hankyoreh

Sehan University President Yi Seung-hoon and Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta shake hands for a photo marking a project between the school and country. (from Sehan University's official website)

A private university in rural South Korea was found to have conspired with a brokering agency to bring unqualified international students into the country illegally and put them to work doing jobs considered undesirable by South Koreans in order to pay for their tuition.

The resulting situation has now escalated into a legal battle.

More than two dozen students from East Timor were recruited by the agency and put to work at an abalone farming facility. Upset by the harsh working conditions, they reported the situation to the East Timor Embassy in South Korea.

Meanwhile, a dispute over responsibility for the incident erupted between the agency and the university, which found itself unable to recoup the tuition and brokering costs in the process.

According to an investigation by the Hankyoreh on Feb. 8, 29 East Timorese students were admitted last September to the liberal studies department at the Yeongam campus of Sehan University, a four-year private institution with campuses in Yeongam, South Jeolla Province, and Dangjin, South Chungcheong Province.

At the time, the university did not receive payment for their tuition, which amounted to around 3.6 million won each (US$2,690). A month later, the students were taken by the agency in charge of their recruitment to work at an abalone farm in nearby Jindo County in order to earn money for their tuition and living expenses.

The students did not receive work permits, making their employment illegal. The agency that assigned them the work also took part in local student recruitment activities by Sehan University in East Timor.

In the process of admitting the East Timorese students, the university issued falsified documents for their visa applications.

According to Ministry of Justice guidelines, international students planning to arrive in South Korea must first receive a standard admission permit from the school, using it as a basis for receiving a visa from their local South Korean Embassy. Tuition must be paid in full before the permit is issued, but Sehan University supplied the document after receiving only a portion of the tuition payments by proxy from the agency.

This action constituted illegal university admission and false invitation.

After arriving, the East Timorese students learned that they would have to work to earn money for their education costs and brokerage fees for entering the country. But they also said they never imagined they would have to endure such demanding working conditions or such a harsh working environment as the abalone farm.

Even so, they were not in a position to refuse the work assigned by the agency, as both their immigration and university admission processes had violated the law. In effect, they were drafted into forced labor.

In order to prevent forced labor, the Labor Standards Act prohibits the act of “offsetting wages with advances,” in which parties agree to borrow funds from an employer and repay them later out of their wages.

After learning about the situation, the East Timor Embassy conducted an on-site investigation last December. Around the same time, the students quit working at the abalone farm.

As matters became complicated, Sehan University discussed countermeasures with the recruitment agency. A professor surnamed Kim — who had previously been a South Korean ambassador to East Timor — was recorded in a telephone conversation with the agency’s president, identified by their surname Kang.

In the conversation, Kim urged Kang to “discuss with the students in preparation,” referring to the investigation into forced labor allegations.

“You need to explicitly tell them: ‘You have to earn money to pay for your education and living costs, and if you don’t work, you’re going to have to get money from home to pay it back. If you don’t have the means to pay it back from home, you’re going to have to return to East Timor [unless you continue working],’” Kim said.

Sehan University promotional material. 

After the students quit and the agency was unable to recover the 29 million won in tuition fees it had paid on their behalf, it reported Sehan University President Yi Seung-hoon to police on suspicions of embezzlement.

Kang explained, “The agreement we made was to pay tuition costs up front for students we had recruited from East Timor at Sehan University’s suggestion, after which we would get it back when they earned money upon employment in South Korea.”

“But after the students arrived in South Korea, we discovered that the legal permissible working hours for international students were just 10 hours a week, and the only way they would be able to pay back the tuition costs would be by working illegally,” they added.

“We quit our student management duties after that, but we never received the tuition funds we had fronted,” they said.

Meanwhile, Sehan University said the responsibility lay with the agency.

“The people at the agency were the ones who told us they’d pay the first semester’s tuition up front and that we should entrust them with student management duties,” a university official said. These management duties included employment oversight.

“The claim that we demanded tuition payments first on their behalf is patently false,” they added.

Regarding the fraudulent issuance of admission permission documents, the official said, “When the South Korean Embassy only issued visas for the first 29 of the 82 students recruited, the agency only made a partial payment of 29 million won without keeping its promise to pay their tuition in full in advance.”

“The school year was about to begin, and the visa review couldn’t be delayed any longer, so we had no choice but to issue the standard admission permission documents before the tuition was fully paid,” they explained.

The reports of an agency providing proxy tuition payment and legally brokering employment for students at Sehan University — which come on the heels of an episode where numerous Hanshin University students from Uzbekistan were deported en masse — have sparked criticisms of the Ministry of Education, which is responsible for oversight of universities, and the Ministry of Justice, which is tasked with oversight of immigration.

A Ministry of Education official said they were “not at liberty to give an exact response” because the matter was currently under investigation by police.

The Ministry of Justice said it was “investigating the circumstances of the standard admission permits’ fraudulent issuances and the possibility of employment-related violations,” adding that it would “take the necessary measures based on the findings.”

By Lee Jun-hee, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]