Legal Entitlement And Empowerment Of Marriage Immigrants In Korea

Abstract

The share of marriages between South Korean men and immigrant women from other Asian countries has increased sharply since 1990, representing approximately 8 percent of all new marriages in Korea in 2009. This study employs 2009 census data on these women to investigate the impact of the acquisition of Korean nationality on their empowerment in their households and community. It employs a fuzzy regression kink design that exploits two-year conditional residence as an instrumental variable for nationality acquisition. Results show that marriage immigrants’ legal entitlement lowers the likelihood that they live with their mother-in-law. Reported difficulties in their relationships with their parents-in-law also improve. Having stable legal status lowers their experience of discrimination in general. However, the findings do not reveal that legal entitlement increases their access to household resources, increases their probability of separating from their Korean spouse, or encourages them to raise their political voices in the community.

HIGHLIGHTS

• “Marriage immigrants,” women who migrate from developing countries in Asia to marry Korean men, have low levels of empowerment in their households and face discrimination in their communities.

• Nationality acquisition improves marriage immigrants' statuses in some ways but is not related to improved household-bargaining positions.

• Marriage immigrants with vulnerable legal statuses should be provided with supplementary legal and educational support for their assimilation into society.

• Empowering marriage immigrants is vital to the developmental outcomes of the second generation, especially in terms of health and education.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationality
• marriage immigrants
• bargaining power
• regression kink design

JEL Codes:

• J12
• J15
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful for comments from Myoung-jae Lee, Jin-young Choi, Miki Kohara, Daiji Kawaguchi, Soohyung Lee as well as participants at the Kansai Labor Economics Meeting, Asian Meetings of the Econometric Society, and Annual Meeting of the International Association for Feminist Economics. This research would not be possible without helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers. We also appreciate support by a Korea University Grant and generous grant support from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo.

SUPPLEMENTAL Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2020.1718174.

Notes

1 The Unification Church was founded in South Korea in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon and has expanded throughout the world, although most members live in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

2 Approximately 70 percent of Chinese foreign-born brides are ethnically Korean, and most are from Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeastern China.

3 Lee (2005) conducted a small-scale survey on women migrant workers at twenty restaurants. More than 50 percent of marriage immigrants reported that their marriage to a Korean was indeed a sham marriage to acquire nationality.

4 In June 1998, the law was revised such that a child of a Korean mother or father automatically acquires Korean nationality at birth.

5 Recently, marriage immigrants have been able to acquire F-6 visa status. The eligibility is expanded to include marriage immigrants who are no longer married for certain reasons.

6 In 2010, the Korean government allowed dual nationality under the condition that people do not exercise their foreign nationality while in Korea.

7 Other waves of the survey series contain only yearly information on marriage immigrants’ arrival in Korea.

8 The questionnaire was administered in the following languages: Korean, English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Mongolian, Thai, Khmer, and Russian.

9 Figure 3 also shows a small jump around the cut-off. To incorporate both jump and kink, we employ regression probability with jump and kink, which was proposed by Dong (2017). The results are presented in the Supplemental Online Appendix.

10 We also tried the quadratic functional form but found that the coefficients of those higher-order polynomials were not significant for all outcome variables regardless of bandwidth choice. To avoid reduced power from over-fitting, we employed linear regression for our analyses.

11 The program suggested different bandwidths for different outcome variables, but the suggested bandwidth was mostly 10–13 months. The program also suggested 8–9 months for the bandwidth below the cut-off and much longer periods (21–36 months) for the bandwidth above the cut-off for non-symmetric MSE optimal bandwidths.

12 The variable is a self-assessed measure of Korean fluency and thus reflects respondents’ subjective confidence in their Korean language ability.

13 We also examined the effects of nationality acquisition on foreign brides from China. Chinese brides are difficult to identify as marriage immigrants due to their long migration history in Korea and their own social networks. We present the RKD estimation results using Chinese brides with an F-2 visa to estimate the impact of nationality acquisition on their empowerment in the Appendix. The results are very different from those for Vietnamese brides. All significant results for Vietnamese marriage immigrants become statistically insignificant. Additionally, the results show that nationality acquisition decreases the probability that they invite their families and raise their voices as foreigners. We interpret these results as their increased mobility to return to their home countries and their assimilation into Korean society.

14 Women having a job or career history is often considered as a measure of women’s empowerment, as employment is likely to increase women’s control over monetary resources. However, marriage immigrants are very likely to undertake paid work in order to provide extra income to their husband’s family. Therefore, we use it as only a supplementary measure of women’s empowerment.

15 We performed robustness test excluding observations with those potential measurement errors and found that our results remained robust.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Korea University Grant.

Notes on contributors

Hanol Lee

Hanol Lee is Professor of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, China since 2017. He received his BA and PhD in Economics from Korea University in 2017. His research interests include human capital, educational mismatch, and the gender gap in labor markets. His works have been appeared in leading international journals such as the Journal of Development Economics.

Dainn Wie

Dainn Wie is Professor of National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, Japan since 2010. She was a visiting research fellow at Asiatic Research Institute at Korea University from 2014 to 2015. She received a BA from Korea University in 2004 and received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2010. Her research interests include wage inequality and technological development in developing countries, the gender wage gap, and international migration. Her works have been appeared in leading international journals such as World Development, Feminist Economics, and Asian Economic Policy Review.