Many readers will be familiar with this.  More familiar than I am, in fact, because I had always bypassed posts and discussions on this issue the last few years because I didn’t have any plans for working in Korea again in the near future.

But, I wanted to post something about it here, because this is a mega difference in Korea for the expat community since I first went there in 1996.

For ESLers, your visa (an E-2) was sponsored by your employer.  And it meant to the owners that they owned you – and they often treated you accordingly – like slaves.  Because –in order to change jobs, you had to get a “release letter” from your boss, no matter what.  Two examples:

I started teaching in a place that was going bankrupt.  I didn’t get paid more than 50,000 Won a week and nothing at the end of my first month.   I taught off-and-on for another two weeks or so before giving up.  By this time, Korean and other teachers were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship – which was pretty much what we were.   But, I still had to get a release letter from the guy, and if he had wanted, he could have reported me to immigration for breaking the contract, which he threatened to do to all the exapts working for him.

But it can get worse:   A guy I knew a little from the first city I taught in told me his plight once:  He had come to work one night, still being owed considerable back money, only to find the manager of the school telling the staff that —– the owner had fled to China with his mistress, the police were around asking about him, and the school’s doors were going to be shut and locked for the last time, and that he had no clue about the apartments the teachers were living in that were in the boss’ name.  Have a nice day…

That teacher still had problems with immigration over the release letter — which he could not possibly get.

As I understand it, the boss at the new school he found finally managed to grease it with an immigration official who took sympathy (and a slightly stuffed envelop).

That’s the way it was.  And I guess that is still the way it is for people under the E-2 teaching visa.

But, as I had forgotten until Chickenhead reminded me, the Korean government in recent years created new visa regulations for those married to Koreans.

In the past for them, as I understood it from newspaper articles, it was not such a problem for foreign women to get a special visa status if married to Korean men, but it was a different matter altogether for the reverse situation.

Now, it is easy for either male or female expats to get an F-2-1 visa that is like magic, because you don’t even have to get a work visa and can change jobs as you like.

I’m sure there were ESLers in the past who would have probably literally killed for that luxury…

You can read about this by downloading the Guidebook for  Foreign Spouses of Korean Nationals off the Hi, Korea! official government website, which I just did.

If you are a new comer and have always had an F-2-1 or have worked in fields outside the E-2 teaching visa one, you might not understand well enough how much, much better it makes things (as far as I can tell from here (in the US)).

In the past, I met a few long term expats who beat the slave-mentality system of the E-2 by simply going illegal.  It worked for them.  They had been doing it for a few years.  One guy kept asking me why I hadn’t done it since I’d been in Korea for a few years.  I just didn’t like the idea of knowingly skirting the law and being an “illegal alien” even if I hated the rules and knew the system was unjust.

However — even after reading the guidebook, I’m not sure about what my status will be when I apply for this visa type — since my Korean wife is going to remain at her job in the US and in college classes while I’m in Korea…

Nothing in the guidebook specifically addresses that issue.  It deals with death of a spouse, divorce, and “separation” – but by that it means legal separation on the way to divorce – not like my situation.

Hopefully this will not make the F-2-1 impossible for me.  In fact, one reason my wife and I made the decision for me to go to Korea for a year or two is that her father was recently diagnosed with cancer and is ill.  My wife can’t get away for an extended period like I can, especially with the US economy being the way it is for the next few years.  She doesn’t want to leave her job, but she’d feel more comfortable if one of us could be in closer touch with her parents, and in my job situation, it is easy for me to go over to Korea and work and spend some weekends with her family.

I am also assuming from what I read in the guidebook that the F-2-1 visa will make much easier one thing in the future I was planning to do:

Since I am a teacher here in the US, I wanted to use our long summer breaks to do some traveling in Korea mixed with private teaching.   Whenever I do that in the future, with the F2-1, it will be legal…

Great….