A joint wedding ceremony of multicultural couples takes place in Seoul on October, 2017. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, May 3 (Korea Bizwire) — A majority of female immigrants visiting divorce clinics are almost fully deprived of any property, data released by a provider of free legal consultation services showed Monday.
The Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations reported that 95.6 percent of female foreigners and 70.1 percent of Korean men who had sought legal aid at the center either had no property in their possession or could not provide any relevant information.
Sorted by type of work, 89 percent of foreign wives and 56.7 percent of Korean husbands were either homemakers, jobless, or worked physical labor, without any source of stable income.
Almost half of all reasons for divorce, consulted by foreign wives, dealt with assault on the part of their husband (44.7 percent) or their assault on their husbands (25.4 percent).
Another 37.8 percent of divorce consultations among multicultural families dealt with remarried couples, which was higher than the 15.6 percent among non-multicultural families.
More than one-third of multicultural families in which the wife was a foreigner were living separately, while 40.9 percent (154 people) had been living separately for longer than 10 years.
Among those who had been married for less than two years, 22.4 percent were already living separately, in which the foreign wife was struggling to acquire Korean nationality.
In order to apply for Korean citizenship, the foreigner must stay married to his/her Korean spouse and hold a home address in the country for more than two years. The Korean spouse must cooperate with the foreign spouse’s visa extension.
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
