https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6542-1055
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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of several people. At the University of Toronto, Michael Donnelly, Lior Sheffer, Joseph Wong, and Zain Asaf offered helpful feedback and advice in the research design stage. Aram Hur (University of Missouri) and Stephen Epstein (Victoria University of Wellington) provided valuable comments on an earlier draft. The entire project team at Delvinia in Toronto delivered crucial programming assistance and survey management, specifically Nicole Caldaraelli, Grace Choe, and Roy Gonsalves. Lastly, we are grateful for the constructive criticism and comments from two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Replication material can be accessed at GitHub: https://github.com/scdenney/Korea_list_experiments.
Notes
1 A term meaning those North Koreans who escape from their country and resettle in South Korea. We use the term in this paper without any intent to transmit a political message of any kind; only, ‘defector-migrant’ conveys the wide range of possible motivations behind acts of abandoning North Korea for a different life in the South; it achieves this more accurately, we believe, than either ‘defector’ or ‘migrant’ (though we occasionally use ‘migrant’ for readability), the neologism ‘saetomin’, meaning ‘new settler’, or ‘Bukhan ital jumin’, meaning ‘resident [of South Korea] who left North Korea’.
2 Authors’ interview with North Korean defector-migrant, Seoul, ROK, June 2016.
3 Sample size limitations preclude us from exploring treatment effects for the Chinese Korean group.
4 Korea Immigration Service, http://www.index.go.kr/potal/main/EachDtlPageDetail.do?idx_cd=2756 (last accessed August 4, 2019).
5 Immigration data is based on 2017 numbers provided by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and 2018 data from the Ministry of Unification on defector-migrants.
6 Growth rates will nonetheless decline, but on current trends, only through the introduction of an immigrant population equating to around one-third of the entire population will economic stagnation be avoided post-2050.
7 World Bank data. See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2018&locations=KR&start=1961&view=chart
8 This would equate to a more than four-fold increase in the number of foreign workers and would result in non-Koreans accounting for approximately 10% of the population.
9 This can be viewed as a function of co-ethnic capital (cf. Kim Citation2016).
10 It is true that there are some differences between the dialects of Korean spoken in North and South, but the two are still recognizably variations of Korean and mutually understood with only modest effort.
11 It is important to note that unlike other co-ethnic migrants and other migrant groups, this group is also accepted unconditionally by the South Korean state, becoming citizens by right under the constitution. This normative component cannot be omitted from consideration.
12 Although those Chinese Koreans who migrate to South Korea for work, study, or marriage usually do speak Korean – a dialect inflected by a history of migration from nearby Hamgyeong Province – they do not share the same constitutionally mandated right to Republic of Korea citizenship, and many report being treated more like migrant labor than part of the national fabric. Their treatment is primarily a reflection of Korean economic needs, but China’s role is also salient. See Choi (Citation2016, 256–258) and Seol and Skrentny (Citation2009).
13 Similar techniques include endorsement experiments (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro Citation2011) and the randomized response technique (Warner Citation1965; Blair, Imai, and Zhou Citation2015). The research presented here uses only the list experiment.
14 Exact question wording and an overview of the descriptive statistics for the direct questions are provided in Appendices A and B of the Supplementary Information (SI) document for this article.
15 Using the most recent census (2015), quotas based on age, gender, and geography were set for the opt-in panels. All respondents are native-born Koreans and currently reside in the country. See Appendix A in the Supplementary Information for more information.
16 The list-direct comparisons were subjected to a means tests of differences, an integrated function part of the ‘list’ package in R we used to conduct our analysis. Fore more, see: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/list/list.pdf
17 See Appendix A for specific question wording and variable construction.
18 To determine whether we reject the null hypothesis of no design effect, we use the proposed statistical tests set forth by Blair and Imai (Citation2012, 62–65), finding no evidence of design effects. Further, examining the distribution of responses for the list experiments across the control and treatment (see Appendix B), we also conclude that there are no ceiling or floor effects.
19 Results from balance testing for the combined samples is provided in Appendix B.
20 South Koreans who go into higher education (which varies at around 70 percent of those eligible) spend four years in university, and few combine education and employment (OECD Citation2019). Males must additionally spend a maximum of one year and nine months in the military. Graduates therefore generally enter the workforce later than in other countries, at or around mid- to late-20s. The early 30s are thus initial, prime working years of young South Koreans, and this is evident from the difference in labor force participation rates between South Koreans in their 20s, only 60% of whom were engaged in economic activity in March 2020, whereas rates for people in their 30s-50s were all nearly 80%, with a steep drop post-60 to 43% (Statistics Korea Citation2020).