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Without a visa, children of illegal immigrants have few options
Ilhim Bayar, 16, will be admitted to his third year at Kwangjang Middle School in Seoul next month. In Mongolia, he would have been in his second year in high school, but here, he is still a middle schooler, and with great difficulty. Earlier this year, Ilhim repeatedly said to his father, "I want to go to a high school instead!" But Ilhim knows better than anyone else that his lack of a visa prohibits him from attending high school. For the first two years he was in Seoul, after coming with his father in 2003, he was told to stay in his room all the time. They were illegal immigrants, his father a migrant laborer who went out to look for work daily. During those long stretches, Ilhim would watch Korean television programs or sleep all day long, alone. He didn’t have any knowledge of the Korean language.Last year, Ilhim was able to attend a Mongolian school in Korea. He was happy because he could start studies again and associate with peers his age. But suddenly, in a crackdown on illegal immigrants in June, his father was caught and deported to Mongolia. Since then, Ilhim has lived alone at a school dormitory. Kwangjang Middle School, adjacent to the Mongolian school, gives a 50,000 won (US$52) monthly scholarship to students from Mongolia. The school also provides free lunch for them. It has maintained a friendly relationship with the neighboring Mongolian school and its students and teachers visited Ulan Bator to work on environmental programs during summer vacation. O Geum-suk, principal of the middle school, said, "We have taken in graduates from the Mongolian school, since there is no official [national] approval for such students, and we produced three Mongolian graduates this year. As a neighboring school, we are making every possible effort to help the Mongolian school," she added. But those Mongolian graduates either put off or gave up on going on to a high school this year. There are no schools which want to accept them, as they have no official visa. Out of eight graduates from the Mongolian school last year, Ilhim alone will go on to Kwangjang Middle School. Nevertheless, Ilhim is not so happy because he will become a third grader, so this will be his last year there, with his future uncertain. "I want to attend a high school and enter a university here in Korea. After studying law, I will be someone who makes useful laws. But I can’t do so without a visa," Ilhim said. For him, it still is a distant dream even to be a high school student.
