The Regime of Urban Informality in Migration: Accommodating Undocumented Chosǒnjok Migrants in their Receiving Community in Seoul, South Korea (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Precarity and Strategic Navigation of Chosonjok Migrants in South Korea
European Journal of Korean Studies, 2021
This paper investigates how ethnic Koreans migrating to South Korea from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have learned to adapt to precarity, tailoring their strategies to cope with an increasingly uncertain South Korean job market. Using archival analysis, participant observations, and in-depth interviews, the findings of this study demonstrate that the in-betweenness of those migrants’ ethnicity and nationality gives them licence to slip into the South Korean job market. They find employment, albeit part-time or contract-based work, further upsetting an already precarious job market. This research argues that Chosŏnjok, KoreanChinese migrants, have developed strategies to navigate unstable situations and use precarity to their advantage as a tactic to survive, relying on their Korean ethnicity to give them a foot in the door. In this paper, I explore the three strategies they employ to survive in increasingly precarious circumstances. One strategy is their willingness to seek ...
Migration, the Urban Periphery, and the Politics of Migrant Lives
This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio-legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio-temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio-temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.
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.
“The Frog That Has Forgotten Its Past”: Advocating for Migrant Workers in South Korea
Positions, 2016
In this article, the author discusses how South Korean migrant advocacy that has emerged since the mid-1990s relied on mobilizing the moral responsibility of local civil society and the state on the dehumanizing conditions of foreign workers—most of whom are from China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. I ask first, what were the ways that migrant advocacy groups that emerged in the aftermath of the Myongdong protest translated the problem of the human rights of the foreign worker? Second, what can those narratives that became dominant in Korea say about the problem of human rights more broadly? The foreign worker is neither entitled to the national rights of the host country, which Hannah Arendt argued so forcefully is the basis for one’s human rights (1951), nor do the international conventions that recognize the rights of migrants have effective legal force. Under such conditions, and as the author shows in this article, it is the narrative of the suffering of foreign workers and the shame of Koreans that most effectively responded to the state and other actors’ abuses against foreign workers. Overall, this article suggests that the emergent postcolonial ethics of shame and responsibility that appeals to the common history of suffering and hardship between South Koreans and migrants should be rethought as a political process of re-reconciling the claims of rights of the foreign worker under the state’s economic interest and sovereignty.
Migrant Struggles in South Korea and Elsewhere
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2021
Bidduth, Syed, and Samar were dishonorably deported from South Korea about fifteen years ago while they were protesting for the rights of undocumented migrant workers. Since returning to their home countries, Bangladesh and Nepal, they have been practicing modes of solidarity that they learned during the years of struggle. Still, We Are Migrant Workers is a documentary film made to record their personal history, will, and current political projects. This is an interview about the historical background of labor migration in Korea, the struggles of the characters in the film, and the alternatives they have been pursuing in the wake of their deportations.
2016
Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article investigates the gendered production of migrant rights under the global regime of temporary migration by examining two groups of Filipina women: factory workers and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Emphasizing gendered labor processes and symbolic politics, this article offers an analytical framework to interrogate the mechanisms through which a discrepancy of rights is generated at the intersection of workplace organization and civil society mobilization. I identify two distinct labor regimes for migrant women that were shaped in the shadow of working men. Migrant women in the factories labored in the company of working men on the shop floor, which enabled them to form a co-ethnic migrant community and utilize the male-centered bonding between workers and employers. In contrast, migrant hostesses were isolated and experienced gendered stigma under the paternalistic rule of employers. Divergent forms of civil society mobilization in South Korea sustained these regimes: Migrant factory workers received recognition as workers without attention to gender-specific concerns while hostesses were construed as women victims in need of protection. Thus, Filipina factory workers were able to exercise greater labor rights by sharing the dignity of workers as a basis for their rights claims from which hostesses were excluded.