Migrant racialization in South Korea: class and nationality as the central narrative

This article examines the significance of class and nationality in relation to South Korea’s migrant integration policy and the racialization of migrant groups within everyday policy practices. As an emergent destination country for regional migration, South Korea offers an interesting case to look at the specific mechanisms through which different migrant groups are received by the “native” ethnic majority, relative to shifting demographic circumstances and the politics of national belonging. Drawing on ethnographic data from state-sponsored migrant integration centers and in-depth interviews with migrants and Korean staff, this article shows how a hierarchy of different ethnic/national migrant groups is established through a logic of class and conferred cultural values, determined largely by conceptions about the economic status of the migrants’ country of origin. The intersection of class and nationality in everyday narratives generates the racialized framing of migrant “others” and crucially informs migrants’ diverging experience of integration in Korea.