Neither “Fish nor Fowl”: An Examination of South Korea’s Diaspora Engagement Policies

Lim, Timothy C.; Hoon, Seol Dong; Sato, Atsuko

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5_3

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…As she succinctly and blandly put it, "… our perceptions of overseas Koreans [before the 1990s] was quite negative." 36 In addition, as with Chosŏnjok and Koryŏ saram, the South Korean government did not keep official statistics on ethnic Koreans in western countries; although they were not "invisible," they were perhaps translucent. Even as late as 1996, in retral part of this program was the establishment of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), which began with the recruitment of 18 senior level scientists/engineers from the United States and West Germany.…”

Section: The "Emergence" Of the Korean Diasporamentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideas, Discourse, and the Microfoundations of South Korea’s Diasporic Engagement: Explaining the Institutional Embrace of Ethnic Koreans Since the 1990s

Lim¹,

Song²

2021

Int J Korean Hist

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This article endeavors to explain South Korea’s institutional turn to “diaspora engagement,” which began in earnest in the late 1990s. This shift can easily be attributed to instrumentalist calculations on the part of the South Korean state, i.e., as an effort to “tap into” or exploit the human and capital resources of ethnic Koreans living outside of the country. But instrumental calculations and interests, while significant and clearly proximate, were not the only nor necessarily the most important (causal) factors at play. Using a discursive institutional and microfoundational approach, we argue that underlying the institutional shift to diaspora engagement, was both an intentional and unintentional reframing of the Korean diaspora as “brethren” and “national assets,” a powerful discursive combination. This reframing did not come about automatically but was instead pushed forward by sentient or discursive agents, including Chŏng Chu-yŏng (the founder of Hyundai) and Yi Kwang-gyu, who was a Seoul National University professor and later the third president of the Overseas Koreans Foundation. Journalists, religious leaders and other activists within South Korea’s NGO community, as well as ethnic Koreans themselves, also played key roles as discursive agents in this reframing process. Central to our discursive institutional and microfoundational approach is the assertion that ideas and discourse were key causal factors in the institutional shift to South Korea’s engagement with the Korean diaspora.

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Section: The "Emergence" Of the Korean Diasporamentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideas, Discourse, and the Microfoundations of South Korea’s Diasporic Engagement: Explaining the Institutional Embrace of Ethnic Koreans Since the 1990s

Lim¹,

Song²

2021

Int J Korean Hist

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“…Jeong (2016) is among those to find evidence of greater ethnocentrism in the Korean case compared to Western states, even if ethnic affinity is conditional on co-ethnics’ origins (cf. Lee and Chien, 2017; Lim and Seol, 2018).…”

Section: Theory Overview: What Explains Attitudes Towards Immigrants mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who should be admitted? Conjoint analysis of South Korean attitudes toward immigrants

Denney

Green

2020

Ethnicities

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South Korea is slowly but steadily becoming a country of immigrants. In 1998, there were barely 300,000 foreign residents in South Korea. As of 2018, there were more than 2.3 million. The immigrant population has yet to reach 5% of the total population, but it is predicted to rise significantly in the years to come. Despite the increase in newcomers, it is not well understood who native South Koreans prefer as immigrants and why. Are immigrant attitudes motivated by co-ethnic solidarity, or are they primarily based on economic and sociotropic concerns? To isolate attitudes on these crucial questions, this research uses a conjoint experiment that simultaneously tests the influence of seven immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Our results show that broad sociotropic concerns largely drive attitudes towards immigrants in South Korea, but an immigrant’s origin also matters. Prospective newcomers from culturally similar and higher-status countries who can speak Korean and have clear plans to work are most preferred. The research findings will be relevant to the comparative study of immigration attitudes, as well as to researchers interested in the specifics of the South Korean case.

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“…9 Accordingly, social norms surrounding co-ethnics and the country's visa system uphold and reproduce a hierarchical notion of citizenship. Here there is a skills component, with less-skilled ethnic Koreansprincipally from Chinaaccorded lower status and granted fewer rights and benefits than Korean Americans, who are seen as the most desirable co-ethnic group (Lee and Chien 2017;Lim and Seol 2018;Seol and Skrentny 2009). Seol and Skrentny (2009), Choi (2016) and Oh and Oh (2016) demonstrate how this ethnic hierarchy determined largely by country of origin is reflected in both policy and popular opinion and reflected in cultural productions.…”

Section: Immigration and South Koreamentioning

confidence: 99%

The limits of ethnic capital: impacts of social desirability on Korean views of co-ethnic immigration

Denney

Ward

Green

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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A substantial body of research has found that social desirability motivates respondents to overstate support for immigration when asked directly, but when provided an unobtrusive means of expressing preferences, support declines. In this paper, we ask whether South Koreans follow this pattern, especially with regards to co-ethnic migrants from North Korea and China. We use list experiments to determine whether observed levels of support for general immigration and co-ethnic migration are biased by social desirability. We find that generally respondents overstate their support for co-ethnics from North Korea by a significant amount when asked directly, but not for the other groups, although college-educated respondents overstate their support for general immigration. Social desirability bias with respect to co-ethnics from North Korea is particularly evident in older respondents and males. These findings challenge the notion that native-born citizens prefer co-ethnic immigrants.

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Neither “Fish nor Fowl”: An Examination of South Korea’s Diaspora Engagement Policies

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

Ideas, Discourse, and the Microfoundations of South Korea’s Diasporic Engagement: Explaining the Institutional Embrace of Ethnic Koreans Since the 1990s

Ideas, Discourse, and the Microfoundations of South Korea’s Diasporic Engagement: Explaining the Institutional Embrace of Ethnic Koreans Since the 1990s

Who should be admitted? Conjoint analysis of South Korean attitudes toward immigrants

The limits of ethnic capital: impacts of social desirability on Korean views of co-ethnic immigration

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