From immigrants to ethnics: The life-worlds of Korean immigrants in Chicago

This study is an exploration of the way in which Koreans' move to the United States since the 1965 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act has influenced their life, their new or modified modes of thinking, and changes in their milieu, taking the life-world experiences of Chicago's Koreans as a case study.This dissertation analyzes Korean immigrants' old world experiences, migration decisions, residential and occupational patterns, familial adjustment, and the Korean community, focusing on a broader theme of the process from immigrants to ethnics, in a social theoretical and historiographical framework. In discussing their adjustment to new situations, we can find out how their old world background and new world socioeconomic situations, under the particular historical circumstance, interacted with each other. This interaction between their past and present provides the basis of their new identity--Korean-American.This study is an amalgam of outsiders' and insiders' views. It is not just a one-sided description of how outsiders look at the lives of Korean immigrants but also an account of how immigrants themselves see their own changing lives and how their worldview shapes their experiences as revealed through in-depth interviews, their own writing, and their community publications.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio