Seoul: new visa for foreign caregivers in the face of the demographic crisis

A pilot project supported by the Ministry of Labor plans to extend the E-9 permit for foreign domestic workers. The measure is part of the initiatives that South Korea is launching to encourage couples to have more children and mitigate the decline in birth rates. There is concern about the risk of exploitation.

Seoul () – The Seoul city council and the South Korean Ministry of Labor have proposed a pilot project to extend the E-9 visa to foreign domestic workers. The objective of the initiative is to make it easier for families to hire new workers -particularly personnel from Southeast Asian countries- and reduce the cost of care tasks. But Seoul also hopes that by attracting younger, cheaper workers, it will reduce the number of South Koreans forced to quit their jobs to take care of their families, which would have a positive impact on the country’s demographic crisis.

During the project, which could start as early as next fall, foreign domestic workers will receive a minimum wage of about $7 an hour, much lower than Korean workers. The issue has raised various questions: on the one hand, Korean caregivers fear losing their jobs; on the other, foreign workers are at risk of abuse. Indeed, female workers in Southeast Asia are generally younger, but they are also less educated and more vulnerable. According to a study by Amnesty International, foreign staff in South Korea – the majority of whom are women – face unfavorable conditions related to discrimination, including wages, communication difficulties and the lack of an adequate protection system.

Despite the doubts, the initiative received the approval of the mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, who had already proposed such a solution last year, taking inspiration from projects that were launched in Hong Kong and Singapore. The extension of the E-9 visa is added to a series of measures adopted to tackle the decline in the birth rate. Among them, for example, is the Happy Parents Project, which was recently announced and which will implement support measures for families with two or more children. Since 2017, the cost associated with the housing market -especially in Seoul- began to become unsustainable, and in addition to the plummeting birth rate, the capital also faces depopulation, as its residents went from 10.97 million in 1992 to 9.49 million in 2022.

Although Korea’s population has been declining since 2021, the country’s fertility rate began to decline in the 1960s. According to the latest figures released by Statistics Korea, the fertility rate dropped to 0.78 in 2022, with a 4.4% reduction in births from the previous year. This is the lowest value of all the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Since 2005, combating the birth decline has become a political priority for successive South Korean governments, and since 2016 more than two billion dollars have been spent on policies that until now have not produced the desired results.

The reasons behind the abrupt drop in birth rates are many, but they are mainly related to a work culture that does not allow for a proper balance between work and personal life. As a consequence, women’s desire to marry and start a family at the sacrifice of their professional ambitions decreased. Added to this is the increase in real estate market prices and child support. According to a study by the YuWa Population Research Institute, a Beijing-based think-tank, South Korea would be the most expensive country in the world to raise a child up to the age of eighteen because of the increase in the cost of education in a country known because of its extreme competitiveness.

The demographic crisis could become the biggest challenge for the Yoon Suk-yeol government: the president recently ordered a reassessment of current birth policies to determine the reasons for their failure. However, such a reassessment could expose the multifaceted nature of the birth collapse and lead to new solutions that are less one-dimensional and better suited to a nation that is reassessing its relationship to family planning in many ways.