The citizenship of foreign workers in South Korea (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Conditional Citizenship in South Korea: An Analysis of the Print Media
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2018
This article shows how the meaning of citizenship has changed in South Korea since the partial emergence of a multicultural society in the past two decades. It does so by analysing how newspaper editorials have discussed multiculturalism, which is a multifaceted concept but one which weighs heavily on notions of citizenship. There is often a consensus about citizenship into mono-ethnic and homogeneous societies, even if it is not always clearly articulated or expressed. Societal and demographic change, however, requires such societies to change or at least revisit notions of citizenship. The article shows that the print media put the onus on migrants to adapt to society, but also for Koreans to accept the 'inevitable reality' of multiculturalism. Editorials advocated a form of conditional citizenship, whereby migrants would be incorporated into society without disrupting current notions of what it means to be a South Korean.
Multicultural and Global Citizenship in a Transnational Age: The Case of South Korea
International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2010
Transnational flows and influx influence perspectives about the concepts of citizenship limited within nation-state borders. The author challenges liberal assimilationist conceptions of citizenship education in order to explore possibilities for the advancement of both multicultural citizenship and global citizenship education. He situates South Korea’s case within this discourse and suggests multicultural citizenship and global citizenship education as alternative, defensible, and appropriate paradigms at the transnational and global age. In the final part of the paper, he discusses the implications of this paradigm for citizenship education in South Korea.
The paper analyses the case of labor migration of CIS ethnic Koreans (Koryo-saram) to South Korea. Because of an ethnicity-based preferential policy, they are offered better conditions than other migrants, but in many cases they choose to switch to a condition of semi-compliance by voluntarily taking jobs in sectors that fall out of their visa requirements. This option is dictated by the absence of Korean language skills and better remuneration in the illegal market, but at the same time exposes them to worse working conditions and vulnerability caused by illegality. This situation, that is convenient for all parties -the state, employers, sub-contracting recruitment agencies and in the short term also migrants -can be explained by two factors -a neoliberal distortion of the local job market in the interests of companies and the resilience of Koryo-saram workers -that are marked by an underlying inequality of power structures. An approach focused on political feasibility suggests that trade unions could be the best answer at hand to address this condition with possible mid-term improvements deriving from forms of transnational social protection.
This article discusses how South Korea is increasingly, albeit reluctantly, relying on immigration to address the consequences of its industrial transformation which include, among others: low births, a rapidly ageing population, and labour shortages. It discusses how policy dissonance, the contradictions in government policies and the realities on the ground, produce mixed results which sometimes deviate from policy intentions. Specifically, the insistence on a restrictive anti-migration regime in the face of increasing labour demands and unwillingness of domestic workers to take low paying jobs result in the twin problems of persistent undocumented migration and increasing labour shortages. Likewise, the contradicting policy orientations of liberalization and ethnicization has been noted to create simultaneous push towards ethnicization and de-ethnicization of migration policies which may decrease discrimination based on citizenship but increase discrimination based on ethnicity. Unless contradictions in policy intent and policy dissonance are addressed, policies will likely keep producing mixed results.
South Korea's Developmental Democracy and Migrant Workers Policy
Pacific Focus, 2011
This paper investigates how the Korean government, under the double pressure of liberal-democratic consolidation and economic growth, has developed its migrant workers policy in the past 2 decades. Its central claim is that even though the Korean government has revised the laws regarding migrant workers in an increasingly liberal way and driven more progressive migrant workers policies with special focus on socioeconomic rights, it could not live up to Korean democracy's liberal ideal by differently treating migrant workers on the basis of the expected contributions of their skills to Korean economy, thus failing to fully respect individual migrant workers' rights. The paper attempts to analyze the practical aporia with which Korean democracy struggles under the aforementioned double pressure from the perspective of "developmental democracy" in which liberal democracy and national economic utilitarianism are mutually constraining each other.p afo_1072 428..455