Foreigners or Multicultural

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Foreigners or multicultural
citizens? Press media's
construction of immigrants in
South Korea
Keumjae Park
Published online: 18 Jan 2013.
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To cite this article: Keumjae Park (2014) Foreigners or multicultural citizens? Press
media's construction of immigrants in South Korea, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37:9,
1565-1586, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.758860
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Vol. 37, No. 9, 1565–1586, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.758860
Foreigners or multicultural citizens? Press

media’s construction of immigrants in South
Korea
Keumjae Park
(Received 10 September 2010; accepted 7 December 2012)
This paper examines the ways in which new immigrants to South Korea are
portrayed and constructed in press media. The influx of labour and marriage
migrants from Southeast Asia and China to South Korea since the early 1990s
has been significant enough to cause national concerns about diversity and
the country’s future as a multiethnic society. Mainstream newspapers in South
Korea have been a major shaper of the public opinion of diverse groups of
immigrants whose presence is becoming increasingly visible in this country
with a strong self-image as a mono-ethnic nation. The ways in which these
new immigrants, typically lower class, are constructed in public discourses
expose the nexus of citizenship, class and ethnicity. Using articles from two
major South Korean newspapers between 1990 and 2008 as data, the analysis
highlights the economic and historical contexts in which public discourses on
new immigrants have been formed and transformed.
Keywords: immigrant workers; immigration in Korea; media construction of

immigration; marriage migrants; attitudes towards immigrants; multiculturalism
Introduction
South Korea has experienced a transition from being a primarily
immigrant-sending country to emerging as an immigrant-receiving coun-
try. As a result of significant increase in in-migration in the past two
decades, resident foreigners account for 1.39 million, or 2.75 per cent, of
South Korea’s population at the end of 2011 (Korea Immigration Service
2011). This may be a relatively small number compared to traditionally
immigrant-receiving countries in North America and Europe. However, for
a country that until the early 1990s had had virtually no immigrant
population, the increase from approximately 110,000 non-citizen residents
© 2014 Taylor & Francis

1566 K. Park
in 1995 to nearly 1.4 million today is a twelvefold growth, significant
enough a change to cause a sense of urgency for policy and cultural
responses. Indeed, there has been much talk about the ‘foreigner
population’ in the past twenty years, and several policies have been
introduced to adjust to the changing demography (Kim 2009). This paper
explores some of the questions inspired by recent immigration flows in
Korea: what are the society’s perceptions of immigrants of different
cultures and ethnicities, who now live visibly amongst a hitherto mono-
ethnic population? What are the general contexts of the immigrant
reception in Korea? How are immigrants perceived and treated? Since
press media play important roles in constructing public discourses on

social and political issues such as immigration (Myers and Caniglia 2004;
Bauder 2008a), contents of newspaper articles can serve as critical
indicators addressing these questions. In this paper, I use articles from
two national newspapers in South Korea between 1990 and 2008 to
analyse the ways in which immigration and immigrants have been
discussed in South Korea’s public realms.
South Korea as an immigration-receiving country has unique social
contexts not commonly found in major receiving countries. For example,
Korea has long held the belief of its ‘five-thousand-year history’ of ethnic
homogeneity; introduction of diverse groups requires a fundamental shift
in this ideology of ethnic purity, a core foundation of Korea’s national
identity. In addition, South Korea was a major immigrant-sending country
until the 1980s, and the lived experiences of its diaspora are still vividly
woven into the recent collective memory of the nation. These circum-
stances present some new contextual factors not often found in frequently
studied immigrant-receiving countries of Europe and North America. My
content analysis will highlight how these variables may shape the
changing perception of immigrants in South Korea as reflected in the
press media in the past two decades.
Media construction of immigration

Mass media are arguably one of the most powerful agents in constructing
how we understand important social issues such as immigration. Media are
major sources of information on political and social conditions and,
furthermore, collective opinions gathered and provided by media are often
reified as social reality (Myers and Caniglia 2004). While press media
contents have not been used frequently in studies on immigrants, a few
studies have critically examined press media’s role in shaping public
opinion and general discourses on immigration. For instance, Bauder’s
(2008a) analysis of Canadian press media discourses prior to the
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act 2002 documents the media
discourses on immigration over time and the correlating shifts in the
Ethnic and Racial Studies 1567
political discourses. In this study, Bauder concludes that media debates
have some important impact on policies and laws on immigration.
Similarly, Bauder’s (2008b) study on German immigration law of 2004
also reveals evidences of the influence of media discourses and the
pursuant public debates on this historic legislation, which had been
transformed from the more innovative version in 2001 to a more
conservative piece of law in its final form. Bauder (2008b) also argues
that in their impacts on immigration laws and policies, media discourses
are dynamically linked to significant social events (e.g. occurrence of
high-profile crime or terrorism, human rights violation cases), the contexts
of economic utility and political processes.

Media contents also reflect the construction of public attitudes on
immigration, which are often connected to the local social contexts in
which they were written. For example, Keogan’s (2002) analysis of two US
mainstream newspapers – The New York Times and Los Angeles Times –
found dramatically different regional discourses about immigrants. In Los
Angeles Times, for instance, immigrants were more likely to be portrayed as
economic and cultural threats, whereas more sympathetic attitudes were
founded in the contents of The New York Times. Keogan (2002) argued that
the different public discourses in the two regions were related to the
regional economic contexts and the different immigration histories in the
two areas. Similarly, Galindo and Vigil (2006) studied newspaper editorials
on highly publicized anti-immigration incidents to critically examine the
process by which anti-immigrant nativism is socially constructed through
media. Elsewhere, researchers examined media contents to study immigrant
identity construction (Coutin and Chock 1995), metaphoric representation
of immigration (Ana et al. 2007) and images of immigrants (Chavez 2001)
in newspapers and news magazines. Some of these studies (e.g. Galindo
and Vigil 2006; Ana et al. 2007; Bauder 2008a) found overall negative and
biased tones towards immigrants in major media venues and linked these
tendency to a broader construction of anti-immigrant nativism in the public
discourses.
While some connections between media contents and public attitudes
have been made by the studies mentioned above, critics also caution
against taking media discourses as direct measures of the general
population’s attitudes towards immigration, since media discourses tend
to be controlled by sociopolitical and cultural elite groups and are often
influenced by corporate power (van Dijk 1991). In fact, the ways in which
media discourses relate to public opinion are rather complex, as they are
the product of power dynamics between multiple perspectives of different
groups (van Dijk 1987, 1993). The complex but powerful position that the
media occupy in the process of constructing discourses on policy and
social issues requires a cautionary approach when we use their contents as
data, for they are not a direct reflection of social realities (Ana et al. 2007).
Nevertheless, media contents are artifacts of social discourses that can
1568 K. Park
provide important clues to the trends and the contexts of collective
perspectives on immigrants in a particular society.
Attitudes towards immigrants and the context of their adaption have
also been studied using opinion-survey results as data (e.g. Jones and
Lambert 1967; Stephan et al. 2005; Simon and Sikich 2007). As a more
direction reflection of the population’s attitudes on immigration, survey-
based research provides different types of information that, when
considered together with data on media construction, can inform more
comprehensive understanding of the cultural and social context of
immigrant reception. Survey-based literature is also useful in assessing
the different kinds of collective perspectives that exist in society and thus
provide helpful typologies of discourses in order to examine media
contents.
Recent studies on native population’s responses to immigrants, repre-
sented both in surveys and in media contents, have found a growing trend
of anti-immigration sentiments (Simon and Lynch 1999; Ana et al. 2007;
Simon and Sikich 2007; Bauder 2008b). The predominant theoretical
framework to explain such negative sentiments is the threats thesis
(Stephan et al. 2005), which assumes that antagonistic attitudes towards
immigrants develop as a result of the perception of immigrants as
economic and/or cultural threats. Anti-immigrant attitudes are likely to
be formed when there is a perception of realistic threats, such as
competition over employment opportunities or competition for political
power, or symbolic threats, such as ethnic and cultural difference (Stephan
et al. 2005). Stereotypes and a general anxiety about newcomers can also
promote unfavourable attitudes towards immigrants (Stephan and Stephan
2000). Theoretical insights gained in these studies inform the study of
media discourses and their dynamic relations to the broader economic,
social and cultural contexts in which they are situated.
South Korean contexts of migration reception

The patterns of immigration to South Korea in the past two decades
consist of two main groups: (1) labour immigrants (‘foreign workers’); and
(2) female marriage migrants (‘foreign wives’). According to recent
government statistics, labour migrants account for approximately 48 per
cent of the registered foreigner population in Korea. Women in intermar-
riage with Korean men account for about 11 per cent (Statistics Korea
2009). Since the implementation of the first guest worker programme,
Industrial Trainee System (ITS), in 1992, Korea has steadily imported
unskilled migrant workers from other regions of Asia, however, with
severe restrictions that affect the rights and quality of life of these migrants
(Lee 1997; Lee and Park 2005; Lee and Lee 2007; Kim 2008). In 2004,
the government passed a historic reform (Employment Permit System
(EPS)) that improved the mechanism to protect migrant workers’ labour
and social rights. Since then, Korea’s basic approach to immigration has
been to improve the conditions of documented labour migration while
enforcing a greater crackdown on undocumented workers (Lee and
Park 2005).
Marriage migration of women from China and Southeast Asia has
steadily increased since the mid-1990s. Intermarriages between Korean
women and foreign men (including both documented and undocumented
Asian labour immigrants) also occur; however, the numbers have been
much lower than unions of Korean men and foreign women. What is clear
in these two main patterns of immigration is that the immigrants are

introduced to the Korean society at the lowest rungs of the class structure.
Moreover, their ethnic minority statuses in an overwhelmingly mono-
cultural society create challenging conditions for adaptation. Hence, the
question of how these economic, cultural and historical circumstances are
reflected in the construction of immigrants in the press media is the main
focus of the following content analysis.
Research methods
I drew my sample of articles from two widely circulated national
newspapers in Korea: Chosun Ilbo (Chosun Daily News) and Hankyoreh
sinmun (The Hankyoreh News). Chosun Ilbo (hereafter CS) is the most
widely circulated newspaper in Korea (Korea Press Foundation 2008) and
is well known for its conservative tone. Hankyoreh sinmun (hereafter
HKR) has the seventh largest readership (Korea Press Foundation 2008)
and has a reputation as a leading liberal-to-leftist newspaper. These two
newspapers were chosen to obtain a balance between conservative and
liberal perspectives, as well as for their substantial combined readership.
My data were drawn from two sources. The articles from HKR were
searched using the digital archive of the Korean Integrated News Database
System (KINDS), which is the most comprehensive newspaper article
search service provided by the Korean Press Foundation (2010). Because
CS was not part of the KINDS system, I used the paper’s own online
archive of articles. The time period searched was 1990–2008. While my
data are still those of convenience, this sampling method gave me a
balanced coverage of both conservative and liberal views.
In order to identify the appropriate keywords, I first conducted a pilot
search using several terms to refer to immigrants, such as ‘immigrants’
(iminja), ‘foreigners’ (oegugin), ‘foreign workers’ (oegugin nodongja) and
‘marriage migration’ (gyeolhon imin). The largest number of articles was
found when I used the term ‘foreign workers’ (oegugin nodongja); a
substantial number of stories about marriage immigrants also appeared
under this keyword. For this reason, I used the term ‘foreign workers’
1570 K. Park
(oegugin nodongja) for this study. The articles that appeared using this
keyword included many irrelevant articles, such as stories about immigrant
workers in other countries. I read through the titles of the stories and
selected only the articles about foreigners and immigrants in Korea.
A total of 1,317 articles were obtained through the above methods (554
from CS and 763 from HKR). The analysis of these articles was two-
faceted. The first analysis was a descriptive statistical count of main
themes represented in the articles. By reading the entire contents of the
articles, I identified the main theme for each (such as ‘policies-related
issues’, ‘advocacy and social service issues’, ‘undocumented workers’,
‘crimes and criminalization’ and so on). In this coding process, I grouped

the articles by what I judged to be the most dominant theme in the story
and ignored secondary and less significant themes. Thus, the unit of
analysis was the article in this phase. This analysis highlights the overall
pattern of thematic coverage of the press media and general trends
over time.
In the second phase of the analysis, each story was reviewed in greater
detail in order to identify pre-coded measures of negative and positive
perspectives on immigrants. The majority of the articles were simple
factual reports of events, policies, organizations and people. There were,
however, a substantial number of longer articles on foreign workers and
their communities in which I could identify some type of argumentation or
perspective. I chose only those articles for this phase of analysis. I
developed a six-item coding scheme by modifying Simon and Sikich’s
(2007) attitudinal measures. While my study was fundamentally different
from Simon and Sikich’s study in that mine was not a study of actual
attitudes that people hold, the codes they developed were useful in
differentiating different types of discourses present in the stories. These
codes were also similar to the five-category typology used by Bauder
(2008a) in his analysis of immigration-related newspaper articles. Some
articles had several codes within the story, in which case I counted the
article for all relevant categories. The results are presented in the Findings
section below. Due to the methodological limits of the sample, the scope
of the study remains exploratory.
Trends and themes in newspaper articles: descriptive statistics

Frequencies of articles by year reveal a clear trend over time. As Figure 1
shows, articles on foreign workers barely existed in 1990, and then the
number of articles increased rapidly, reflecting the growing population of
immigrant workers and society’s attention to the issues related to
migration. There was a noticeable drop in the stories on foreign workers
during Korea’s foreign currency crisis and the subsequent economic
recession period (1997–2000) as the lack of jobs in Korea forced many
200
180
160
140
Number of Articles
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Year
Figure 1. Coverage on immigrants (CS and HKR).
workers to leave during this period. The surge between 2002 and 2004
reflects the extensive policy discussions leading toward the 2004 EPS.
Although the number of articles decreased somewhat after 2004, overall,
the number was higher during the 2000s, compared to during the 1990s,
demonstrating the salience of the immigrant population as a new social
issue.
The themes of the articles varied, but the largest number of articles
covered human rights issues and discrimination. Figure 2 summarizes the
thematic distribution identified through the first phase of the content
Figure 2. Distribution of themes.

1572 K. Park
analysis. As is shown in the pie chart, approximately two-thirds of the total
articles were devoted to three themes: (1) human rights and discrimination;
(2) policies and laws; and (3) social service and community events.
Articles focusing on undocumented workers represented 11.7 per cent of
the sample; however, it should be noted that a large number of articles
categorized as human rights issues also included mistreatment of
undocumented immigrants by employers and law enforcement agencies.
Articles about legislation and policy reforms were particularly frequent
during the two years preceding the historic policy reform in 2004 that
introduced the Employment of Foreign Workers Act (EFWA) to provide
full labour law protection for immigrant workers with legal status.
Although relatively small in number, there some articles (3.9 per cent of
the sample) on immigrant women including both women workers and
women who are married to Korean men. Children of immigrants had
rarely been discussed during the 1990s but they began to appear in the
stories from 2000, and much more frequently after 2003. Articles on
immigrant children accounted for 4.3 per cent of the sample, most of
which were stories about their rights to public education and special
community events for immigrant children. Some of the articles lumped
immigrant children and the children of the union between a Korean parent
and a foreigner parent together as ‘children of multicultural families’.
Sometimes immigrants were linked to crime (3.3 per cent), but about one-
fourth of these articles described them as victims of crime. All of the
above themes generally depicted immigrants as victims, or as a group
suffering from extreme economic and social marginalization.
A careful review and coding of paragraphs in the news articles revealed
further patterns. The numbers of articles containing each of the six
attitudinal codes are summarized in Table 1.
In addition to the six attitudinal measures, three additional thematic
codes were identified in the process of analysis, which I include here due
to their relevance to my discussions. These additional codes reflect the
Table 1. Frequencies of attitudinal codes in the articles.
Attitudinal codes Number of articles
1 Immigrants help economy 46

2 Immigrants are victims 282
3 Immigrants are part of Korea 89
4 Immigrants take jobs from Korean workers 25
5 Immigration increases crime and disease 32
6 Immigrants alter ethnic/cultural purity 14
7 Koreans suffered from hardships as labour migrants 24
8 Society should embrace multiculturalism 78
9 Undocumented immigrants’ political organizing is worrisome 13
specific historical and social context of Korea as a new immigrant-
receiving nation. As is shown in Table 1, the additional codes are:
Koreans had suffered from hardships as labour migrants (Code 7); society
should embrace multiculturalism (Code 8); and concerns about undocu-
mented workers’ political organizing (Code 9). In the vast majority of the
feature stories in the sample, immigrants were portrayed as victims of
discrimination, mistreatment and flawed policies. This theme appeared
282 times and was spread throughout the studied period. The accounts
saying that immigrants help national economy and provide necessary
labour (Code 1) outnumbered the perspective that immigrants compete
with Koreans for jobs (Code 4). This indicates that immigrants are
generally not portrayed as a threat, but rather as a necessary group for the
national economy. The overwhelming tone in the stories was that labour
migration is an unavoidable trend, given the state of global economy and
demographic trends in Korea. Interestingly, more than half (n = 13) of the
articles written from the threats perspective (Code 4) were concentrated
in the early period of migration (1990–94), as the nation debated the new
social needs for importing labour. In other words, there had been
concerns about labour migration as a potential threat to Korean workers
in the earlier period, but, once the system was in place, immigrant
workers began to be perceived as being channelled into segmented low-
wage and low-status job categories that Korean workers were reluctant to
accept.
Another notable pattern in the data is the increase in discussions on
social integration and multiculturalism since 2000. In Table 1, the ideas
that immigrants are part of Korea (Code 3) and that Korea needs to
embrace multiculturalism (Code 8) have the second- and third-largest
counts. These two codes only began to appear in the data since 1998
(Code 3) and 2001 (Code 8), indicating that cultural changes may have
been occurring as a result of the presence of foreigners who are settling
down as long-term residents. These two themes were most often
discussed in the stories about the formation of multicultural families
and immigrants’ multiethnic enclaves. Contrary to my expectations,
immigrants were hardly described as cultural/symbolic threats (Code 6).
In the data, all articles containing Code 6 appeared before 1994 and no
article since 1995 expressed antagonistic attitudes to the cultural presence
of immigrants.
In short, the following key issues can be summarized from the
descriptive statistical analysis:
1. Overall, articles expressing sympathy or support towards immi-

grants (Codes 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8) clearly outnumbered unfavourable
attitudes (Codes 4, 5, 6 and 9).
1574 K. Park
2. The Korean press media have not published strong discourses of
immigrants as threats, either as economic or cultural threats.
Immigrants have been mostly portrayed as vulnerable victims.
3. While immigrants had been mostly equated with workers during
the 1990s, after 2003 they began to be viewed as families,
residents and part of a potentially multicultural Korea.
What do these patterns tell us about the way in which immigration is

constructed in the contexts of Korea’s economic and social dynamics?
Below, I engage in more in-depth discussions to address this question.
Discussions: changing perceptions of immigrants as reflected

in the press media
My analysis shows that, in general, immigration is perceived as respond-
ing to Korea’s economic needs and as an unavoidable phenomenon.
Moreover, immigrants – workers and marriage migrants alike – have been
widely portrayed as victims of racism, exploitation, violence and general
human rights violations. This is clearly established by the large number of
articles on the human rights of immigrants. To better illustrate the contrast
between negative and positive perspectives on immigrants, I recoded my
nine attitudinal codes into four dominant argument types (Bauder 2008b):
(1) economic needs; (2) humanitarianism; (3) threats; and (4) multi-
culturalism/multiethnicity.
Figure 3 shows the trends in these four types of argumentation in the
articles surveyed. Overall, economic needs and humanitarian discourses
outweigh the other two types of argument. In particular, the historical
Figure 3. Argumentation types by year.

trends show that the peaks of economic needs and humanitarian arguments
paralleled the highest rates of undocumented immigrants, between 1995
and 1996, and between 2001 and 2003, which is right before the
introduction of EPS and a connected amnesty programme (Table 2).
Moreover, a tone of advocacy was clearly present, as immigrants were
viewed as a disenfranchised and socially marginalized group in need of
protection, support and social service programmes. For example, an
opinion column that appeared in CS wrote:
Industrial Trainee System was originally implemented to resolve the labor

shortage in small- and mid-size-manufacturing firms, however, the system

has deviated from the original purpose of the policy and has now become a
tool for exploitation. Human rights violations and the breaking of the
contracts have been serious problems in our society…We should prepare
mechanisms, both in policies and in our treatments, to care for foreign
Table 2. Immigration-related policies and events.
Date Policies Major events
1993 Industrial Trainee System (ITS)

1995 The minimum wage applied to foreign
workers
1997– Penalty waived for undocumented Foreign currency crisis and
98 workers who voluntarily leave Korea economic recession
2000 Two-year training + one-year
employment programme
2001 9/11 in the USA
2003 Foreign Workers’ Employment Act Undocumented rates peaked at 49%
passed
Amnesty programme applied to
undocumented immigrants who met
conditions
2004 Foreign Workers’ Employment Act
and Employment Permit System
(EPS) implemented
Establishment of Committee on
Foreigner Policies
2005 Department of Labour denied
foreign workers’ labour union
Haxane poisoning of eight

immigrant women workers drew
criticism on the treatment of labour
migrants
2007 Termination of ITS Fire at Yeosu Immigration
Deportation Centre killing nine
undocumented workers
2008 Support for Multicultural Families Economic recession following
Act I (revised in 2010) financial market crisis in the USA
Source: http://www.eps.go.kr; http://www.chosun.co.kr; http://www.index.co.kr.

1576 K. Park
workers who live their daily lives amongst us and to provide an
environment for humane treatments…Ultimately, we must not treat labor
importation as a way of addressing our economic needs for 3-D industries,
but as a way of making broader connections between countries. (Chosun
Ilbo, 11 January 1995)
According to the articles on social service and community events analysed,

community agencies routinely hold charity events and provide legal,
medical and educational service programmes to help immigrant workers
and their families. In these articles, ‘foreign workers’ were usually
identified as one of the most disadvantaged groups in Korean society,

similarly marginalized and isolated as elderly people without family and
child heads of households. For instance, ‘Warm Harvest Festival for
Foreigners and the Poor’ was the title of an article in CS (8 September
2008) about various charity organizations’ holiday-sharing events.
It should be noted, however, that the prevailing discourse of victimiza-
tion in the newspapers does not mean that society as a whole has accepted
immigrants with entirely favourable attitudes. The fact that so many
articles have been dedicated to human rights violation and mistreatment
indicates the contrary; discrimination has been widespread and has been
recognized as a social problem. Examples of mistreatment most often
mentioned in the articles include below-minimum wages, withholding
wages by employers, exposure to work-related hazards, untreated injuries,
lack of health care, beating by Korean employers and co-workers, and
overall racism and denigration by Korean citizens. The newspaper articles
and op-ed pieces surveyed frequently ‘admonished’ these patterns of
behaviour by the public, signalling the press media’s attempt to shape
society’s morality. The reports of victimization began to decrease
gradually after the implementation of the EPS in 2004, as doors opened
for a large number of immigrant workers to obtain legal status and have
access to labour law protection.
Public debates about immigration policies and laws, which account for
20 per cent of the sample, show that Korean government’s policies have
evolved to offer the protection of immigrants’ human rights and labour
rights and to expand opportunities for longer-term and lawful stays in
Korean society. Although my methodology does not allow me to make a
causal link, it is conceivable that public concerns about the inhumane
treatment of immigrant workers might have influenced the directions of
policy changes somewhat, given that the peaks in humanitarian discourses
generally preceded policy changes in the mid- 1990s and early 2000s
(Figure 3). An interesting pattern is that major changes in immigration
laws, such as ITS and EPS, also coincided with moderate increases in
threats discourse (Figure 3). Thus, the periods leading to major reforms
appear to be times of competing perspectives and mobilization. As
indicated earlier, CS and HKR represent different positions in the political
spectrum. When I compared the conservative and liberal perspectives
(Figures 4 and 5), two interesting patterns emerged. Overall, HKR ran
more articles on humanitarian concerns than CS. The number of threats
argumentations remains similar in the two newspapers during most of
the period surveyed. However, an ironic pattern was observed in the
earlier half of the 1990s; while HKR ran more articles on the human
rights of immigrant workers, it was also HKR that showed more threats
argumentation than the more conservative CS. This paradoxical tend-
ency by HKR is similar to what scholars have often found in the
positions taken by political liberals towards immigration. For instance,
in her analysis of political discourses around immigration in South

Korea, Nora Heejung Kim (2008) found a coexistence of advocacy
and human rights arguments for immigrants and a preference of
ethnic Koreans as a favoured category of immigrants over other ethnic
groups, in a practice that Joppke (2003) termed ‘de-ethnicization’ and
‘re-ethnicization’.
When I examined the articles in HKR, I discovered that the threats
articles featured in HKR represented the voices of labour unions,
especially in the manufacturing and construction sectors, which warned
about the unforeseeable effects of cheap immigrant workers on the blue-
collar labour market. Good examples of this would be HKR’s column
article published on 2 March 1990 and one in 19 November 1993:
Since the government decided to expand ITS quotas in order to respond to

the severe labour shortage problem of the manufacturing industry, there has
been a rising concern about unemployment and the distortion of the labour
market. If the Ministry of Commerce and Resources increases the current
annual quota of industrial trainees from 9,000 to 20,000, as it is planning to
in order to address the needs for workers in 3-D (dangerous, difficult, and
dirty) jobs, it is expected to relieve some of the problems faced by
Figure 4. Humanitarian discourses in CS and HKR by year.

1578 K. Park
Figure 5. Economic needs discourse in CS and HKR by year.
employers. However, in the longer run, this policy is likely to increase

unemployment of Korean workers and undermine their opportunity
structures (HKR 19 November 1993).
As such, the attention of the Korean press media to immigration and

immigrant workers fluctuated over time, with emphasis placed on different
types of argumentation. While media analysis itself does not allow me to
establish a causal relationship between media contents and actual social
dynamics, the data presented in this study offer grounds for three possible
explanations as to why immigrants are constructed in this particular way.
First explanation is the social construction of immigrant workers as
serving Korea’s economic needs at the lowest rungs of economic
stratification. South Korea has ultra-low fertility rates and very high levels
of education. According to 2009 statistics, 39 per cent of the adult
population has at least some college education; this number exceeds the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
average (Statistics Korea 2009). Given Koreans’ strong cultural preference
for white-collar work, labour shortage in the least desirable categories of
job is easily understandable. Consistent with growing public perception,
the official statistics reported in 1991 an overall labour shortage of 5.5 per
cent, but the percentage was much greater in industries typically perceived
as difficult and high-risk work. In this demographic context, the
introduction of an immigrant guest worker programme was a deliberate
policy choice, although debated at first. This policy at its inception was
presented through campaigns by the government and industries as a
necessary measure for the national economy which was beginning to lose
its competitive advantage as a low-cost manufacturing centre of global
economy to China and Southeast Asian countries. Rapidly expanding
service sectors and Korea’s construction boom at the time also required
low-cost labour and the shortage of such labour was clearly established in
public discourses. Reflecting these circumstances, only a few opposing
articles to the initial ITS were found in the data (mostly in HKR, which
represents more favourable views on labour unions) on the ground of
unpredictable impacts on the Korean labour market. Some early articles
before 1994 worried about future problems with cultural integration, and
none presented alternative ways to fill the labour shortage in the lower-
skilled manufacturing and service sectors. However, the economic logic
appears to be influenced by political ideologies to a certain extent. For
instance, during Asia’s foreign currency crisis and subsequent economic
recession between 1996 and 1998, the conservative CS was completely

silent about the economic benefits of immigrant labour, while HKR still
discussed how immigrant workers were a critical part of Korea’s
struggling small firms (Figure 5).
The second explanation is that foreign workers are generally perceived
by the Korean people as being concentrated in clearly defined bottom
rungs of the labour market. They have been considered as too margin-
alized to become a threat to native workers. Indeed, Korea has been an
extremely closed system for upward social mobility for foreigners. For
instance, a comprehensive survey of multiethnic families conducted in
2009 reports that over 60 per cent of multiethnic families have a monthly
income below 2 million Korean won, or US$1,600, which is approxi-
mately 58 per cent of the average monthly income of Korean households
(Kim et al. 2009). The average earnings of immigrant workers is less than
those of Korean workers at the bottom 10 per cent of the earnings ranking
in 2010, according to a report by Work in Korea (2010), an advocacy
organization. Several structural factors contribute to the current economic
and social disadvantages that immigrants face. For instance, both the ITS
and the EPS, under which foreign workers have immigrated, are highly
restrictive policies that make it very easy for them to lose visa status and
become vulnerable undocumented immigrants. The work visas tend to be
very short; it was initially one year without extension with the initial ITS,
and no longer than three years even with the first EPS in 2004. However, a
large number of workers who had paid large sums of brokerage fees to
come to Korea were in debt, or they were in dire need of supporting their
families back home for a longer term. Moreover, the policies prohibited
workers from switching jobs, and leaving their initially contracted
employer would immediately forfeit their legal visa status. According to
the patterns found in the news stories, the vast majority of workers
defected from their initial employer due to routine withholding of wages,
or in search for a better wage. Simply put, few structural channels have
existed for immigrant workers to maintain legal status and build financial
security in Korean society. Given the relatively small number of
immigrants in the population and the overall perception of immigrants as
1580 K. Park
isolated and socio-economically disadvantaged groups, a discourse of
competition or threat is unlikely.
The third historical factor that might explain the prevailing victims
discourse is Korean society’s collective consciousness on human rights
norms and a strong tradition of labour movement, both of which are the
products of Korea’s struggles for democratization throughout its contem-
porary history. The substandard working and living conditions of immig-
rant workers at the bottom rungs of Korea’s social stratification system and
their vulnerable immigration status has caught the attention of human rights
activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) since the early stages
of ITS, according to the articles in the sample. The two newspapers

studied here began to publish critical articles on human rights violation
and discriminatory treatment of foreign workers almost immediately after
the guest worker programme started. The vast majority of these articles
relied on accounts and statistics provided by human rights activists and
advocacy groups. In particular, some of the key advocates interviewed
multiple times by the two newspapers over the years had a personal
history of activism for democracy and social justice during the 1970s and
1980s. This finding is consistent with existing studies (e.g. Kim 2003;
Chung 2010) that have identified the roles of pro-immigrant activist
groups as key agents in shaping Korea’s policies on immigrants. In
addition, the news stories often compared the poor working conditions of
immigrant workers with those of Korean workers in export-processing
zones just a decade or two before, who had suffered from similarly
exploitative treatments. Hence, the widespread awareness of human rights
standards, which had been earned through decades of democratic social
movement, may explain in part the framing of immigrant workers as
victims of rights violations.
As I had expected, the data indicated that Korea’s recent history as a
sending country during the 1970s and 1980s may be influencing
empathetic attitudes towards immigrants. As shown in Table 1, reminders
that Korean labour migrants suffered similar hardships and discrimination
in foreign countries appeared twenty-four times in the sample. There were
several op-ed pieces written by Koreans who had lived in other countries
as labour migrants, comparing their own experiences as migrant labourers
and the current situation of immigrants in Korea. For example, an op-ed
article in CS in 2000 wrote:
I read the column on the human rights violation of foreign workers, ‘‘We
Were Slaves,’’ published on May 24th. In May of 1985, I landed in
Argentina with a 3-month tourist visa. I am writing this with great sadness
because what I experienced in the Korean immigrant community in
Argentina was very similar to the exploitation of foreign workers we see
today…I ask the employers to treat foreign workers kindly so that they
would bring with them a good impression of Korea when they return to their
families. (Op-ed in CS, 3 June 2000)
This pattern suggests that, in newly emerging immigration destinations

like Korea, a theoretical consideration for historical variables such as a
recent collective experience as an immigrant-sending society is necessary.
Perhaps the most provocative finding in this analysis is the shift from
the treatment of immigrant workers as ‘foreign workers’ to ‘resident
foreigners’, ‘immigrant workers’ or ‘immigrants’ since 2000. These terms
are more inclusive than the common words used in the 1990s, such as
‘foreigners’ or ‘foreign workers’. The new terms with a connotation of

settlement and inclusion began to appear in the data in 1999. The changes
in the language, I argue, represent a critical shift in the prevailing public
discourse and the perspective of opinion leaders. During the 1990s, the
presence of immigrant workers was confined to industrial areas and they
were treated strictly as cultural and ethnic ‘foreigners’ and temporary
sojourners. Indeed, the core essence of both ITS and EPS had precisely
been the prevention of immigrants’ settlement in Korea as permanent
members (Kim 2009). Two issues should be considered as possible
sources of such changes in public discourses. One is an awareness of
demographic changes. Rapidly growing numbers of immigrants forming
families with Korean citizens and bi-ethnic children are a stark contrast to
Korea’s extremely low fertility rates and its ageing population (Kim 2009).
Continuing labour shortage is also expected, and articles in the data often
linked these demographic projections to the inevitability of the increasing
settlement of immigrants in the future. Indeed, the argumentation on
multicultural Korea and embracing resident foreigners as part of Korean
society became increasingly more common after the early 2000s, both in
CS and HKR (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Multiculturalism/multiethnicity discourse in CS and HKR by year.

1582 K. Park
My analysis shows that Korean society not only began to pay attention
to the changing demographic trends, but is even taking some active
measures to prepare itself for the possibility of a multiethnic population in
the future.
The other contextual factor for the openness towards multiculturalism
may be the country’s positive perspectives on globalization. Led by the
Kim Young Sam administration in the early 1990s as the country’s
strategic plan, Korean society has mobilized itself tirelessly to participate
in the globalizing society both economically and culturally. For example,
many of the articles criticized the ‘narrow world view’ of traditional
Korean society and advocated the need to socialize itself to international

standards of civility. Since 2000, frequent publication of op-ed pieces by
experts and economic and political leaders of Korean society has presented
the argument that multiculturalism is the global trend. These articles in the
data often criticized Korean society’s deep-seated racism, which manifests
itself as ‘double standards’ – overly kind treatment of white Americans
and Europeans and mistreatment of other Asians as second-rate citizens –
towards different groups of foreigners. Policies regarding naturalization
and citizenship are also changing. The Korean government has changed its
immigration policies to open possibilities for qualified foreign workers to
acquire Korean citizenship and to add protective measures for women
marriage immigrants (Lee 2008). Thus, my data indicate that a shift may
be occurring in the ideology of mono-ethnic culture and ethnic purity as
Korean society is transformed by migration, intermarriage and its
initiatives in globalization.
Would the changes in policies and increasing social acceptance of
immigration in the past ten years eventually pave a way for more open
system for immigrants in Korea? Would immigrants be perceived as an
economic threat in the future if they gradually begin to move upwardly
under changing structural conditions? These are vexing theoretical
questions that beg further investigations through longitudinal studies.
One notable pattern was found in my analysis, which may be related to
this question. I pay attention to the fact that thirteen articles in the sample,
published after 2000, contained concerns about or objections to immi-
grants’ organizing. An article in the sample predicted that immigrants are
becoming the ‘political minority’ (Lee, column article in CS, 26 March
2007, emphasis added). These were stories in reaction to what some
considered as political activities by foreign workers, such as organized
resistance to arrests by undocumented workers and the formation of the
first labour union among immigrant workers in 2005. These concerns were
more frequent (n = 11) in the conservative CS. These voices of concern
could be an indication that the dominant discourses of victimization could
possibly give way to more conservative tones, if immigrants’ political
empowerment occurs in the future.
Conclusions
The South Korean case provides some unique historical and social
contexts that shed further light on existing theories and empirical findings
on the reception of immigrants in host countries. Korea is in a transitional
period from being an immigrant-sending country to a newly emerging
immigrant-receiving country. How this shift may shape society’s eco-
nomic, social and cultural contexts of the reception of immigrants is a
question rarely studied in the literature. My discourse analysis found that
Koreans’ collective memories of their experiences as hard-working labour
migrants in past decades often influenced more sympathetic views towards

immigrants. While exploratory in scope, the present study adds a number
of new insights to our general theoretical understanding of how images of
immigrants are discursively constructed in host societies. For instance, the
Korean case demonstrates that the image of danger is likely to be weak
when citizens perceive in-migration as the product of their policy choice to
address needs in the national economy, and not as the result of self-
motivated immigrants who simply want to come to a richer country for
opportunities. Moreover, immigrants are more likely to be portrayed as
victims, rather than a threat, when they are perceived to be channelled into
the lowest rungs of society, with little room for upward mobility. While
this is beyond the scope of this study, the possible relationship I found
between strong general human rights discourses and perspectives on
immigrants may deserve more systematic study in the future. Similar
historical precedence can be also found in the USA, where significant
1965 immigration law reform was preceded by the civil rights movement.
How would the host country’s experiences with, or lack thereof,
diversity affect perceptions of immigrants is another question explored in
this study. While I had anticipated a strong discourse of cultural threat to
Korea’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity, I found evidence to the contrary.
My data show that the language used to describe immigrants in Korea is
changing from ‘foreigners’ to ‘residents’ and ‘immigrants’, who are
becoming part of a nation that is on the verge of cultural and demographic
transformation. The term ‘multicultural citizens’ has also emerged,
although this is often more exclusively used to refer to marriage migrants
and their children than to migrant workers. A future study focusing on
multiculturalism in particular can shed further light on the ideological
construction of multiculturalism around different groups of immigrants.
My data provide some contextual explanations about this changing view,
including low fertility and projection of demographic changes, increasing
intermarriages and Korea’s openness to globalization.
Limits of my study must be acknowledged. My sample from only two
national newspapers is not representative of all press media content during
this period and therefore the findings are exploratory. More importantly,
media content is not a direct measure of the public’s attitudes and therefore
1584 K. Park
cannot be used comparatively with survey data. The analysis of ideolo-
gical construction of immigration requires more sophisticated data, which
is beyond the scope of this study. A systematic comparison of natives’
perception of different groups of immigrants would be helpful in the future
to refine the findings of this study. The case of women marriage migrants
deserves greater attention. The gendered phenomenon of rapidly growing
intermarriage is a crucial demographic question for Korea’s social change.
The data in this study did not capture the range of articles on marriage
migrants whose reception is shaped by complex dynamics of class and
gender. These future inquiries will not only help to understand the social
changes in Korea but will add much to the existing scholarship on the
interplay between the sending and receiving contexts of immigration.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been supported by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’
Summer Research Stipend Program at William Paterson University. The author
would like to thank the members of William Paterson University’s Writing Group,
and the anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their insightful
comments.
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KEUMJAE PARK is Associate Professor of Sociology at William

Paterson University.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, William Paterson University,
Wayne, New Jersey, 07470, USA. Email: parkk4@wpunj.edu

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Foreigners or multicultural citizens? Press

(Received 10 September 2010; accepted 7 December 2012)

Keywords: immigrant workers; immigration in Korea; media construction of

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

press media play important roles in constructing public discourses on

Media construction of immigration

of economic utility and political processes.

South Korean contexts of migration reception

in these two main patterns of immigration is that the immigrants are

‘crimes and criminalization’ and so on). In this coding process, I grouped

Trends and themes in newspaper articles: descriptive statistics

Figure 1. Coverage on immigrants (CS and HKR).

Figure 2. Distribution of themes.

Table 1. Frequencies of attitudinal codes in the articles.

Attitudinal codes Number of articles

1 Immigrants help economy 46

1. Overall, articles expressing sympathy or support towards immi-

What do these patterns tell us about the way in which immigration is

Discussions: changing perceptions of immigrants as reflected

Figure 3. Argumentation types by year.

Industrial Trainee System was originally implemented to resolve the labor

shortage in small- and mid-size-manufacturing firms, however, the system

Table 2. Immigration-related policies and events.

Date Policies Major events

1993 Industrial Trainee System (ITS)

Haxane poisoning of eight

Source: http://www.eps.go.kr; http://www.chosun.co.kr; http://www.index.co.kr.

According to the articles on social service and community events analysed,

identified as one of the most disadvantaged groups in Korean society,

in her analysis of political discourses around immigration in South

Since the government decided to expand ITS quotas in order to respond to

Figure 4. Humanitarian discourses in CS and HKR by year.

Figure 5. Economic needs discourse in CS and HKR by year.

employers. However, in the longer run, this policy is likely to increase

As such, the attention of the Korean press media to immigration and

recession between 1996 and 1998, the conservative CS was completely

of ITS, according to the articles in the sample. The two newspapers

This pattern suggests that, in newly emerging immigration destinations

‘foreigners’ or ‘foreign workers’. The new terms with a connotation of

Figure 6. Multiculturalism/multiethnicity discourse in CS and HKR by year.

Korean society and advocated the need to socialize itself to international

migrants in past decades often influenced more sympathetic views towards

KEUMJAE PARK is Associate Professor of Sociology at William

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