Seoul Mayor Proposes Foreign Nannies To Beat Country's Falling Fertility Rate

As South Korea struggles to reverse a falling fertility rate, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon proposed a new idea to beat this problem: Open up the border to foreign nannies to relieve the childcare burden of working parents.

South Korea’s birthrate -- the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime -- dropped to a new all-time low of 0.81 in 2021, down from 0.84 the previous year, according to data from Statistics Korea. It is the lowest mark in the world.

Seoul Mayor Proposes More Foreign Nannies

Immigration law in South Korea allows foreign residents with long-term visas to work as babysitters, according to the Korea Immigration Service. But migrant workers with temporary work visas need special permission to do so.

In a brief Facebook post, Oh said that he made the proposal during a cabinet meeting held earlier in the day, hoping the topic would be discussed at a soon-to-be-launched pan-government task force aimed at tackling the country's demographic crisis.

Oh Se-hoon said that alleviating the country's high cost and low supply of babysitters would encourage more South Koreans to have children. “This should be good news for parents who have been reluctant to hire babysitters because of financial burdens or the shortage of their supply,” Oh said Tuesday in his post.

Oh did not detail how exactly the visa rules would be changed to increase the number of working babysitters in South Korea, though he pointed to other countries where low-cost domestic workers are common and successful models.

“When Hong Kong and Singapore introduced this system in the 1970s, the share of women in the labour force showed a marked rise,” he said. “It did not reverse the long-term dip in fertility rates, but the downward trend has slowed compared to South Korea.”

“Parenting should be socially respected, and measures are needed to enable mothers and fathers to raise their children together,” he added.

According to research at the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education, a growing number of South Korean parents hiring foreign babysitters over the years because of their lower cost and greater availability. But COVID restrictions have reduced the number of babysitters coming in from other countries, especially China, making the mayor’s proposal more urgent.

However, some experts said the proposal was premature. Lee Sang-lim, a demographer with the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, said the plan did not mention anything about labour protections for foreign workers, such as wage requirements, training and vetting procedures.

Many experts also opined that the financial burden is only one of the several reasons South Koreans are reluctant to have children. Housing and education costs, scarce jobs and general anxiety about the future are other contributing factors.

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