In case you haven’t read it yet, check out Sean Hayes’ trashing of an Immigration Bureau official’s earlier op-ed in the Korea Times.
BTW, just to put this on public record, after my own fisking of said column (which I sent to the writer), my office received a threatening phone call from someone claiming to be a “Ministry of Justice, Immigration Bureau” official. According to the person who took the call, said caller said I was “anti-Korean” and “instigating foreigners,” and (the caller) warned me to be careful since I was on a visa. The supposed official did NOT leave a name or number, so it’s very possible it was just a prank call by an angry netizen. I’d prefer to think so, anyway. But on the off-chance that something untoward were to happen to yours truly, I figure prudence requires me to make a note of the incident here.
23 Comments
Well… this sounds not dissimilar to the experience of at least one Dave’s ESL Cafe poster, who reported having been threatened by Mr. Lee in an e-mail exchange.
http://forums.eslcafe.com/kore.....67#1475067
Good to make note of it.
Still around, Oranckay. I miss your blogging.
That’s almost a compliment!
It’s weird, I went by Oranckay’s blog for the first time in a looong time just yesterday.
I loved the article. Can we expect anything less from Korean nationals?
In Korea, it seems to be the case of a majority of bad apples making a minority of good apples look bad.
It was most likely a prank since Korean immigration would not be as foolish unprofessional to make a mistake that that would expose them to legal persecution and bad PR.
Like I said, I hope that was the case.
If it WAS someone from Immigration, though (and I’m not saying it was), the irony would be that I actually SUPPORT the new visa regulations. I just don’t think they’ll be effective in their stated goal (the problem is on the employment end, me thinks, rather than the immigration end), and I question the quality of the public “discussion” that led to the Bureau of Immigration feeling compelled to implement changes in the first place. I also had a problem with the attitude displayed by the Bureau employee who wrote the KT piece — I dare say that if a civil servant were to have adopted a similar attitude in an op-ed contributed to the vernacular press, readers would have been outraged.
Hey sorry, that was me. I was cranky because somebody criticized my tie. It’s ok, you can stay.
What is “legal persecution”?
Apparently, to some people, the new E-2 regulations.
I have no problem with the new visa rules as long as it applies to all foreign nationals seeking employment here, not just English teachers.
“Do you have or have you ever had AIDS?”
This is one of the things they ask!
Oh, by-the-way, I worked with a couple of gyopo drugies here on F4 visas who always bragged about getting stoned.
Good one. But I’m serious — I’d like to know what is meant by “legal persecution” to which “New York lawyer” Lee Dong-wook has supposedly exposed the Korean Immigration Bureau by his act of publishing his stupid screed in the Korea Times? Criminal prosecution? A civil claim?
What’s the claim here? There is so much muttonheaded thinking about legal matters in the English-teacher community it’s ridiculous.
That’s strange. I’ve had an ongoing email conversation with him (Mr. Lee) and have found him to be fairly open and professional. From a policy perspective (I studied policy in grad school), I think the visa regulations are not very likely to achieve kimmi’s goals, and was very careful to stay on-point in my emails to him. In the last email he hinted that there may be “good news” in early January. Anyone else get that response from him?
Understatement of the year.
That’s good to hear. And once again for the record, I never said it was him. It could very well have been a prank caller.
I would assume that the ‘legal persecution’ being threatened would be based upon the ‘threatening phone calls’ rather than Mr. Lee’s KT ‘article’. I suppose that maybe in South Korea there’s some sort of rule against making phone calls?
Ah, quitcher huffin’. Elgin’s harmless. I get mildly irked too when I hear people talk about taking a write-off as if it were a way of artificially making profits, instead of a way of legitimately recognizing losses; or being a stockholder as choice to side with the neocons, rather than taking a genuine risk in order to save enough money for retirement. Etc. etc. Everyone with a degree has a vocabulary they dislike to see misused. It’s going to happen anyway, regardless of the self-appointed language protectors’ huffin’.
Simple, legal persecution is persecution that is not illegal.
Persecution? Darn it, I meant prostitution. :o)
Korea is a good place to be Korean. A country where foreigners are constantly put in their place, for whatever reason, reasonably and unreasonably.
Would it be out of line for you to call the immigration office and say that you received what you think to be a prank call from someone claiming to be from them? Perhaps they could make some post on their web page to discourage people from doing that, and perhaps accept information from others who get the prank in an attempt to catch the guy who’s doing it.
Or perhaps if it was really them they’d fess up to it on the phone.