Marriage Migration Policy in South Korea: Social Investment beyond the Nation State
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12350 |
| Author | Majella Kilkey,Gyuchan Kim |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
Marriage Migration Policy in South Korea:
Social Investment beyond the Nation State
Gyuchan Kim* and Majella Kilkey**
ABSTRACT
This article seeks to contribute to understandings of South Korea’s approach to marriage
migration. Situating our analysis of marriage migration policy specifically within the recent
emergence of a social investment approach to welfare, we bring together two bodies of litera-
ture that due to the methodological nationalism of much welfare state scholarship are usually
treated separately. Through an examination of the policy framework governing marriage
migration -so-called ‘multicultural family policies’-we find that successive Korean govern-
ments have actively sought female marriage migrants to perform various social reproductive
roles as a means to secure the reproductive capacity of the nation, just as feminist scholars
have argued the care work of citizen-mothers can be understood. Our analysis also suggests
that marriage migration policy in Korea constitutes a distinctly transnational dimension to its
overall social investment approach, which is strongly motivated by concerns to reproduce the
next generation of human capital.
INTRODUCTION
Related in part to the country’s economic outperformance in Asia, South Korea (hereafter Korea)
has undergone a rapid transition since the mid-1990s to a migrant-receiving country (Castles,
2014). Growth in marriage migration, predominantly of female migrants, is a major aspect of Kor-
ea’s migration transition and its migration policy development (Castles and Miller, 2009). In con-
trast to Western states (Bonjour and Kraler, 2015), marriage migration has been regarded as a
welcome migration stream in Korea; it has come to occupy a comparatively privileged position
within Korea’s overall migration regime and successive governments have actively engaged in
managing marriage migration. Korea now has a comprehensive set of policies targeted specifically
at marriage migrants and their families, spanning a range of policy fields that goes beyond migra-
tion to include education, social security and childcare.
This development has coincided with Korea’s transformation from one of the poorest countries
in the world to a high-income welfare state with all major social programmes in place. For this rea-
son, the Korean case has attracted attention from social policy researchers. So far, their portrayals
of the Korean welfare (state) regime centre largely on the “developmental”or the “productivist”
welfare state. A recent body of scholarship, however, highlights Korea’s shift towards a “social
investment”state (Peng, 2011a, 2014; Lee and Baek, 2014). The social investment paradigm con-
stitutes a set of policies and ideas that emerged in the mid-1990s within national, transnational and
* University of Ulsan, South Korea
** University of Sheffield, UK
doi: 10.1111/imig.12350
©2017 The Authors
International Migration ©2017 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (1) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
international institutions across the globe as a response to fundamental changes in the labour mar-
kets and demographic structures of advanced industrialized societies, and their ensuing new social
risks (Jenson, 2017). To address such challenges, the social investment perspective emphasises the
“imperative to reproduce - biologically and cognitively - human capital, therefore investing in hav-
ing and raising children, and to be in employment as much as possible”(Saraceno, 2015: 10).
This article situates analysis of marriage migration within the social investment approach in order
to contribute to understandingKorea’s approach to marriage migration, both its encouragement of it
and the characteristics of the policy package it has developed around it. We argue that Korea’s
approach to marriage migration can be understood as part of its more general concern to reproduce
the population for human capital purposes within the context of demographic ageing, combined
with a persistently low fertility rate. Our argument requires that we bring together two bodies of lit-
erature, the one on migration, the other on social investment, which are usually treated separately,
due to the continuing “methodological nationalism”of much welfare state scholarship (Wimmer
and Glick Schiller, 2002; Clarke, 2005). Thus, for example, while discussions of social investment
in Western welfare states trace the origins of the ideas back to the highly influential writings of
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on solutions to Sweden’s fertility crisis in the 1930s (Morel et al., 2012),
they fail to mention that the Myrdals explicitly rejected immigration as a solution to Sweden’s
“population problem”due to fears that migrants would be difficult to assimilate (Jackson, 2014).
Such an elision of the migration dimension is symptomatic of the “container-model”approach to
the study of the social investment paradigm, which “contains”analysis within the territorial and
institutional boundaries of the nation state. Yet, our study suggests that marriage migration policy
in Korea constitutes a distinctly transnational dimension to its overall social investment approach.
More precisely, we argue that while analysis of the social investment paradigm is generally focused
on the mobilization of “citizens”for human capital development purposes (see Esping-Andersen
et al., 2002), consideration of the treatment of marriage migration in Korea reveals that its approach
to social investment stretches beyond its own national borders and incorporates non-citizens too.
This finding, we suggest, has the potential to inform understandings of the social investment
approach to welfare beyond the specific case of Korea.
The article first investigates Korea’s evolution from a developmental state to a social investment
welfare state, identifying the centrality of demographic concerns in Korea around population ageing
and falling fertility rates. The article then turns to examine the scale, pattern and drivers of the growth
in marriage migration in Korea from a demand perspective, which we argue are also bound up with
Korea’s“reproductive crisis”. The article continues by analysing marriage migrant policies, demon-
strating how those policies, framed within a social investment paradigm, are structured to ensure that
marriage migrants contribute to stabilising families’social reproductive functions throughout the life
course of families. Those functions comprise the production and reproduction of people as physical
and social beings, incorporating on the one hand, family building through relationship formation and
procreation, and on the other hand, the ongoing care required in the maintenance of people on a daily
basis (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015; Kilkey and Palenga-M€
ollenbeck, 2016).
We argue that successive Korean governments, developing policies within a social investment
framework, have actively sought female marriage migrants to perform those roles and have sup-
ported them to do so. In this way, we suggest, marriage migrants’social reproductive role can be
understood as vital to the reproduction of the nation, just as feminist scholars have argued that the
care work of “citizen-mothers”can be understood (Roseneil et al., 2013; Yuval-Davis and Anthias
(Eds), 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1996;). Analysed from this perspective, marriage migrants’procreation
and care for children as a new generation of future citizens serves to legitimize their comparatively
privileged position as migrants within Korea’s political and social citizenship regime. The article
concludes by identifying what our analysis contributes to understanding the approach to marriage
migration in Korea, as well as to understanding the social investment welfare state in Korea and
potentially beyond.
24 Kim and Kiley
©2017 The Authors. International Migration ©2017 IOM
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