On Visas

Posted by Chris in Practicalities, Working | Comments Off

I am planning a series of articles on the practicalities of visiting, living and working in Korea. Here’s the first: visa information for people who may be planning to come to Korea.

If you’re a national of any of a wide variety of countries, you can enter Korea for up to 90 days without a visa, simply by showing up. If you’re Canadian, you can enter visa-free for up to a six month stay. Longer stays require that you get a visa before you arrive, and of course, working while on a tourist visa is illegal.

For the vast majority of people entering Korea to work as teachers, the E-2 is what they will be applying for. If you are offered a job, you can either apply for and get the E-2 before you leave your home country, or come to Korea without a visa and do The Visa Run later. The most common destinations for visa runs are Fukuoka and Osaka, in Japan. Both Korean embassies are well-used to the constant, endless stream of E-2 applicants trooping through, and are quite efficient. Like most embassies and consulates, they do tend to have odd opening hours, but if you time things right, you can leave Korea one day and be back the next, E-2 in hand.

Working during that period after you arrive under the visa waiver program and before you do your visa run (if necessary) is illegal, no matter what your new boss might tell you. Many people do it anyway.

The E-2 is tied to your workplace — if you quit your job or are fired, you lose your visa, and must exit (and re-enter, if you wish) within a relatively short time. Other restrictions include a prohibition from working anywhere besides the company or institution who hired you, without permission from your employer, or teaching privately. This restriction is widely ignored, but can potentially get you deported if you break it. I’ve never personally known this to happen to anyone, though.

There are a wide array of other visas, but the only other ones that potential fresh meat (that’d be you, if you’re reading this) might be interested in are probably the H1, the F-2 (and F-2-1, which is, as far as I can tell, identical to the F-2), and the C4.

The F-2 (which I hold) is a spousal visa, for those married to a Korean national. It allows you to work where you like, at as many jobs as you like, and to enter and leave Korea freely, among other things. Recent changes to the visa (I believe as a result of the massive increase in international marriages, to a great extent driven by the unwillingness of young Korean women to marry farmers and their consequent importation of brides, mainly from SE Asian countries (a topic I will do some talking about at a later date, I promise)) have given us foreign spouses some great new latitude, including a provision that allows you to apply for permanent residency in Korea after 5 years holding an F-2.

The H1 is the working holiday visa, for young citizens of countries with which Korea has reciprocal arrangements. I don’t know if teaching is a job permitted under this visa — there’s very little else in the way of work if you don’t speak Korean — but I worked under similar visas in New Zealand and Australia back in the day, and they are great for the young, poor traveller.

The C4 is a temporary employment visa. I suspect that the chainsmoking, emaciated, leotard-clad Russian girls I invariably used to see at immigration offices back in the day — entertainers, don’t you know — were applying for these visas, or the E-6 entertainter visa.

On the fringe are the cowboys. I’ve personally met a few people over the years — usually Canadians, thanks to that 6 months entry visa-free — who had spent several years in Korea, teaching private lessons, always on a tourist visa, always working illegally. They’d simply hop out for a holiday in Thailand or somewhere twice a year, then come back and get another tourist visa on entry, and carry on. All of the ones I’ve met have claimed to make anywhere from five to eight thousand dollars a month doing this, tax-free cash in hand. I don’t recommend it, of course, because I do not advocate breaking immigration law, but I include it for completeness.

If anyone has questions, feel free to add a comment below.

Related Posts

No related posts.