Organizer: Byoungha Lee, Yonsei University, South Korea Discussant: Jungmin Seo, Yonsei University, South Korea International migration as a global phenomenon entails political, social, and cultural issues; in particular, it raises several fundamental questions about how nation states control borders, how they delineate membership of the state, and how immigrants construct their migratory spaces and identities. This panel will examine the complex process of social transformation due to the influx of foreign workers, ethnic Koreans, and marriage migrants, and the Korean state’s response to this multicultural change in terms of immigration policies. Since foreign migrant workers first began to enter Korea in the late 1980s, the Korean immigration policies have been evolved from merely importing and distributing this cheap labor force to the so-called 3D sectors (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) to more rationalized form of foreign labor policy through a series of social struggles. Further, the increasing rates of cross-border marriages and births of mixed-raced children pose questions of multicultural reality in Korean society. In 2006, the Korean government announced that Korea is moving toward a multicultural society and that this trend is irreversible. In particular, this panel will explore how this new “multicultural” transformation has affected identity, citizenship, and belongingness in Korea, and how Vietnamese migrants subjectively construct their own urban spaces. This panel will also investigate the process of immigration policymaking in Korea with comparison to the Japanese case through a lens of developmental state, and the impact of the recent global recession on immigration policies in Korea.
Korean identity—based on a conflation of race and ethnicity—has been generally accepted as an unquestioned fact and closely associated with rights to citizenship and belongingness in Korean society: “non-Koreans” have simply and unabashedly been excluded from membership in South Korea. The now three decade-old surge in transnational migration, however, is beginning to erode the once solid myth of South Korea’s homogeneity, and with it, the taken-for-granted belief that the South Korea is only for Koreans. Moreover, the dramatic increase in international marriages, especially those between a Korean male and “foreign bride,” bring an added dimension to transnational migration in South Korea, one in which questions of identity, citizenship, and belongingness must be directly addressed. The process of social transformation in Korea will be complex, contingent, and profoundly political, involving multiple socio-political actors; increasing tensions, along gender, racial, and class lines; and intense debates over the discourse and practices of citizenship, belonging and national identity. This paper argues that transnational migration—both of workers and foreign spouses—has already laid the basis for a significant change in long held conception of Korean identity and belongingness. This is partly evidenced in the increasingly salient idea that Korea is now a “multicultural society.”
This research addresses the formation of subjective places by immigrants to South Korea, with a particular focus on the Vietnamese, concerning how they assemble, conduct, and experience both the communities of host and home countries through the regeneration of informal identity. While the emergence of migrant communities in East Asia is an ongoing phenomenon due to the global trends of population movements, the meaning of subjective place for the immigrants in Korea has been limited to addressing the superficial condition of immigrants and their relation to ‘space’ and ‘place,’ to try to find out how they live in a new society. The subjective dimension of place-making by immigrants is particularly significant as the globe enters into a new mode of neoliberal space. As the capital and labor flow from global metropolises to localities without being rigorously regulated by state sovereignties, we need to overcome the conventional interpretations of space and place that are heavily constrained by state-centered epistemology. The interpretation of new settlers’ imagination of the spatiality of the host society will be critical to understand the way in which migratory spaces are formed and unformed in a given society. Ultimately, this new approach is the most fundamental effort to overcome the territorial trap as the subjectivity of new migrants is the least tamed territory of a nation state which relies on the control of temporality and spatiality to ensure its own perpetual dominance.
This paper deals with the decision making process of immigration policies in Japan and South Korea. The two nations are well-known as the model case of developmental state that the developmental plan bureaucrats made leads domestic market and society. Moreover, Korea has steadily adopted similar policies of Japan using “late-development advantages.”
The inflow of immigrants is a challenge to the two homogeneous societies. As regards to immigration policies, Japan is no more the model case to Korea. Korea has tried to find alternative model to survive at the challenges of globalization. Finally, Korea enacted new immigration laws including the Foreign Workers Employment Act of 2003 and the Act on the Treatment of Foreigners in Korea of 2007.
This paper explains the causes of differences of the two nations in terms of policy making process: long deliberation vs. speedy decisiveness. We analyze the roles of bureaucrats, politicians, scholars, civil activists as well as mass media.
This paper deals with the decision making process of immigration policies in Japan and South Korea. The two nations are well-known as the model case of developmental state that the developmental plan bureaucrats made leads domestic market and society. Moreover, Korea has steadily adopted similar policies of Japan using “late-development advantages.”
The inflow of immigrants is a challenge to the two homogeneous societies. As regards to immigration policies, Japan is no more the model case to Korea. Korea has tried to find alternative model to survive at the challenges of globalization. Finally, Korea enacted new immigration laws including the Foreign Workers Employment Act of 2003 and the Act on the Treatment of Foreigners in Korea of 2007.
This paper explains the causes of differences of the two nations in terms of policy making process: long deliberation vs. speedy decisiveness. We analyze the roles of bureaucrats, politicians, scholars, civil activists as well as mass media.
This paper aims to examine how the recent economic crisis has affected migration pattern, and how the Korean state has responded to this economic downturn when it comes to immigration policies. As the crisis has developed from the financial markets to the manufacturing sectors, many countries have suffered from a high rate of unemployment. The rise of unemployment at the global level has significantly changed patterns of international migration as well as immigration policies in migrant-receiving countries. For instance, the Korean government dramatically cut the quota on migrant workers from 100,000 in 2008 to 34,000 in 2009. Considering job competition over citizens, the state froze employment of foreign workers and ethnic Koreans on construction sector. To examine the change of immigration policies during the global recession, this article will focus on functional imperatives of the state embedded in immigration policy as suggested by Christina Boswell. Focusing on security, accumulation, fairness, and institutional legitimacy, this article will explore what functions of the state-embedded immigration policies have been emphasized by the Korean state during this economically hard time.
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