South Korea is today synonymous with cutting-edge technology and exports, both of continents and of content. A story of resurrection and success that, however, is threatened by demographic decline. Its population peaked three years ago and has begun to decline, accelerated by the lowest fertility rate on the planet: 0.7 children per woman.
“Accepting more immigrants,” said its Minister of Justice, Han Dong Hoon, yesterday, “is no longer an option, but a necessity, because without them the country could be doomed to extinction.” Han thus defended, before his coreligionists from the People’s Power Party, the creation of a state immigration agency, which would be under his ministry.
This claims to have been inspired by the model of Germany and Japan. It would not just be about accepting more immigrants, but doing so judiciously, while tightening measures against illegal immigration.
The minister also considers that measures to support birth rates are even more essential than immigration policies. However, billions of euros have been invested in this endeavor in two decades, without results.
Now, in North Korea, where the fertility rate is 1.8 children per woman, dictator Kim Jong Un is far from satisfied. This week she shed tears as he implored North Korean women to have more offspring.
It should be said that South Korea’s population is still double that of North Korea, but the difference is tending to reduce. Some demographers warn that, if this continues, in just over forty years, half of South Korea’s population would be retirees.
Twenty years ago, South Korea opened the door to immigrants from Southeast Asia – before, in the 1990s, Koreans arrived from China and the former USSR – Pakistan and Sri Lanka for jobs that were said to be “difficult, dangerous or dirty.”
Seoul is now forced to open the range of jobs in various industries, as well as the visas that give them access, to more preselected countries, such as Nepal, India or Lithuania. Proficiency in Korean will count.
Although in some rural areas mail-order brides, especially from Southeast Asia, have been giving birth to one in seven babies for years.
So what was once one of the most homogeneous states in the world is no longer so. But if South Korea illuminates the future with its smartphones, its cars, its K-Pop and its cosmetics, it also does so with words like goshiwon, for apartments of five to ten square meters. Because in Greater Seoul, where half of South Koreans live, the average house price is equivalent to 43 years of salary.
South Korea is also the OECD country with the largest wage gap between men and women. As if that were not enough, the current prime minister, the right-wing Yoon Suk Yeol, elected last year by a very narrow margin, mobilized the anti-feminist vote of the boys in his favor.
These are part of the so-called generation “of the three resignations.” Namely, to love, to get married and to have children. Or, “of the five renunciations” – to a job and a house, in addition – or even “of the seven renunciations”, also to a relationship or a better life. Finally, there remains the total renunciation.
Not in vain, South Korea registers the highest suicide rate in the world, especially among students and – even worse – among the elderly.
A municipal study of the South Korean capital, released yesterday, confirms this: “Almost half of the young population in Seoul lives in poverty.” Understood as living with less than half the resources of the average.
In fact, 41% of Koreans between 18 and 35 years old live with their parents and their interest in getting married and having children is at a minimum. Expensive private education and intermittent jobs do not make it viable.
As the specialist, Juliette Morillot, says, “Today’s Korea hides, behind an insolent economic success, a cruel and unknown world: that of the deep hopelessness of its youth, trapped in a hierarchical and ultra-competitive society.”
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the multinational Itochu has tripled the birth rate of its workers in nine years with a simple recipe. Prohibiting overtime and establishing daycare centers.
