Foreigner Crime Up in Korea

The Korean government is reporting that foreigner crime has risen sharply over the past three years:

The number of criminal offenses committed by foreigners has surged amid an influx of more migrant workers into the country.

The Ministry of Justice said in a report Wednesday that the number of crimes by foreign residents rose from 8,046 in 2002 and 9,338 in 2003 to 12,821 last year.

Of course most of the offenses are traffic related. Here is a new twist though in this article:

Meanwhile, a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said about 2,500 Korean-born offenders were jailed in five major immigrant-crowded areas in the U.S. _ New York City, Los Angeles, Orange County in California, Harris County in Texas and Maricopa County in Arizona _ in the 2003 fiscal year.

The figure ranked fifth in the list of inmates by country of origin for foreign-born offenders.

Mexicans led the list with 108,000, followed by 10,500 offenders from El Salvador, 5,500 from Guatemala and 3,000 from Honduras.

I did not know that Korea was that high on the list of incarcerated foreign nationals. This is what one human rights activist had to say about this:

“We should not forget Koreans are foreigners in other parts of the world, and need as much legal protection as they can get,’’ said Kim Jung-ah, an activist of human rights group Sarangbang.

Korea needs to remember that foreigners that live in their country deserve as much legal protection as they can get as well.