scholarly journals Who should be admitted? Conjoint analysis of South Korean attitudes toward immigrants

Ethnicities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146879682091660
Author(s):  
Steven Denney ◽  
Christopher Green

South Korea is slowly but steadily becoming a country of immigrants. In 1998, there were barely 300,000 foreign residents in South Korea. As of 2018, there were more than 2.3 million. The immigrant population has yet to reach 5% of the total population, but it is predicted to rise significantly in the years to come. Despite the increase in newcomers, it is not well understood who native South Koreans prefer as immigrants and why. Are immigrant attitudes motivated by co-ethnic solidarity, or are they primarily based on economic and sociotropic concerns? To isolate attitudes on these crucial questions, this research uses a conjoint experiment that simultaneously tests the influence of seven immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Our results show that broad sociotropic concerns largely drive attitudes towards immigrants in South Korea, but an immigrant’s origin also matters. Prospective newcomers from culturally similar and higher-status countries who can speak Korean and have clear plans to work are most preferred. The research findings will be relevant to the comparative study of immigration attitudes, as well as to researchers interested in the specifics of the South Korean case.

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Lankov

This article deals with the problems of North Korean defectors currently living in South Korea. In the past, most such defectors came from privileged groups in the North Korean population, and their adjustment to the new environment did not pose a significant problem. However, from the mid-1990s, defectors began to come from the far less privileged groups. They experience serious problems related to jobs, education, crime, and social adjustment. Recent years have seen a dramatic but not always openly stated change in the official South Korean attitude toward defectors: from a policy explicitly aimed at encouraging defection, Seoul has moved to the policy of quietly discouraging it. There are fears that encouraging defection will undermine the policy of peaceful engagement with the North. There is also the perception that refugees are outsiders, not quite adjustable to the conditions of South Korean society and thus a social and budgetary burden.


Author(s):  
Matthew W. Finkin

This article proceeds in four stages. First, it takes up the emergence of labour law and its comparative offspring as a discipline. Second, it provides a crude taxonomy of comparative labour law scholarship. Third, it treats the role comparativism has played in the development of national labour policy from the nineteenth century to the present. Fourth, and to come full circle, it situates the comparative study with respect to the contemporary quandary of labour law as a discipline. Comparative labour law was born fast upon the construction of labour law as a subject of instruction and academic study. Even from the beginning, however, it was far from clear what labour law was. Today, that question has recrudesced: labour law is a discipline in search of an identity and, to some, a future. Consequently, attention rightly turns first to the root of which comparative study is a branch.


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