A Study On The Social Integration Of North Korea Defectors In South Korean Society

The current influx of refugees into Europe has caused many social problems for European countries and their people,and it has even incurred,in some highly democratically developed countries,a number of social problems like vicious crime committed by refugees,which has made even the most developed countries feel the difficulty to resolve this problem.South Korea is also faced with social problems caused by immigrants.A large number of foreign workers,foreign wives,as well as foreign citizens coming from less developed regions and looking quite different from Korean people,have not adapted themselves to living in South Korea.Even North Korean defectors,who share the same culture and ethnicity with South Korean people,suffer from discrimination of the latter.A different social system has made it hard for those North Korean defectors to adapt to South Korean society.North Korean Defectors working and learning in South Korea face a lot of adaptation problems and are subject to discrimination of South Korean people.Their miserable suffering raises a question:why South Korean people discriminate against those defectors of the same race who have escaped and made it to the South.This paper,therefore,will focus on this minority group-North Korean defectors.Though most South Korean people think North Korean defectors are their relatives,not all hold a friendly attitude toward them.This dissertation tries to observe South Korean people's attitude toward North Korean defectors from social integration theory and the situation of North Korean defectors and endeavors to give a detailed and theoretical analysis by studying the cases of some of the defectors' success in integrating into South Korean society as well as the cases of the relatively vulnerable defectors.This paper argues that South Korea should not consider North Korean defectors as "half foreigners fleeing from poverty and enduring hunger" but perceive their integration into South Korea as a first step of the future course of unification.