This paper is an exploratory study on the encounters of Filipino asylum-seekers in South Korea – understanding their experiences during application as refugees, their motivations, and the ways through which they negotiate their privileges as asylum-...
This paper is an exploratory study on the encounters of Filipino asylum-seekers in South Korea – understanding their experiences during application as refugees, their motivations, and the ways through which they negotiate their privileges as asylum-seekers in the country. Largely anchored on Bryan Turner’s Denizenship Theory, this paper contends that Filipino asylum-seekers have been compelled to become ‘voluntary denizens’ in South Korea – a country which is unable to provide them secured living arrangements but, nevertheless, deemed to be able to attend to the responsibilities they carried with them from the Philippines. At once, this situation has turned them into denizens in the South Korea while remaining to be citizens in their home countries.
Following through Garret Hardin’s concept of the Lifeboat Ethics, South Korea and the Philippines could be viewed as two separate big boats which the Filipino asylum-seekers, as lifeboat passengers, alternate between. Due to the limited capacity of the Korean boat, Filipino asylum-seekers had to become tolerant and accepting of the partial privileges they receive as they sojourn along the legal margins of the accepting country which, most probably, will remain eternally a foreign land to them.