[The Second Take] "When Life Gets Hard, We Look for Scapegoats"

Anger from Hardship Directed at Refugees in Ken Loach's "My Old Oak"
The Roots of Korea's Reluctance Toward Refugees

In Ken Loach's film My Old Oak, residents of a former mining village in the northeast of England are visibly angry. They are displeased with the Syrian refugees who have settled in their town. "I'm not trying to be racist, but the state of the schools is unacceptable. Suddenly, the number of kids has increased. It's not their fault, but many of them can't speak English. The lessons just don't progress." "People from the big cities don't want to live next door, so they load them onto buses and dump them on us. Refugees, immigrants... fine, that's okay. But we have nothing ourselves, and now we're supposed to share with people we don't even know? If we complain, we're branded racists. It's utterly infuriating."

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Director Loach portrayed the fathers of these people as heroic workers in his films from the 1960s and 1970s. It was not a glorification of labor itself, but a tribute to the struggles demanding wage increases and better working conditions. The fervent social movements faded as the UK underwent deindustrialization in the 1990s. With mass unemployment, working conditions deteriorated again. Loach captured this on camera as well. In Looks and Smiles (1981), he dealt deeply with the worsening unemployment situation. In Riff-Raff (1991), he depicted the reality of workers being further oppressed due to unemployment and deregulation. Workers were no longer heroes. They deliberately ignored colleagues who were fired for demanding better conditions.

The cost of silence is severe. The lives of the residents in My Old Oak are all tough. Property prices have plummeted, and government and local authority support has dried up. The accumulated anger and sorrow are directed at the Syrian refugees receiving donations and supplies. Personal attacks and violence are not hesitated. TJ Valentine (Dave Turner), who has witnessed both the glory and decline of the village, fears a catastrophe. "When life is hard, we look for scapegoats. We never look up but only down, blaming those weaker than us. We always blame them. It's easier to brand the faces of the vulnerable."

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The root of Korean society's distancing from refugees can also be found here. The 1997 Asian financial crisis and the subsequent industrial restructuring worsened not only the labor market but also the income distribution structure. The fruits of economic growth were not evenly distributed across various classes but concentrated in a small upper echelon. The economic gap among the majority of the population has been widening. The government and local authorities have struggled to fill this gap.

Many oppose accepting refugees by emphasizing the concept of a "homogeneous nation." However, Korean ethnic history is a continuous story of mixing and crossing. According to the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, Baekjeong, descendants of northern nomadic peoples, accounted for one-third of the total population in the early Joseon period, as nomadic peoples had been migrating to the Korean Peninsula continuously since the Goryeo era. For example, tens of thousands of Khitans, the main group among Baekjeong, surrendered or were captured as prisoners during the wars with Goryeo (993?1018).

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In 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that the Korean government recognize its multiethnic character and prevent racial discrimination. Regardless of this, there are lessons to be learned from the histories of Rome, the Tang (China), Mongolia, and the United States. They all built empires with pluralistic and tolerant attitudes. Perhaps it was because they allowed people of different races, religions, and ethnicities to coexist and prosper that they wielded global hegemony.