(iPoster) Does Local Refugee Exposure Change Immigration Attitudes? Evidence from South Korea

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Migration and Citizenship & Political Beliefs and Democratic Legitimacy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Migration & Citizenship

Abstract

Sudden exposure to asylum seekers has often been found to generate negative public attitudes among natives, particularly in European cases. However, these effects need closer examination across different political contexts. This paper argues that institutional settings condition how public attitudes respond to sudden refugee exposure by shaping the frequency and quality of contact between host communities and refugees. In doing so, it treats public attitudes as a key micro-level arena through which broader processes of social cohesion and integration unfold. The paper adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining a natural experiment with a case study of the 2018 Yemeni refugee influx to Jeju Island, South Korea. As a democratic but culturally insulated society compared to the Western contexts that dominate existing research, the Jeju case presents a puzzling empirical pattern. Difference-in-differences analyses of this event have yielded divergent findings: some studies report increasingly negative public attitudes, while others find mitigated anti-immigrant sentiment following local exposure.

This paper seeks to explain why similar quasi-experimental designs produce different results. It leverages repeated cross-sectional survey data to examine how public attitudes evolve over time, while employing a case study to trace how contact was structured on the ground and how institutional mediation shaped local responses. By institutions, I refer to both formal arrangements—such as labor allocation, legal status, and access to employment—and informal institutionalized practices, including the role of religious organizations, language education, and community norms. The findings suggest that public attitudes toward migrants are shaped less by exposure itself than by the institutional contexts that organize contact. By examining a culturally closed, non-Western democracy, this paper contributes to the division’s broader theme of how sudden cultural diversity tests social cohesion and democratic inclusion.

Author

• Yun Jung Cho, Temple University