Emigration and immigration benefits will be granted (gold card) to skilled technical manpower.

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy and the Ministry of Justice are discussing about supporting employing technical manpower from overseas for domestic enterprise needs for the development in the high-tech industry field such as BT, NT and new material.

The current “Gold Card”, which gives emigration and immigration benefits to foreign manpower working in the IT and e-business fields, will be extended to 6 more high-tech fields such as BT, NT, digital house appliances, new material, environmental energy, and transportation machinery.

As the golden card applicable field has widen, an “International Industrial Technical Cooperation Center” will be established within the Korea Industrial Technology Foundation. Overall support services related with overseas technical manpower such as issuing gold cards and building a DB on overseas manpower, will be provided here.

In addition, as the exemption law for foreign technicians will close later this year, talks with the Ministry of Finance and Economy to extend the law for 3 years till 2006 is under way.