hybrid cultures arising out of the transnational movements of people and cultures. Cultural globalization is conceived as the creolization of diverse cultures, which entails not just contacts, networks or associations, but also confrontation, conflict or modification.” http：//therealsouthkorea.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/korea‐moving‐toward‐a‐multicultural‐society/
For some people the British model of race relations in the post war era was seen as particular to this country in both allowing a relatively high level of autonomy of different communities (including migrant and faith based communities) whilst simultaneously the state intervened in recognising (some) cultural rights (such as wearing the turban or the veil) and legislating against discrimination. This pluralism ‐ that might be taken to characterise much of policy intervention in the 1980s and 1990s ‐ was criticised from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. From the left the ghettoisation of individual cultures was an inevitable result of the British multicultural model and scholars such as Kenan Malik preferred to promote more universal identities that were shared by all. From the right multiculturalism was criticised from many different positions that shared what was seen as a distaste at the ‘privileges’ minorities were allegedly being offered by both cultural recognition and policy interventions to promote equality.
In the wake of the events of ‘7/7’, the bombings in London in July 2005, it was inevitable that many across the world – from both left and right – would try to suggest that their particular critique of British multiculturalism had been vindicated. French voices praised their republican model as an alternative until in the following summer and autumn the banlieus (or ‘suburban ghettos’) in France erupted in protests between migrant (often Islamic) migrant communities and the police. In Britain the multiple forms of race and faith hatred escalated. The rise of forms of Islamophobia, or prejudice and hatred against British Muslim communities, widely commented on since the bombing of New York’s twin towers on ‘9/11’ ( 11th September 2001) became even more pronounced. The mass demonstrations against the British presence in Iraq that crossed ethnicities, faiths and regions of Britain became conflated with a poisonous suspicion of the role of British Muslim communities in civic society, particularly in some of the tabloids and most egregiously in papers such as the Daily Mail.
So it was in this context that some of the suspicion about the use of the terms of integration and cohesion has been developed. Some people thought that this might be a new code for talking about Muslims in British society. Some people thought that the new language was a way of obscuring talk about the realities of racism, discrimination and inequality in order to promote alternative emphasis on assimilation, the responsibilities of communities to conform and the erosion of civil rights.
Consequently, it was perhaps not surprising that when Ruth Kelly announced the formation of the Commission on Cohesion and Integration in the summer of 2006 that many people reacted with a mixture of scepticism, cynicism and critique. Was this new Commission to be the vehicle that endorsed the new language at the expense of the old; that shifted attention away from the struggles of communities to be heard and towards their obligation to assimilate? And most of all, was this to be the Commission that described new policies for the powerful in the country to ‘manage’ the British Muslim presence in the country?
I was asked to become a Commissioner at this time. I was aware of the widespread suspicions, as were most of my colleague commissioners. And although I have some reservations about the way the work of the Commission has been represented, not least in those self same tabloid newspapers, I do believe that for those people who have actually read the final report of the Commission they will see that some of the suspicions have proved ill founded.
The Commission has stated quite clearly some very basic things. There is a sense that the situation on the ground in Britain is different in 2007 from the way it was thirty or forty years ago and we need to think carefully about what this means for all of us. There is a sense that the new migrations of the last ten years may prove as significant in the history of the country as the migrations from the Caribbean and South Asia in the 1950s and 60s. There is a sense in which the notion of ‘diversity’ has become much more complex than it ever has been in recent decades. On an estate in Tower Hamlets you might find all in a row on a single block an old white Jewish or Irish Catholic family living alongside a third generation Sylheti family, a Brazilian couple that have been here five years and five men working in the building trades from Lithuania. This should make us think carefully about how we all get along. This language of ‘getting along’ or ‘conviviality’ comes pretty close to something that we might understand as integration and cohesion.
That is why when we produced our final report as the Commission for Integration and Cohesion in June 2007 we made it absolutely clear that the notions of integration and cohesion related to all communities. We were quite explicit in making clear that there was a danger in both government and media of a particular focus on Muslim communities and a worry that caricatures were reflected in policy construction. We were determined to make it clear in our work that the new vocabulary needed to be linked to the new realities in the country rather than to the preconceptions and prejudices of the tabloids.
But the mass media were less sympathetic. It is flattering to be read and disconcerting to be misunderstood. But is it forgivable to be spun? Before the CIC report was released Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian (http：//society.guardian.co.uk/ communities/story/0,,2101020,00.html) had already characterised the commission as brain dead; failing to address the key concepts of segregation and multiculturalism that were for her the most fraught issues that faced today’s Britain.
For others, the key messages were either reassuringly xenophobic or predictably politically correct and overwhelmingly about a sense of Britishness putatively overwhelmed by migration. The London Standard highlighted migrants spitting, the Daily Telegraph furiously rejected the Commission’s suggestion that political parties standing for election in the UK should voluntarily abide by the terms of the Race Relations Amendment Act and should strive to become more representative of the diversity of the communities they served. Meanwhile, on the prime 8.10 morning slot on the Radio 4 Today programme the BBC decided that the commission had celebrated Belfast and found there a ‘community’ with ‘perfect social capital scores’.
In fact whilst we visited all regions in the UK, the ossified social relations of the new Ulster were hardly the exemplar that we chased; the brutal ‘interfaces’ that mark Belfast’s cartography of ‘peace lines’ a reminder of history stalled rather than sins forgiven, a living testimony to Amos Oz’s axiom that “A tension runs between peace and justice; peace requires compromises; justice detests them”.
As one of 14 commissioners I stand by the collective responsibility that informs such an enterprise. We fought in good faith for those things we thought correct. A consensus generated through the scrupulous chairing of Darra Singh produced a list that nobody would agree unanimously but all could live with. As with all of us, I could pick my favourite recommendations and those I was less keen on but that would not really be the point.
More importantly the report has a structure, an analysis, an argument and a narrative form (http：//www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/Our_final_report.aspx). It suggests why it might be opportune to talk about cohesion and integration, the principles on which we should base our deliberations and a substantive content that is determined by the imperative to translate each of these principles into actions.
3. On principles
The report argues that debate should flow from a set of four principles. The first principle of ‘shared futures’ valorises a sense of becoming that does not erase the imprint of history and memory over a sense of being. The second principle argues that we need to consider a framework of rights and responsibilities that recognises the incommensurabilities of the global, national and local senses of the citizen. The third principle argues for an ‘ethics of hospitality’ that acknowledges the moral place of the stranger in the rapidly changing landscapes of today’s Britain. And the fourth argues that these forms of recognition need to be geared with a sense of visible social justice that stems from principles of equality and institutional transparency.
4. On multiculturalism and segregation
As Bunting has suggested the current moment in the ‘race relations debate’ has tended to be viewed through the bifocal lenses of geographical separation and multiculturalism. These are important debates and the debate around multiculturalism in particular involves complex and contradictory philosophical and political takes on a particularly contested term.
It is less clear that these lenses have been particularly helpful or that the call and response public debate around the ‘death of multiculturalism’ has been analytically or politically insightful. It was precisely in order to think differently rather than in the terms of received wisdoms that the CIC report stresses that a serious debate about integration and cohesion cannot be a pretext for a focus on contemporary Islam and that it must address all parts of the country rather than the metonyms of multiculture that lists of inner city place names tend to constitute. The suggestion of the report is instead that contemporary British debates about both multiculturalism and segregation tend to ‘sleepwalk into simplification’. For what it is worth – and for reasons there is no space to develop here ‐ if offered a choice between the multiculturalism of Tariq Modood (Open Democracy http：//www.opendemocracy.net/ conflict‐terrorism/multiculturalism_2879.jsp) or the Chair of the new national Commission for Equality and Human Rights Trevor Phillips’ wholesale rejection of multiculturalism I would personally prefer to argue with both. In this sense the report prefers a narrative arc that takes definition (of integration and cohesion) through a set of ethical principles and translates each of these in turn into chapters that focus on practical social policy interventions.
Similarly, whilst it is possible to measure how far apart some communities are from others geographically this is not always particularly significant. Do we get concerned when the super rich from Russia congregate in one part of London and do not mix very much? Or are we only ‘bothered’ when talk of segregation focuses on some communities in the mill towns of the M62 in the north of England?
5. Local government, ‘solutions’ and policy prescriptions
5a. Biographical experience：Leading an inner London Council
So the logic of the language and the conceptualisation of cohesion and integration points to the significance of the local mediation of national problems. In a world where a clichéd axiom suggests that the nation state has become too big to address the major concerns of the everyday (neighbourhood issues of civility, crime, quality of life) but also too small to address major concerns of social policy (global warming, world poverty, both local governance and local government become more significant. By the former I mean the networks of state agencies, civil society institutions and community organisations that make up the constitution of everyday life at the level of the local. By the latter I refer to the institutions, varying from one country to another, between the UK and Korea, that make up the organisation of the state at sub‐national level.
In the British system of local government I was for twelve years (from 1994‐2006) a local politician and for five years the leader of one of London’s 32 boroughs, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets is constituted by the area of London commonly known as the ‘East End’, adjacent to the largest single concentration of wealth in Europe in the City Corporation and covering an area from the Tower of London in the west to the London 2012 Olympic site and the new Docklands in the east (including the second largest financial centre in Europe in the Isle of Dogs, with the global HQ of HSBC, the European HQ of Citibank and numerous other financial service players). The borough has a population of approximately 200, 000 and an annual revenue budget of approximately £1 billion pa with responsibilities for education, welfare and the provision of substantial social housing and the regulation of development, ‘regeneration’ and other regulatory services under its remit. The ‘east end’ demonstrates some of the extremes of contemporary city change. In the late 1990s commercial property boom over 40% of London’s office development took place in the borough, on the fringes of the City Corporation and on the Isle of Dogs. At one time the borough included both the highest scores for social deprivation and the highest median income post code in the UK. In other words the social polarisation between rich and poor is more marked here than across the nation in a country where such polarisation has been a characteristic of the last two decades. It is also an area historically renowned as the first place of settlement for migrants to London. From Protestant Huguenots fleeing the counter reformation in 17th century France, to the Jews and the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the seamen from across the Docks to the Bangladeshis in the post war decades and the A8 migrants and Brazilians in the last few years, wave after wave of migration has become almost normalised in the area.
Some aspects of these changes can be read as tensions – the transience of migrants too often meaning that ‘getting on’ equates with ‘getting away’, the historical clashes throughout the last hundred years that have seen significant confrontations between communities at times. In the time that I have been politically engaged since the 1980s the area has been bombed eight times; four times by the Irish Republican Army (the IRA), once by an extreme right ‘nail bomber’ rejecting British multiculturalism and twice by the suicide bombers of 2005 (Aldgate East tube was the scene of one of the 7/7 bombs and their failed emulators two weeks fauiled to detonate a suicide bomb on Hackney Road two weeks later).
But there is also a paradox here. If the place has seen the most extreme forms of intolerance it has also witnessed the most intense and productive moments of inter cultural dialogue. A portrait of continuous conflict would be as misleading as a rosy image of cosmopolitan harmony. In reality the best and the worst sit alongside one another. Again at the local level it was in the east end that communities from across East London came together to confront the British fascist movement in the 1930s in Cable Street, to campaign successfully against their far right descendants, the British National Party in the 1980s and 1990s and to unite different faith communities in the wake of the London bombings of 2005.
There also more material signs of hope. In the period from 1994‐2006 the borough was seen to progress from being polarised, divided and bankrupt to one that was objectively delivering the best welfare services of any social services department in the country, the most rapidly improving schools in the country and a strong sense of pride in the local community. The borough was awarded the ‘Beacon Council’ award for community cohesion in 2005, singled out as the best in the country for partnership workings of local government and local governance.
I would not want to be complacent. We know what hubris prefigures. But there are some lessons in the Tower Hamlets experience. They are principally about the manner in which governance structures of partnership might supplant the occasional arrogance or ossification of structures of local government. A recognition that the boundary between state and civil society is a permeable one informs a set of policies that are about generating a debate on the future direction of the borough (the ‘place shaping’ agenda) and the shared priorities of peoples from very different backgrounds in ensuring that their children are offered a decent schooling, that the streets are safe and clean and that we recognise the dynamics of economic transformation and mediate their effects. If the lessons could be summed up succinctly it would involve the shift of focus to policy interventions that recognise the material, cultural and ethical benefits of diversity but also concentrate on building from this diversity a future that is shared. These were themes that were very much echoed in the working of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion when we were dealing with similar issues across the United Kingdom.
5b The Commission’s framework for policy recommendations
The Commission’s framework for policy recommendations emerges directly from the structuring of our final report and its roots in a set of principles identified in our work These relate to each in turn of the five following areas that I shall discuss in more detail in my talk：
1. Developing shared futures
2. Strengthening rights and responsibilities
3. Building mutual respect and civility
4. Making social justice visible
5. Acting in the four public spheres
Developing Shared Futures
• A focus on where we are going not on where we have come from
• Shared national vision
• Strong local leadership
• A public debate about the nature of change
• Practically
– Mapping communities and dynamics of change
– Reflecting the community in services, representatives nd workforce
Strengthening rights and responsibilities
• National citizenship / local citizenship
• New migrants and their impacts
Building mutual respect and civility
• ASB
• Working with women
• An increased focus on young people
• The importance of faith communtiies
– BUT
– Whose voices are legitimate at neighbourhood level?
But：Local and national frameworks of citizenship and belonging
And the ethics of scale – neighbourhood, local authority, regional and national interest
Making social justice visible
• Targeted action to address inequalities
• Communications and working with the media
• Myth busting
• BUT
– Contested processes and contested outcomes
– Universal and specific provision
– The importance of transparency
Acting in the four public spheres
• “A light national touch, locally driven”
• Education (including faith schools)
• Public space and residential areas
• Sports, culture and leisure
• The workplace
6. On Britishness and empire
Whilst the work of the Commission strongly emphasised the importance of local institutions, loc al government and local governance it was a published at a time when national concerns about cohesion and integration were translated into wider debates about British identity in the face of globalisation, cultural diversity, new migrations and the devolution of powers to the new assemblies in Wales and Scotland.
The report does not argue that the debate around Britishness is illegitimate. It does suggest that the new configurations of transnationalism, glocalism and super diversity might make us think carefully about how we address the term’s power. Displacing a putatively European ethnic nationalism (bad) with an allegedly civic American nationalism (good) will not work and may not be possible for the economy that has so completely embraced globalisation. The Humpty Dumpty of the 19th century nation state cannot be put together again any more than its empire. However, a sense of Britishness that begins to share a reckoning with the past and an Orwellian notion of patriotic national becoming might be something slightly different.
A sense of the national that acknowledges that levels of identification are stronger at the level of locality than at the level of the nation and that networks, movements and cultures that cross borders create sentimental imaginaries at plural spatial scales does no more than reflect realities already on the ground. The forms of new conviviality that cross conventional racial boundaries that characterise some parts of today’s city occupies the same spaces as old and reproducing articulations of bigotry and racism. Contemporary calls for new forms of transnational co‐operation and a supra‐national conversation about poverty or climate change are hardly radical but they do nuance appeals to Britishness.
Consequently, our sense of autonomy and freedom needs to think carefully about how we consider the fabrication of the individual, the cultural and the social, within and beyond the boundaries of the national. In this sense 21st century sovereignty is an essentially transactional category that sits in a babushka doll nest of spatial scales of material and symbolic flows and institutional deliberations. The nation state continues to organise much of social and economic life but not in the same ways as 100 years ago. In this context the report asks about the appropriate invented traditions that can speak to this politics of jumping scale – that can invoke the global, national and local simultaneously.
This is not evangelising for a naive cosmopolitanism or a sub national parochialism, it merely recognises the social consequences of globalisation. There is a geography to this. It is not new to suggest that whilst the economic benefits of migration accrue nationally, the social costs are mediated locally (and impact disproportionately in some places). We might want to think slightly more carefully about both the historical and geographical narratives that make places visible in Britain’s changing social and economic landscape. When Walter Benjamin suggested that ‘the future of the past is not safe in their hands’ he drew attention to the ways in which received wisdoms (of nationhood, of race, of power) should be regarded suspiciously; historiography becoming a contest of memory and remembering. He might have added that we should be similarly cautious about the manner in which cartography conceals as much as it reveals, we are made to ‘know our place’ through what lies beyond us, the boundaries and borderlines of ‘the elsewhere of place’. The spatial boundaries of today’s languages of rights structure the calculus of citizenship that needs to speak to the new Rachmans that are wholesaling old right to buy properties in inner London and to the white working class in Dagenham that face labour market competition from A8 migration as construction related wage rates are forced down and housing competition for each family is intensified by new gentrifiers and old eastwards migration of the Windrush generation.
This does mean that the forms of welfare state rationing that scale the local, national and global demand a debate about the forms of recognition and the forms of redistribution that might set the parameters of social policy intervention in housing, in health and in education. It also means that we might just need to consider the figuration of the local slightly more imaginatively. In narrating the iconographies of place in the stories of Barking fascists, mill town riots, rural migrant labour, the New East End, British Islam and cosmopolitan London we might just need to recognise some historical ghosts alongside the ‘elsewhere’ of the global political.
For practitioners and politicians operating in local government it also means that we need to think carefully about the things we can influence, those we cannot and the difference between the two. The importance of the issues is beyond doubt. Perhaps our ability to address them might be considered with the ironic optimism of Samuel Beckett’s injunction to ‘fail again, fail better’.
Michael Keith
1. Context
Britain is a country shaped by migration over centuries. From the countless invasions of the first millennium to the sometimes buried links with mainland Europe emphasisied by the historian Norman Davies the ‘insularity’ of the island race has frequently hidden flows of people and culture across national boundaries. The uneasy balance between the Celtic fringe (including the movements of people from Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and the ‘nation‐state’ of the United Kingdom has also left complex legacies.
From the second half of the 20th century the country has experienced two major ‘moments’ of international migration. In the wake of the second world war the shattered infrastructure of the country, the growing welfare state and the declining old industrial base all displayed chronic labour shortages and Britain looked to current and former colonies for the people that would answer this need. Frequently told that the ‘mother country’ would welcome them the experiences of the first generations of settlement – principally from the ‘New Commonwealth’ was in reality less hospitable; populist sentiment and institutional intolerance often setting the tone for the early decades of settlement in Britain.
The origin of this much needed migrant labour was complex. Symbolically associated with the arrival at Tilbury Docks of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948, bringing former servicemen and people looking for work from the Caribbean this wave of ‘New Commonwealth’ migration tended to come from tight networks in particular islands of the Caribbean and sub regions of south Asia. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinaidad (and Guyana) were the source of many of the Caribbean migrants, although there were strands of migrations from the smaller islands as well. Gujerat and Punjab (in the old India), Mirpur (in the old west Pakistan) and Sylhet (in what is now Bangladesh) all provided sources of labour that was frequently recruited explicitly by the British. The National Health Service recruited directly from the Caribbean, Wolffs rubber company, staffed by colonial Raj military officers, recruited Sikh’s from the Punjab to work in their plant close to the emerging site of Heathrow airport.
So the nature of this wave of British multiculturalism always bore the imprint of old colonial pasts and new patterns of settlement. Concentrated massively in London, Birmingham and some of the declining manufacturing areas outside London, particular parts of specific cities became identified with particular communities in the post war decades. Southall was known for the Sikh faith and Punjabi cultures; Brixton and Notting Hill the iconic hearts of Jamaican and Trinidadian settlement, and Brick Lane was long famous for the ‘curry capital’ of Sylheti (Bangladeshi) settlement, long before Monica Ali’s eponymous book and the recently released film of the same name.
And the story of these settlements is one that is also characterised by long and intense struggles by those communities against various patterns of systematic discrimination, overt and covert patterns of racism in allocating resources (such as access to housing to rent and to buy, schools, social centres) and in recognising particular cultural needs (such as the right to worship together, cultural imperatives of diet and dress, the need to recognise the life cycle cultural particularities of naming, growing up, marrying and dying). So the extent to which these communities – themselves the products of struggle and contest – would become part of a large whole, British society in the late 20th century was frequently the object of policy and journalistic concern. The extent to which assimilation of the Windrush generation was either desirable or achievable, the extent to which spatial separation of one community from another marked patterns of undesirable ‘segregation’, the ways in which ‘separation’ represented a resource and a strength for the second and third generations of these communities or a form of exclusion and isolation, were all at various times from the 1960s to the early 1990s subject of extensive debate. And whilst by the late 20th century most popular surveys tended to recognise that most people welcomed the new diversity of Britain’s cities the history was no simple story of Whiggish progress; moments of violent attacks and racist murders and occasional outbreaks of civil unrest and rioting marking the uneven path of the last decades of the century.
So the multiculturalism of late 20th century Britain was very much a hybrid product. It tended to be discussed in ways that in part recognised cultural differences, and had built up a legislative history combating racial discrimination in particular areas, particularly around employment and the provision of public services. Legislation also placed particular responsibilities on British local government to promote ‘good race relations’ and combat discrimination and so the town hall became in turn both the site of some of the most fiercely contested moments of municipal policymaking (for example around education and policing in the 1980s) and the vehicle of some of the more prominent policy changes (for example in the ‘ethnic monitoring’ of who was and was not getting access to municipal welfare state services such as subsidised ‘social housing’)
From the late 1960s to the early 1990s major international migration into Britain declined massively. Papers were given regularly by academics stressing that the age of mass migration to Britain was over. Some of the debates around multiculturalism focused increasingly on the uneasy relationship between cultural diversity and economic restructuring in the UK as postindustrial parts of the country and sectors of the economy went into steady decline. Migration became principally made up by the growing flows of professional and managerial groups, small in scale but reflecting the increasing globalisation of the economy and growth of financial services as the single most significant driver of the UK economy.
But from the early 1990s onwards the new and stronger ‘long trend’ of economic growth has been identified with new streams of migrant labour, our second principal ‘moment’ of mass migration to the UK. Frequently from areas with no old colonial links to the UK this migration is again the product of labour scarcity in key areas of the economy. Again the boom in London’s economy from 1993 onwards becomes the largest single engine of these new forms of demand in catering, leisure and other service related trades but also new parts of the country experience significant inward migration for the first time in living memory as rural areas, growing new towns and places where refugee populations are ‘decanted’ host migrants, with numbers growing exponentially at rates that at times prompt local concerns.
This second major wave of migration was also identified with the freedom of movement in the old ‘Iron Curtain’ countries in the East of Europe and the expansion of the European Union, sometimes referred to by the shorthand of ‘A8’ migration (referring to the accession of 8 new countries into the union). It is important nevertheless, to understand that again the increasingly complex demographies of Britain relates to the economic drivers of globalised, liberalised labour markets in which flows of people, capital and culture are increasingly international in their nature.
And how the British multicultural model either does or does not work has again been the subject of sustained controversy. The year 2001 saw both the attacks on the twin towers in the USA and the ‘milltown’ riots in northern British cities, at times setting one community against another. And in 2005 the first suicide bombings in the UK on ‘7/7’ (the 7th July 2005) provoked a storm of consideration internationally about whether or not the British multicultural model was working. And again the very diversity of experiences across the country means that a focus is again cast on local governance, below the level of the nation, sometimes in ways that are progressive and aimed at developing new solutions and sometimes with the rise of populist xenophobic politics in growing support for the British National Party and other groups from the far right of the political spectrum.
In this context integration and cohesion are both terms that are becoming increasingly common. In social policy, in serious journalism and in academic analysis of societies in Britain and across the world the terms have gathered a power unrecognisable ten or even as little as five years ago. Why is this? Is it that the circumstances on the ground have changed so much that we need a new vocabulary to describe them? Or is that the powerful have chosen to hide some agendas and prefer others to be accepted?
2. Korea and Britain
The British trajectory is clearly significantly different from that in Korea. But once we understand that the flows of labour, culture and values are directly related to general economic trends then we might expect that the burgeoning experience of globalisation will begin to speak to the experiences of multiculture, cohesion and integration in both countries. Though in no way an expert I understand that there is a developing debate in Korea about the growing numbers of people migrating to the country, again linked to the labour demands of a successful globalised economy and the demographic transitions associated with this, particularly between town and country. The projections reported in the press of a population of 800, 000 ‘foreigners’ rising to about 1.5 million in next five years and a growing number of mixed marriages, particularly in rural areas again focuses attention on the diversity of the experiences in different parts of the country. One study has suggested that international marriages now make up 13 percent of all marriages in Korea and that more than 30 percent of international marriages are unions between rural men and foreign brides：
The term "mixed‐blood people" was changed to "people of international marriages" in future government documents.
Furthermore, the government is reviewing plans to give citizenship or residency status to those who marry Koreans and to their children. And school textbooks that describe Korea as a "nation unified by one bloodline" will be changed to one that has a "multiethnic and multicultural society."
Such changes have prompted North Korea`s Rodong Shinmun (the Workers Party`s paper) to fiercely criticize the South Korean government.
It said, "South Korea is denying its national race and its 5,000‐year history by professing to be a multiracial nation. Such moves will Americanize Korea, ruin its past history and weaken the power to combat dominative U.S. forces." http：//yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=7918
And clearly there is at least some discussion of the links between the emergent patterns in Korea and the processes of globalisation and diasporic sensibility that is central to the British experience. One Korean academic Kim Mun‐cho has even suggested that we are seeing the rise of a new Korean cosmopolitanism where
“In particular, the idea of hybrid associations seems most promising, in terms of fostering cultural cosmopolitanism because, in the process of cultural globalization, the key significance resides in the notion of hybridity. Jan Nederveen Pieterse defines cultural globalization as a creation of hybrid cultures arising out of the transnational movements of people and cultures. Cultural globalization is conceived as the creolization of diverse cultures, which entails not just contacts, networks or associations, but also confrontation, conflict or modification.” http：//therealsouthkorea.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/korea‐moving‐toward‐a‐multicultural‐society/
For some people the British model of race relations in the post war era was seen as particular to this country in both allowing a relatively high level of autonomy of different communities (including migrant and faith based communities) whilst simultaneously the state intervened in recognising (some) cultural rights (such as wearing the turban or the veil) and legislating against discrimination. This pluralism ‐ that might be taken to characterise much of policy intervention in the 1980s and 1990s ‐ was criticised from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. From the left the ghettoisation of individual cultures was an inevitable result of the British multicultural model and scholars such as Kenan Malik preferred to promote more universal identities that were shared by all. From the right multiculturalism was criticised from many different positions that shared what was seen as a distaste at the ‘privileges’ minorities were allegedly being offered by both cultural recognition and policy interventions to promote equality.
In the wake of the events of ‘7/7’, the bombings in London in July 2005, it was inevitable that many across the world – from both left and right – would try to suggest that their particular critique of British multiculturalism had been vindicated. French voices praised their republican model as an alternative until in the following summer and autumn the banlieus (or ‘suburban ghettos’) in France erupted in protests between migrant (often Islamic) migrant communities and the police. In Britain the multiple forms of race and faith hatred escalated. The rise of forms of Islamophobia, or prejudice and hatred against British Muslim communities, widely commented on since the bombing of New York’s twin towers on ‘9/11’ ( 11th September 2001) became even more pronounced. The mass demonstrations against the British presence in Iraq that crossed ethnicities, faiths and regions of Britain became conflated with a poisonous suspicion of the role of British Muslim communities in civic society, particularly in some of the tabloids and most egregiously in papers such as the Daily Mail.
So it was in this context that some of the suspicion about the use of the terms of integration and cohesion has been developed. Some people thought that this might be a new code for talking about Muslims in British society. Some people thought that the new language was a way of obscuring talk about the realities of racism, discrimination and inequality in order to promote alternative emphasis on assimilation, the responsibilities of communities to conform and the erosion of civil rights.
Consequently, it was perhaps not surprising that when Ruth Kelly announced the formation of the Commission on Cohesion and Integration in the summer of 2006 that many people reacted with a mixture of scepticism, cynicism and critique. Was this new Commission to be the vehicle that endorsed the new language at the expense of the old; that shifted attention away from the struggles of communities to be heard and towards their obligation to assimilate? And most of all, was this to be the Commission that described new policies for the powerful in the country to ‘manage’ the British Muslim presence in the country?
I was asked to become a Commissioner at this time. I was aware of the widespread suspicions, as were most of my colleague commissioners. And although I have some reservations about the way the work of the Commission has been represented, not least in those self same tabloid newspapers, I do believe that for those people who have actually read the final report of the Commission they will see that some of the suspicions have proved ill founded.
The Commission has stated quite clearly some very basic things. There is a sense that the situation on the ground in Britain is different in 2007 from the way it was thirty or forty years ago and we need to think carefully about what this means for all of us. There is a sense that the new migrations of the last ten years may prove as significant in the history of the country as the migrations from the Caribbean and South Asia in the 1950s and 60s. There is a sense in which the notion of ‘diversity’ has become much more complex than it ever has been in recent decades. On an estate in Tower Hamlets you might find all in a row on a single block an old white Jewish or Irish Catholic family living alongside a third generation Sylheti family, a Brazilian couple that have been here five years and five men working in the building trades from Lithuania. This should make us think carefully about how we all get along. This language of ‘getting along’ or ‘conviviality’ comes pretty close to something that we might understand as integration and cohesion.
That is why when we produced our final report as the Commission for Integration and Cohesion in June 2007 we made it absolutely clear that the notions of integration and cohesion related to all communities. We were quite explicit in making clear that there was a danger in both government and media of a particular focus on Muslim communities and a worry that caricatures were reflected in policy construction. We were determined to make it clear in our work that the new vocabulary needed to be linked to the new realities in the country rather than to the preconceptions and prejudices of the tabloids.
But the mass media were less sympathetic. It is flattering to be read and disconcerting to be misunderstood. But is it forgivable to be spun? Before the CIC report was released Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian (http：//society.guardian.co.uk/ communities/story/0,,2101020,00.html) had already characterised the commission as brain dead; failing to address the key concepts of segregation and multiculturalism that were for her the most fraught issues that faced today’s Britain.
For others, the key messages were either reassuringly xenophobic or predictably politically correct and overwhelmingly about a sense of Britishness putatively overwhelmed by migration. The London Standard highlighted migrants spitting, the Daily Telegraph furiously rejected the Commission’s suggestion that political parties standing for election in the UK should voluntarily abide by the terms of the Race Relations Amendment Act and should strive to become more representative of the diversity of the communities they served. Meanwhile, on the prime 8.10 morning slot on the Radio 4 Today programme the BBC decided that the commission had celebrated Belfast and found there a ‘community’ with ‘perfect social capital scores’.
In fact whilst we visited all regions in the UK, the ossified social relations of the new Ulster were hardly the exemplar that we chased; the brutal ‘interfaces’ that mark Belfast’s cartography of ‘peace lines’ a reminder of history stalled rather than sins forgiven, a living testimony to Amos Oz’s axiom that “A tension runs between peace and justice; peace requires compromises; justice detests them”.
As one of 14 commissioners I stand by the collective responsibility that informs such an enterprise. We fought in good faith for those things we thought correct. A consensus generated through the scrupulous chairing of Darra Singh produced a list that nobody would agree unanimously but all could live with. As with all of us, I could pick my favourite recommendations and those I was less keen on but that would not really be the point.
More importantly the report has a structure, an analysis, an argument and a narrative form (http：//www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/Our_final_report.aspx). It suggests why it might be opportune to talk about cohesion and integration, the principles on which we should base our deliberations and a substantive content that is determined by the imperative to translate each of these principles into actions.
3. On principles
The report argues that debate should flow from a set of four principles. The first principle of ‘shared futures’ valorises a sense of becoming that does not erase the imprint of history and memory over a sense of being. The second principle argues that we need to consider a framework of rights and responsibilities that recognises the incommensurabilities of the global, national and local senses of the citizen. The third principle argues for an ‘ethics of hospitality’ that acknowledges the moral place of the stranger in the rapidly changing landscapes of today’s Britain. And the fourth argues that these forms of recognition need to be geared with a sense of visible social justice that stems from principles of equality and institutional transparency.
4. On multiculturalism and segregation
As Bunting has suggested the current moment in the ‘race relations debate’ has tended to be viewed through the bifocal lenses of geographical separation and multiculturalism. These are important debates and the debate around multiculturalism in particular involves complex and contradictory philosophical and political takes on a particularly contested term.
It is less clear that these lenses have been particularly helpful or that the call and response public debate around the ‘death of multiculturalism’ has been analytically or politically insightful. It was precisely in order to think differently rather than in the terms of received wisdoms that the CIC report stresses that a serious debate about integration and cohesion cannot be a pretext for a focus on contemporary Islam and that it must address all parts of the country rather than the metonyms of multiculture that lists of inner city place names tend to constitute. The suggestion of the report is instead that contemporary British debates about both multiculturalism and segregation tend to ‘sleepwalk into simplification’. For what it is worth – and for reasons there is no space to develop here ‐ if offered a choice between the multiculturalism of Tariq Modood (Open Democracy http：//www.opendemocracy.net/ conflict‐terrorism/multiculturalism_2879.jsp) or the Chair of the new national Commission for Equality and Human Rights Trevor Phillips’ wholesale rejection of multiculturalism I would personally prefer to argue with both. In this sense the report prefers a narrative arc that takes definition (of integration and cohesion) through a set of ethical principles and translates each of these in turn into chapters that focus on practical social policy interventions.
Similarly, whilst it is possible to measure how far apart some communities are from others geographically this is not always particularly significant. Do we get concerned when the super rich from Russia congregate in one part of London and do not mix very much? Or are we only ‘bothered’ when talk of segregation focuses on some communities in the mill towns of the M62 in the north of England?
5. Local government, ‘solutions’ and policy prescriptions
5a. Biographical experience：Leading an inner London Council
So the logic of the language and the conceptualisation of cohesion and integration points to the significance of the local mediation of national problems. In a world where a clichéd axiom suggests that the nation state has become too big to address the major concerns of the everyday (neighbourhood issues of civility, crime, quality of life) but also too small to address major concerns of social policy (global warming, world poverty, both local governance and local government become more significant. By the former I mean the networks of state agencies, civil society institutions and community organisations that make up the constitution of everyday life at the level of the local. By the latter I refer to the institutions, varying from one country to another, between the UK and Korea, that make up the organisation of the state at sub‐national level.
In the British system of local government I was for twelve years (from 1994‐2006) a local politician and for five years the leader of one of London’s 32 boroughs, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets is constituted by the area of London commonly known as the ‘East End’, adjacent to the largest single concentration of wealth in Europe in the City Corporation and covering an area from the Tower of London in the west to the London 2012 Olympic site and the new Docklands in the east (including the second largest financial centre in Europe in the Isle of Dogs, with the global HQ of HSBC, the European HQ of Citibank and numerous other financial service players). The borough has a population of approximately 200, 000 and an annual revenue budget of approximately £1 billion pa with responsibilities for education, welfare and the provision of substantial social housing and the regulation of development, ‘regeneration’ and other regulatory services under its remit. The ‘east end’ demonstrates some of the extremes of contemporary city change. In the late 1990s commercial property boom over 40% of London’s office development took place in the borough, on the fringes of the City Corporation and on the Isle of Dogs. At one time the borough included both the highest scores for social deprivation and the highest median income post code in the UK. In other words the social polarisation between rich and poor is more marked here than across the nation in a country where such polarisation has been a characteristic of the last two decades. It is also an area historically renowned as the first place of settlement for migrants to London. From Protestant Huguenots fleeing the counter reformation in 17th century France, to the Jews and the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the seamen from across the Docks to the Bangladeshis in the post war decades and the A8 migrants and Brazilians in the last few years, wave after wave of migration has become almost normalised in the area.
Some aspects of these changes can be read as tensions – the transience of migrants too often meaning that ‘getting on’ equates with ‘getting away’, the historical clashes throughout the last hundred years that have seen significant confrontations between communities at times. In the time that I have been politically engaged since the 1980s the area has been bombed eight times; four times by the Irish Republican Army (the IRA), once by an extreme right ‘nail bomber’ rejecting British multiculturalism and twice by the suicide bombers of 2005 (Aldgate East tube was the scene of one of the 7/7 bombs and their failed emulators two weeks fauiled to detonate a suicide bomb on Hackney Road two weeks later).
But there is also a paradox here. If the place has seen the most extreme forms of intolerance it has also witnessed the most intense and productive moments of inter cultural dialogue. A portrait of continuous conflict would be as misleading as a rosy image of cosmopolitan harmony. In reality the best and the worst sit alongside one another. Again at the local level it was in the east end that communities from across East London came together to confront the British fascist movement in the 1930s in Cable Street, to campaign successfully against their far right descendants, the British National Party in the 1980s and 1990s and to unite different faith communities in the wake of the London bombings of 2005.
There also more material signs of hope. In the period from 1994‐2006 the borough was seen to progress from being polarised, divided and bankrupt to one that was objectively delivering the best welfare services of any social services department in the country, the most rapidly improving schools in the country and a strong sense of pride in the local community. The borough was awarded the ‘Beacon Council’ award for community cohesion in 2005, singled out as the best in the country for partnership workings of local government and local governance.
I would not want to be complacent. We know what hubris prefigures. But there are some lessons in the Tower Hamlets experience. They are principally about the manner in which governance structures of partnership might supplant the occasional arrogance or ossification of structures of local government. A recognition that the boundary between state and civil society is a permeable one informs a set of policies that are about generating a debate on the future direction of the borough (the ‘place shaping’ agenda) and the shared priorities of peoples from very different backgrounds in ensuring that their children are offered a decent schooling, that the streets are safe and clean and that we recognise the dynamics of economic transformation and mediate their effects. If the lessons could be summed up succinctly it would involve the shift of focus to policy interventions that recognise the material, cultural and ethical benefits of diversity but also concentrate on building from this diversity a future that is shared. These were themes that were very much echoed in the working of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion when we were dealing with similar issues across the United Kingdom.
5b The Commission’s framework for policy recommendations
The Commission’s framework for policy recommendations emerges directly from the structuring of our final report and its roots in a set of principles identified in our work These relate to each in turn of the five following areas that I shall discuss in more detail in my talk：
1. Developing shared futures
2. Strengthening rights and responsibilities
3. Building mutual respect and civility
4. Making social justice visible
5. Acting in the four public spheres
Developing Shared Futures
• A focus on where we are going not on where we have come from
• Shared national vision
• Strong local leadership
• A public debate about the nature of change
• Practically
– Mapping communities and dynamics of change
– Reflecting the community in services, representatives nd workforce
Strengthening rights and responsibilities
• National citizenship / local citizenship
• New migrants and their impacts
Building mutual respect and civility
• ASB
• Working with women
• An increased focus on young people
• The importance of faith communtiies
– BUT
– Whose voices are legitimate at neighbourhood level?
But：Local and national frameworks of citizenship and belonging
And the ethics of scale – neighbourhood, local authority, regional and national interest
Making social justice visible
• Targeted action to address inequalities
• Communications and working with the media
• Myth busting
• BUT
– Contested processes and contested outcomes
– Universal and specific provision
– The importance of transparency
Acting in the four public spheres
• “A light national touch, locally driven”
• Education (including faith schools)
• Public space and residential areas
• Sports, culture and leisure
• The workplace
6. On Britishness and empire
Whilst the work of the Commission strongly emphasised the importance of local institutions, loc al government and local governance it was a published at a time when national concerns about cohesion and integration were translated into wider debates about British identity in the face of globalisation, cultural diversity, new migrations and the devolution of powers to the new assemblies in Wales and Scotland.
The report does not argue that the debate around Britishness is illegitimate. It does suggest that the new configurations of transnationalism, glocalism and super diversity might make us think carefully about how we address the term’s power. Displacing a putatively European ethnic nationalism (bad) with an allegedly civic American nationalism (good) will not work and may not be possible for the economy that has so completely embraced globalisation. The Humpty Dumpty of the 19th century nation state cannot be put together again any more than its empire. However, a sense of Britishness that begins to share a reckoning with the past and an Orwellian notion of patriotic national becoming might be something slightly different.
A sense of the national that acknowledges that levels of identification are stronger at the level of locality than at the level of the nation and that networks, movements and cultures that cross borders create sentimental imaginaries at plural spatial scales does no more than reflect realities already on the ground. The forms of new conviviality that cross conventional racial boundaries that characterise some parts of today’s city occupies the same spaces as old and reproducing articulations of bigotry and racism. Contemporary calls for new forms of transnational co‐operation and a supra‐national conversation about poverty or climate change are hardly radical but they do nuance appeals to Britishness.
Consequently, our sense of autonomy and freedom needs to think carefully about how we consider the fabrication of the individual, the cultural and the social, within and beyond the boundaries of the national. In this sense 21st century sovereignty is an essentially transactional category that sits in a babushka doll nest of spatial scales of material and symbolic flows and institutional deliberations. The nation state continues to organise much of social and economic life but not in the same ways as 100 years ago. In this context the report asks about the appropriate invented traditions that can speak to this politics of jumping scale – that can invoke the global, national and local simultaneously.
This is not evangelising for a naive cosmopolitanism or a sub national parochialism, it merely recognises the social consequences of globalisation. There is a geography to this. It is not new to suggest that whilst the economic benefits of migration accrue nationally, the social costs are mediated locally (and impact disproportionately in some places). We might want to think slightly more carefully about both the historical and geographical narratives that make places visible in Britain’s changing social and economic landscape. When Walter Benjamin suggested that ‘the future of the past is not safe in their hands’ he drew attention to the ways in which received wisdoms (of nationhood, of race, of power) should be regarded suspiciously; historiography becoming a contest of memory and remembering. He might have added that we should be similarly cautious about the manner in which cartography conceals as much as it reveals, we are made to ‘know our place’ through what lies beyond us, the boundaries and borderlines of ‘the elsewhere of place’. The spatial boundaries of today’s languages of rights structure the calculus of citizenship that needs to speak to the new Rachmans that are wholesaling old right to buy properties in inner London and to the white working class in Dagenham that face labour market competition from A8 migration as construction related wage rates are forced down and housing competition for each family is intensified by new gentrifiers and old eastwards migration of the Windrush generation.
This does mean that the forms of welfare state rationing that scale the local, national and global demand a debate about the forms of recognition and the forms of redistribution that might set the parameters of social policy intervention in housing, in health and in education. It also means that we might just need to consider the figuration of the local slightly more imaginatively. In narrating the iconographies of place in the stories of Barking fascists, mill town riots, rural migrant labour, the New East End, British Islam and cosmopolitan London we might just need to recognise some historical ghosts alongside the ‘elsewhere’ of the global political.
For practitioners and politicians operating in local government it also means that we need to think carefully about the things we can influence, those we cannot and the difference between the two. The importance of the issues is beyond doubt. Perhaps our ability to address them might be considered with the ironic optimism of Samuel Beckett’s injunction to ‘fail again, fail better’.
Michael Keith is a Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the author most recently of ‘After the cosmopolitan? Multicultural cities and the future of racism’. He was formerly a politician in East London and a Commissioner on the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion.
Interaction at neighbourhood level
：Strategic approaches can bring success
(This document includes the written agenda presentations from the 'International Multi-Cultural Seminar' in Daegu and Gwangju co-hosted by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, British Embassy in Korea, Yeungnam University, and Chonnam National University on November 8 - 9, 2007.
The International Multi-Cultural Seminar was held to raise awareness of migrants' rights and further their social integration in Korean society, where the number of migrants now exceeds one million. Michael Keith and Leonie McCarthy (Commissioners, British Commission on Integration and Cohesion), and Ji-Hun Lee (Human Rights Solidarity for Women and Migrants) made agenda presentations. Among the participants in the panel discussion were human rights experts from Gyeongsang and Jeolla Province. This document contains only the greetings by the hosting organizations and written agenda presentations by those who made presentations on the main topic.)
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