Making Migrants: Policy Communities and Immigration Policymaking in South Korea

In less than a decade, South Korea transformed from a country of non-immigration with exclusionary citizenship policies to an avowed “multicultural society” with sweeping immigration reforms. Dominant approaches to immigration liberalization claim that states extend rights to migrants either according to international norms, elite calculations, or civil society mobilization. However, these explanations cannot account for Korea’s differential expansion of rights to different migrants. Korea has extended legal protections to migrant workers as a response to human rights advocacy, but restricted stay to short periods via its control-oriented guest worker program. Overseas Koreans receive different residency and work permission in Korea depending on their country of origin. And the state has created a novel migrant category—marriage migrants, or persons who immigrate for the express purpose of marrying a Korean national—and elevated this group as the outsized beneficiaries of social welfare programs and entitlements, some which surpass those available to Korean citizens. To explain these variations, this dissertation builds on studies of policy communities and takes a disaggregated approach to analyzing South Korea’s immigration policymaking. Rather than assume policymakers or civil society actors are united in their interests or frames vis-à-vis immigration policies, this dissertation explores how the meso-level interactions among bureaucrats, private sector firms, NGOs, think tanks, academics, and migrant groups shape debates, agendas, and outcomes regarding immigrant policies in different issue areas. As a result, South Korea, like other industrialized democracies, has made not one immigration policy, but several types of immigration policies targeting specific migrant groups and policy issues. Based on archival research, public documents, and ten months of immersive fieldwork in the greater Seoul metropolitan area from 2017 to 2019, this dissertation demonstrates how policy community dynamics can produce restrictive policies for some migrants while simultaneously expanding rights and social benefits for others