More than 70 percent of students from multicultural families in South Korea consider themselves as “100 percent Korean,” a survey showed Monday.

According to the survey of 1,502 multicultural students in their fourth year of primary school nationwide, 73.4 percent said they are “100 percent Koreans,” followed by 21.5 percent regarding themselves as “half Korean and half foreigner.”

Those who identified themselves as “pure foreigner” came to 3 percent, showed the survey conducted by the National Youth Policy Institute.

The number of multicultural families in South Korea has been on the rise due largely to an increasing number of Korean men marrying foreign wives and a steady influx of migrant workers settling here to take up jobs.

The number of children from such multicultural families reached 151,154 last year, which has soared 3.4 times over the past five years, according to government data.

“As most students from multicultural families saw themselves as Korean, the government needs to devise measures to integrate the growing multicultural population into the society, rather than supporting them as strangers,” NYPI researcher Yang Gye-min said. (Yonhap News)