Racing “return”: the diasporic return of U.S.-raised Korean Americans in racial and ethnic perspective

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing body of research on ethnic return migrants originating from the U.S., few have situated this practice within sociological framings of U.S. race relations or immigrant assimilation. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with 56 Korean American ethnic return migrants, this article demonstrates the manner in which their desires to relocate to an ancestral homeland are intricately linked to their racialization and ethnic identity formation in the U.S. Rather than being a phenomenon simply driven by economic, affective, and/or politico-legal processes, this study contends that these racial/ethnic processes help to reinforce and later channel the already existing “return” desires of Korean Americans. In stating these findings, this article highlights the limitations of examining the experiences Korean Americans (and Asian Americans writ large) solely within an epistemological framework that assumes their domestic incorporation as a foregone conclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic return migration
• Korean Americans
• ethnic identity
• race relations
• transnationalism
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article builds upon analyses from the author’s Ph.D. dissertation (Suh 2016b).

2 I use “return” and “returnees” to denote ethnic return migration and ethnic return migrants, respectively.

3 Rates of adoption from South Korea to the United States have dropped steadily since its peak in the mid-1980s. For instance, 1986 saw a record high number of Koreans adopted to the U.S. at 6,138 (Hübinette 2006). Comparably, the U.S. Department of State recorded 276 Korean adopted to the U.S. in 2017 (U.S. Department of State—Bureau of Consular Affairs 2018).

4 I utilize the term U.S.-raised Korean Americans strictly as a demographic or analytic category, not as an identity category. The point is not to diminish the undoubtedly different biographies and identities shared by children of Korean immigrant parents and transnationally adopted Koreans, but rather to draw attention to their analogous connections to the U.S., especially concerning their racialization as Asian Americans. I also consider their comparable ties to the South Korea, particularly as individuals who tend to be eligible for the F-4 “Overseas Korean” visa while sharing relatively weak ties to South Korea compared to first-generation Korean Americans.

5 Though official figures are unavailable, research on this population completed by me and others indicates that Korean American ethnic return migrants are overwhelmingly college educated. This is likely because the most widely available form of employment for “returnees”, teaching English, generally requires a four-year university or college degree in hand at the time of employment.