In August 2022, there was a news out of Thailand that many Thai tourists had collectively disappeared on the South Korean island of Jeju.
A few days ago, more than 600 Thai "tourists" arrived on the South Korean island of Jeju, and as a result, more than 400 people were repatriated by the South Korean side at once. A tour group of 200 people, more than 50 people missing, it looks quite scary.
However, this matter is actually not so mysterious.
Those thai tourists who disappeared did not collectively cross the other world in Jeju Island, but slipped away from the group and ran to work.
The old man first noticed that "many Thais went to Work in South Korea", or when the epidemic first began.
At that time, the first wave of the epidemic broke out in South Korea, Italy, Brazil, and South Africa, and a large number of Thais fled from South Korea and flocked to Thailand, scaring Thailand out of its soul.
At that time, we specifically studied why there are so many Thai workers in South Korea.
It is also simple to say, come to money quickly, and it is easy to go.
In the 1980s, South Korea, which rose to prominence in the "Miracle of the Han River," began to face the problem of rising labor prices.
A large number of Korean enterprises have transferred production lines to Vietnam and other countries, which has caused a serious "American disease", hollowing out the industry in South Korea, making domestic employment difficulties, and fierce social involvement.
However, despite the domestic roll, South Korea, as a developed country with a per capita output value of more than 3W US dollars, its salary package is still much better than that of China and Southeast Asia.
As a result, a large number of laborers from neighboring countries poured into South Korea.
The most typical of these are Korean laborers from China and laborers from Southeast Asia.
There is a very contradictory place in South Korea's treatment of overseas workers: there is a demand and a path, but the institutional threshold is particularly high.
As early as 1981, South Korea began to implement a visa-free policy for Thailand, and Thais could stay in South Korea visa-free for 90 days. Therefore, it is relatively easy for Thais to enter South Korea to work.
However, at the same time, the "formal threshold" for overseas workers in South Korea is relatively high, and the "employment permit system" and the "Foreign Labor Employment Law" implemented in 2003 are extremely strict and cumbersome, and they must pass the basic Korean language examination, conduct physical examinations, declare to the Korean Ministry of Human Resources, and negotiate with the employing unit through the Korean Ministry of Human Resources.
If you can get this process through and become a legitimate "Korean overseas worker", then you can indeed be guaranteed.
But for the working people of Southeast Asia, it's too hard for you...
The extremely high employment threshold and the excessive intervention of the national government in the recruitment of enterprises not only make Thai workers sigh, but also make small and medium-sized Korean enterprises feel troublesome.
According to your one-sided glance, it is not as pleasant as black work.
It just so happened that South Korea was exempt from thailand visas, so thousands of Thai laborers poured into South Korea, and the later, the greater the proportion of black workers.
By 2019, according to the South Korean government itself, 40% of the 380,000 illegal workers in South Korea are Thai, accounting for 15% of the total foreign population in South Korea!
Since they are illegal workers, they naturally need to spend money to smuggle.
Thanks to South Korea's relaxed entry restrictions on Thailand, Thai black workers do not need to die like Syrian refugees and cross the sea to land, but can enter through legal channels.
Find a black intermediary, pay a few tens of thousands of baht (according to the different remuneration of migrant workers, the smuggling price is between 10,000 and 50,000 yuan), forge the identity history travel visa, enter South Korea from formal channels, and then directly "black" in South Korea.
Later, in order to curb this trend, the South Korean government introduced an "electronic entry permit" system for countries such as Thailand to set up thresholds for the entry of illegal workers.
Thai laborers turned to Jeju Island, the only tourist destination in South Korea that can enter Without electronic permission, and entered Jeju Island in groups in the form of chartered tourist groups, and then transferred from Jeju Island to South Korea.
South Korea apparently discovered this routine and intercepted and repatriated Thais who had disguised themselves as tourists after failing to apply for electronic entry permits. Some Thais are quick-sighted and decisively break out of the group before the Korean side starts.
After Thai tourists were "large-scale shut out" by the South Korean island of Jeju in 2022, they staged a "mass disappearance" – the essence behind this cat-and-mouse game between the South Korean government and Thai laborers.
After smuggling into South Korea with all the hard work, what did you do?
Thai laborers in Korea are found in all walks of life, but are particularly prominent in three areas:
Agriculture, construction, healthcare.
To put it bluntly, it is to help Koreans pick cabbage in the field, carry bricks and beams for the Korean construction and shipbuilding industries, and provide great health care for Koreans (yes, that kind of big health care).
Agriculture and manufacturing are obviously not easy jobs, but the most dangerous, most tiring, high-intensity, and low-security jobs. In fact, in addition to Southeast Asian labor, it is almost impossible for local Koreans to engage in this kind of work, the shortage of people is just needed, and there are not enough people who can only recruit illegal workers, which makes the entire industry chaotic and the working environment is getting worse and worse.
The most concerned is Still South Korea's "Thai Health Care".
Thai women who enter Korea, no matter how they came in, in the end many people will enter the "Thai massage parlor", and the lucky one will really massage people... Unfortunately, it is basically a foot into the fire pit.
For more than a decade, various "Thai massage parlors" have blossomed all over Korea, and many of them are open 24 hours a day. People who come to massage in the middle of the night naturally do not come to massage therapy, but to find flowers and ask for willows.
Over time, the concept of "going to Work in South Korea = Falling into the Dust" has become so popular in Thailand and South Korea that the local people of Thailand are full of contempt when they mention women who go to South Korea to work.
In 2020, when "laborers who went to South Korea returned to Thailand in a big way", many Thai laborers who made money from South Korea did not carry out strict self-isolation, but turned around and ran to eat barbecue and bungee bars, which made the Thai people very angry, and the Internet scolded these Thai compatriots who picked cabbage during the day and sold skin and meat at night for "sending poison for thousands of miles".
Thais who go to Work in South Korea sneer at each other on the Internet - "The old woman makes hard money in South Korea, and earns back your wages for seven or eight years a year, you envy it..."
The Thais ran to South Korea to work as black workers, but South Korea would not let them, so the two sides began a cat-and-mouse game of "encirclement and suppression" and "counter-encirclement and suppression".
The matter itself is actually not complicated.
What's really complicated is how we should look at this, and... Think about what to do in the future when it is our turn.
The problem of illegal labor is actually a global one, and to a large extent it is a "presence is reasonable" thing.
In developed countries, when there is money, wages are higher, so business owners will move factories overseas with lower labor costs, and industries that cannot be relocated and must be carried out locally can only import labor from overseas.
However, the introduction of foreign workers has also affected local employment, so the governments of rich countries can only set various thresholds for foreign workers under the pressure of their own voters, and prevent too many people from entering.
However, if we look beyond the position of specific countries and stand in God's point of view, the existence of transnational labor is actually the unequal level of economic development between countries, resulting in the natural flow of population, which is the inevitable result of the equilibrium of human living standards under globalization.
The human demands and capital logic of "people go to high places and money flows to low places" are difficult to effectively hinder through the strengthening of the national government's discipline and through the "building of walls" in the system.
Because this kind of mobility is the intrinsic demand of the labor-importing countries, the essential needs of the people in the labor-exporting countries, and the general trend of human resource distribution towards equality.
Unless you lock down the country completely, it is impossible to completely ban the influx of illegal workers, and in many countries, the state regimes controlled by capital even periodically and deliberately open up illegal labor — even the influx of illegal immigrants , creating a transformation of the industrial status quo and even the demographic structure of the entire country.
There are some things that you can't stop, and if you have to stop them, you can only stop a knife and break the water.
If you really stop it, it is the modern version of the Book of Expulsion, and the process of stagnation and decay of the country will begin from here.
Chinese readers, when reading the news of "Thai coolies smuggling into South Korea", went from not knowing why to suddenly realizing, "enlightenment" is a sneer, saying that some Thais kneel and lick smecta clouds.
In fact, as a Chinese living in Thailand, the old man really thinks that this matter is not funny.
For Thailand, China, and South Korea, there is a lot to think about.
For Thailand, I think the biggest enlightenment is to learn to think from the perspective of the "Jeju Island Disappearance Case" to think about labor cooperation between Thailand itself and its neighbors in Southeast Asia.
As Thais stand on their toes to discriminate and expel illegal workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, they should wonder if they would like their own citizens to be treated in the same way by South Korea.
And whether this kind of rough and simple prevention can have the desired effect.
For South Korea, we should reflect on what other ways than to play hide-and-seek with illegal immigrants from Southeast Asia.
Should we revise our own strict standards for "legal registration of foreign workers" so that families can arrive legally, work legally, and find a win-win balance between the needs of the national industry and the personal rights and interests of foreign workers.
As for China?
China should see its own "past and present lives" in it.
Once, and not so long ago, "now", in fact, China is also a country that exports illegal labor to South Korea in large quantities. Looking up on the Internet, you can also find many major Chinese smuggling cases similar to the "Jeju Island Disappearance Case" in the past two years.
Therefore, the former China is nothing more than thailand now.
With the development of China's economy, in recent years, there have gradually been no more large-scale foreign smuggling incidents.
However, in the future, with the improvement of China's own economic development level and the advent of China's own population aging crisis - the problem in the future will no longer be Chinese smuggling out of the country, but foreigners smuggling to China.
In some places, such as Guangzhou and Yiwu, this trend has begun.
If in the future, Indonesians collectively disappear from Hainan Island, Vietnamese singers pour into the Internet celebrity circle in the two Guangdong regions, and Arabs in Gulf countries establish a huge "Middle East City" in Yiwu...
Is it exclusion, crackdown, clean-up, or openness, acceptance, or even active introduction?
China, it's best to think about what to do before that day comes.
This world will not always be a world isolated from each other, and the artificial boundaries will not disappear, but the people who will gradually be migrated, the things that fly, and the money that flows will become more and more blurred.
This process may not be linear, there will be countless twists and turns in between, and even a few generations, the world will become more "pure" and "decoupled", and people in different countries will become more hostile to each other.
However, that is not the end of civilization after all.
The world will still become integrated, close, easy to communicate, and difficult to distinguish from each other. Many years later, when future generations of human beings read the term "illegal labor", they will be confused, just as we today will have difficulty understanding what "part" or "Mamluk" is.
One day, human beings will be able to inhabit this vast expanse of land freely and equally.
From the subway station of any big city in the world, you can see the race of the people, the languages of thousands of miles away, the variety of characters, and the cuisine of all over the world.
Just like that year's Chang'an.
Wouldn't such a world be a better place? (Editor: Yue Han)