Public Perception of Migrants: Impact of Multicultural Policy in Japan and Korea

• In Event: Migration and Citizenship in East Asia

Abstract

Do national migration policies impact natives’ perception of migrants? Past researches on public perception have predominantly focused on North American and European countries. By instead shedding light on Japan and South Korea, our study aims to investigate how migration policies impact people’s migration attitudes in East Asia. We purposefully select these two countries due to their economic, demographic, and ideological similarities. Their migration policies emerged in the midst of their rapid economic growths (in the 1980s and 1990s respectively) due to subsequent labor shortages. Consequently, their migration policies resemble great similarities, breeding analogous outcomes and concerns. Additionally, both countries have a long history as ‘ethnic nationalist regimes’ that do not consider themselves ‘immigrant countries.’ In the meantime, migration policies of the two countries reveal one conspicuous difference – While South Korea has initiated series of national multicultural policies to integrate female marriage migrants and their children, Japan has instead focused on significance of labor migrants. Thus, a comparison of the two countries allows us to control for potential confounding variables while more accurately measuring the actual impact of national migration policies.

In order to test whether this policy difference yields any impact on public perception in viewing different migrant types, we conduct framing and conjoint analyses based on original survey experiments in both Japan and South Korea (2020). The importance of our experiment is two-folds. First, we give different treatments, framing respondents by providing different information about governmental policies on migrants. Our purpose is to gauge if targeted migrant group influences people’s perceptions (if so, positively or negatively), and if there is a gap between the two countries. Second, we present our comparative study on migration policies of Japan and South Korea, and how they impact public perception of various types of migrants. We do so by examining our survey experiment results based on conjoint analysis. This method allows us to parse out different levels of public tolerance toward comparable migrant types cross-nationally while reducing social desirability bias.

Authors

• Yu Jin Woo, Waseda University

• Jaehyun Song, Kansai University