Calls growing to strip foreign residents of voting rights

Growing anti-China sentiment is leading some to call for taking away the right of foreign permanent residents to vote here.

The move is intended to target Chinese residents, as they make up the majority of eligible immigrant voters in Korea. Recent disputes have pitted the people of the two countries against each other over various cultural issues, including recent claims coming from China that some elements of Korean culture, including kimchi, hanbok and samgyetang, originated there.

A Korean citizen, who identified himself as a former professor at Korea National University of Welfare, posted a petition on the Cheong Wa Dae website, saying that giving non-Korean permanent residents the right to vote was “a violation of the Constitution, and thus should be rescinded.”

“The Constitution stipulates that sovereign power resides with the people, not with local residents, thus giving voting rights to foreign residents is unconstitutional,” the petitioner wrote.

Under the Public Official Election Act, all foreign-born permanent residents aged 19 or older here may vote in local elections here after holding permanent residency for three years. They can vote for municipal representatives and mayors, but not in National Assembly or presidential elections.

“About 80 percent of foreign residents eligible to vote in this country are Chinese,” the petitioner wrote. “Allowing them to vote amounts to allowing them to meddle in Korea’s elections, and this fact raises the possibility for them to meddle in National Assembly and presidential elections.”

According to Ministry of Justice data, the number of foreign eligible voters stood at 121,806 as of March 31. Among them, the number of Chinese nationals was 95,385, accounting for 78.3 percent, followed by Taiwanese at 9 percent, Japanese at 5.9 percent, Vietnamese at 1.1 percent and Americans at 0.8 percent.

The petition, posted April 28, has garnered more than 37,000 supporters as of Wednesday afternoon.

But experts say it is an international trend to allow foreign residents who meet several qualifications to vote in local elections.

A report issued in 2014 by the Multiculture & Peace Institute, run by Sungkyul University in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, stated that at least 45 countries grant suffrage to immigrants.

Korea has been doing so, starting with the local elections that took place on May 31, 2006.

“Very few countries grant immigrants voting rights for presidential elections, but an increasing number of democratic countries have been giving foreign residents the right to vote in local elections since the 1970s when some western European countries began to do so,” the report states.