South Korea as an Ordinary Country: Industrialization, Democracy and the Politics of Immigration (original) (raw)
Related papers
LABOUR MIGRATION TO SOUTH KOREA
Sarah Hassan, 2011
Labor migrations revolve around push and pull factors between labor-sending and labor-receiving countries. In the case of South Korea, reasons behind the increase in labor migration include rapid industrialization and demographic features. Despite intense efforts, a shortage of labor has persisted. Since the 1990s, various policies have been introduced to bring in and manage migrant workers. This paper argues that despite increased legislative reforms in the fields of labor and immigration, issues such as the increase in illegal migrant workers and the vulnerability of these workers to human rights abuses have been left untackled. The paper highlights how these policies have in fact, further divided 'illegal workers' from 'legal workers'. The paper reviews labor immigration policies and points out loopholes in them.
Foreign Workers in Korea 1987-2000: Issues and Discussions*
2000
The Korean economic miracle of the 1980s drastically altered the regional labor landscape. Once a major labor exporter, Korea has become a prime destination for migrant workers from developing countries due to a severe shortage of unskilled production workers in small- and medium-size industries. Also, Korean workers had developed the so-called "3-D syndrome," an aversion to difficult, dangerous and dirty jobs in factories and sought relatively higher-paying employment in the construction sector. Of the three types of migrant workers n the legal employee, the industrial and technical trainee and the undocumented migrant worker, the latter two, in general, are made to endure long working hours, low wages and poor working conditions. In some cases, the trainees receive the least in terms of wages, even less than the undocumented worker because of the Industrial and Technical Training Program for Foreigners (ITTP). The ITTP prevents them from acquiring proper working status a...
"Foreign Workers in South Korea: Policies, Challenges, and Prospects"
South Korea Studies, 2024
South Korea faces significant labor shortages due to an aging population and declining birth rates, making foreign workers essential to its economic stability. This paper examines South Korea's policies on foreign labor, focusing on the Employment Permit System (EPS), visa programs, and worker protection mechanisms. It also explores the challenges foreign workers face, including exploitation, limited mobility, and inadequate social integration. The analysis compares South Korea's labor policies with Japan's to highlight regional differences and similarities. The paper concludes by providing policy recommendations aimed at improving worker mobility, social integration, and regional collaboration. These suggestions aim to foster a sustainable and equitable labor migration framework that benefits both foreign workers and the South Korean economy.
This paper investigates a transient border between the temporary and (potentially) permanent migration schemes, by reviewing the changes in migration policies relating to Korean-Chinese (Joseonjok) co-ethnic migrants in South Korea in the last ten years. We pay attention to Working Visit (WV) Status and Overseas Korean (OK) Status and the fluidity between the two visa streams, to argue that the government utilises the arbitrary notion of 'skilledness' as an indicator to distinguish the temporary from the non-temporary migrants. To interrogate how the visa system operates, this paper reviews politics between and within the government, the market and the migrants. Although the government rhetorically uses visa policies as a quality-control mechanism to selectively accept a desirable population, it can only do so by relying on the market to 'evaluate' migrants. However, Korean-Chinese migrants are welcomed in the low-skilled employment market to fill labour shortages, and they also contribute to the expanding migration industry as consumers, which stand at odds with the government's effort to limit 'unskilled' migration. The relegation of the state's responsibility to the market provides an opportunity for migrants to contest the border and negotiate with the state. However, their negotiation comes at the expense of precarisation of their legal status.
This study examines the impacts of immigration policies adopted by the Korean government, vis-à-vis other economic, socio, demographic, and political factors, on labour migration from developing countries to South Korea using a modified gravity model. The model is extended to marriage-related migrants to gain insights on marriage migration. The positive results in three out of the five immigration policies examined affirm that liberal policies are associated with increased migration, especially for preferred groups like ethnic Koreans, marriage migrants, and professionals. The positive effects of " push " factors such as population, unemployment, and inflation are generally similar to their effects on migration to the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK despite its more rapid transition from a migrant-sending into a migrant-receiving country. Political terror's non-significance may be due to South Korea's limited asylum policy. Finally, the results of the extended model imply that marriage migration share plenty of similarities with labour migration. Abstract This study examines the impacts of immigration policies adopted by the Korean government, vis-à-vis
Korean Development and Migration
Our introductory paper to this special issue of JEMS on Korean development and migration provides a sketch of internal migration in Korea, and international migration from and to that country. It positions these movements within the great transitions experienced by Korea over recent decades: the transition from an agricultural to an industrial and then a tertiary economy; the transition from a rural to an urban society; and the transition to low fertility and mortality. A transition in migration can also be observed from rural to urban and from emigration to immigration. The papers in this issue each illustrate a different facet of Korea’s migration*the importance of internal remittances in the process of urbanisation, the range of destinations in Korea’s diaspora, the different enclave economies and societies around the Pacific rim, ethnic ties and the incorporation of Koreans into the economies of destination areas, the importance of transnational families and whether Korea will ever become a ‘settler’ society are all examined as part of Korea’s local and global migrations. They all demonstrate, in different ways, how Korea’s development into a member of the global economy has interacted with migration to change its volume, direction and composition.
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.