Co-ethnicity at Work: Unskilled and Skilled Co-ethnic Labor Migrants to South Korea

• In Event: 598 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Work, Labor, and Professions

Abstract

This paper traces how Korean Americans and Korean Chinese are subject to a sorting process in the South Korean visa system and labor market based on two axes: family vs. foreigner and professional vs. manual laborers. This occurs at both the institutional level through South Korean immigration policies and the individual level through their interactions with South Korean employers and co-workers. The particular kinds of skills migrants bring with them are assessed in terms of their economic utility to the South Korean labor market. As a result, Korean Americans and Korean Chinese are sorted into different ends of the labor market. For Korean Chinese, their linguistic and cultural fluency and willingness to do manual labor eschewed by middle class, educated South Koreans make them ideal workers in 3-D and service industries. Due to the strict visa policies, Korean Chinese become vulnerable to exploitation in this low waged, temporary and unstable workplace. On the other hand, Korean Americans with their U.S. citizenship, cultural capital, native English skills, combined with college and graduate degrees from elite US colleges and universities, have access to higher paid, higher status jobs particularly in the English language teaching and business industries. In providing an ethnographic account of how the language of family intersects with the economic logics of different forms of Koreanness in the South Korean labor market, this paper ends with a discussion of how their work experiences with South Korean employers and co-workers have consequences for their own identities as both co-ethnics and foreigners.

Author

• Helene K. Lee, Dickinson College