Necessity and Method of Connecting the Korean Foreigner Policy and Special Education Development Zone System

The 4th Basic Plan for Foreigner Policy, which covers time until 2027, calls for the establishment of a virtuous cycle system that attracts excellent foreign talents and international students and leads to social integration, and the establishment of the Immigration Administration that can manage cooperation between ministries in an integrated manner. Although many local governments are competing to attract this new institution, they have not come up with an alternative that considers overcoming the crisis of regional extinction, a national major task that is intensifying mainly in non-metropolitan areas. In addition, the academic community has not considered the solution of matching methods between regional-specific education and industry for the tasks of the 4th Basic Plan for Foreigner Policy, which emphasized the system of a virtuous cycle from foreign inflow to settlement and maintaining cooperation between departments. Against this backdrop, this paper presents a plan to link the education development special zone system to be promoted as an alternative, with a sense of the fact that it did not sufficiently lead to settlement from inflow as a result of previous governments' implementation of foreigner policy. To this end, the contents related to education are introduced while reviewing the 4th basic plan for foreigner policy and the implementation plan of local governments. And the policy value to compensate for the insufficient foreigner policy through connection with the special education development zone system is discussed. Finally, in order to materialize this thinking, this research proposes a plan to link the Jeollanam-do foreigner policy and the special education development zone system, which is scheduled to be implemented from 2025. While the 4th Basic Plan for Foreigner Policy and the Local Government's Implementation Plan focused on economic aspects such as jobs, the education policy was limited to customized education for children from migrant backgrounds and intensive education on the Korean language and culture for children of multicultural families. Second, this article proposes a new implementation plan that integrates the special educational development zone project centered on foreign talents and foreign students covering special culture zone and university innovation projects. Lastly, local communities such as local governments, industries, and universities, will work together to prepare a joint curriculum in the form of a specialized education development zone to cultivate regional-specific settlement-type talents, and to include children of foreign residents in the virtuous cycle system. In addition, it is recommended to consider foreigners when matching regional-specific education and jobs in special education development zone projects while adding a program for fostering industrial talents through re-education such as Korean language education for foreign workers.