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This paper postulates that South Korea's multicultural rhetoric is written in neoliberal terms and is part of the state's new nationbuilding discourse. Following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, South Korean nationalism has been reshaped to impose neoliberal ideals on its citizens. Similarly, foreign populations such as marriage migrants have been objectified into specific roles needed in the national economy. The government has used their economic role as means to justify their presence in society while at the same time limiting their political and civil rights. The current paradigm deliberately marks the "foreignness" of biracial populations to emphasise their market value-and therefore their justified stay-in Korea. This paper starts with a theoretical discussion for South Korean state nationalism and reviews globalisation-inspired changes in light of nationalist discourse. Then the paper draws on field notes, participant observation data, interviews, documentary analysis and case study to review Korea's "multicultural" policies and argue that the selective acceptance of migrants and their social hierarchy are codified in legal structure. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute.

Temporary contract migration represents the predominant form of legal migration policy in Asia. With its rationale of the filling of jobs and provision of income-generating opportunities, it is linked to the migration–development nexus debate. This paper focuses on the impact of migrants’ agency as development actors within a transnational sphere. The mainstream migration–development nexus debate and policy prescriptions imagine diaspora groups as the ideal conduit for grassroots-driven development initiatives. While ‘diaspora group-led’ initiatives assume long-term, if not permanent, migration, temporary migration creates a dynamic that is fundamentally distinct. Temporality of migration, as mandated by bilateral agreements and promoted by global institutions in Asia, shapes migrant agency and migrants’ development aspirations in essentially different ways, but temporary contract migrants are nevertheless constructed as the ‘agents of development’ at the macro level of politics and policies, while receiving limited research attention. This paper analyses temporality, migrant agency and the migration–development nexus debate in relation to female domestic workers who epitomise the feminisation of migration and constitute the largest number of newly hired migrants in many key source countries in Southeast Asia. This introduces a gender dimension to our discussion of temporary migration in its link to migrants’ developmental agency.