The side doors of immigration: multi-tier migration regimes in Japan and South Korea

Abstract

South Korea and Japan have among the lowest levels of international migration among all rich democracies. While both countries enacted far-reaching democratic reforms in their recent histories, their immigration policies remained relatively stagnant. This article examines how South Korea and Japan’s de jure and de facto migration policies have enabled both states to maintain low levels of immigration while meeting labour demands through the proliferation of visa categories. Because each visa category comes with its own set of rights, migrant claims have centred on the circumscribed rights of their individual visa statuses that have, in turn, institutionalised noncitizen hierarchies within each country. Migration governance in South Korea and Japan thus reflects not liberal convergence but, rather, multi-tier migration regimes that extend generous institutionalised rights to some categories of migrants and exclude others from permanent settlement. Rather than assume that the liberalisation of immigration policies is an inevitable outcome of political liberalisation, or view specific immigration policy reforms as indicators of broad liberalisation, the two cases caution us to recognise that liberal migration regimes are far from becoming the universal model among democratic countries.

Keywords:

• Migration and refugees
• civil society
• democratisation
• ethnicity and diaspora
• Northeast Asia

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Katharina Natter, Hélène Thiollet, Els van Dongen, other participants at the Workshop on the ‘Politics of Migration Policies’ held at SciencesPo in December 2018, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article uses the terms ‘immigrant’, ‘migrant’ and ‘foreign resident’ interchangeably as a heuristic tool to compare policies and movements pertaining to foreign nationals across countries with a variety of citizenship regimes. Foreign nationals in these cases may refer to temporary migrants (who are not eligible for permanent settlement), long-term immigrants or multiple generations of native-born foreign residents, including former colonial subjects and their descendants.

2 Reforms in 1982 conferred greater residential security to Chōsen nationals who were designated ‘exceptional’ permanent residents (tokurei eijū). The two categories (kyotei eijyū and tokurei eijū) were unified with the 1990 revisions to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which established the legal category of ‘special permanent resident’ (tokubetsu eijūsha) to cover all former colonial subjects and their descendants.

3 The fingerprinting requirement was reinstated for all foreign residents except for those with special permanent resident status in 2007.

4 The term Hwagyo, or huaqiao in Chinese, is used in reference to overseas Chinese. In Korea, this term is reserved for descendants of Chinese settlers in Korea (who later became Taiwanese nationals) following the 1882 trade agreement between Joseon Korea and Qing China that gave Chinese merchants land rights in the port cities of Busan, Incheon and Wonsan (Lee 2002; Choi 2008).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this project was funded by the 2008 Abe Fellowship, awarded by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in cooperation with and with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Centre for Global Partnership, on Immigrant Incorporation in Ethnic Democracies: Citizenship Regimes and Noncitizen Political Participation in Japan and Korea, Erin Chung, PI; the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies [AKS-2018-LAB-2250001]; and the Agence Française de Développement/French Development Agency [grant number IRS/ECO/492-2018].

Notes on contributors

Erin Aeran Chung

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She previously served as the director of the East Asian Studies Program and co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program at Hopkins. She specialises in East Asian political economy, international migration and comparative racial politics. She is the author of Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Japanese translation by Professor Atsuko Abe, Akashi Shoten, 2012) and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of the Politics and Society of East Asia Elements series at Cambridge University Press. Her research has been supported by grants from the Academy of Korean Studies, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Foundation Centre for Global Partnership, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies.