Immigrants’ Rights and Responsibilities in East Asia: Framing Low-Skilled Labour Migrants in the Politics of Japan and South Korea

The aim of this thesis is to understand and explore the rights and responsibilities of immigrants in East Asia. Specifically, it focuses on two East Asian welfare states, Japan and South Korea, and explains cross-national similarities and differences from a more comprehensive perspective by adopting a mixed methods methodology. The analysis of this thesis consists of three parts, answering three different—but interrelated—questions. The first part conceptualises immigrants’ rights and responsibilities in terms of an intersection between welfare and immigration regimes, and then uses fuzzy set ideal-type analysis to analyse 27 OECD countries’ welfare and immigration regimes and immigrants’ rights and responsibilities. Thereby, the two East Asian cases are viewed from an international comparative perspective, showing that they are different not only from Western welfare states but also from each other. Second, the analytical focus is narrowed into a comparison between the rights and responsibilities of low-skilled labour migrants in Japan and Korea and concentrated on discussing the developments of welfare and immigration regimes, and furthermore, of the rights and responsibilities of low-skilled labour migrants from a historical perspective. Its findings interestingly indicate that Japan and Korea, although having similar institutional foundations of welfare and immigration regimes, have demonstrated somewhat different paths regarding the rights and responsibilities of low-skilled labour migrants. The last part employs comparative historical analysis to analyse and compare their similarities and differences in terms of three aspects: socio-economic challenges facing the societies, the politics of inclusion and exclusion and policy ideas (legacies and emerging alternatives). Behind their different developments, there are three decisive factors: different political opportunity structures, different political leverage of civil society organisations and different policy influence of alternative ideas. Overall, this thesis contributes to our empirical comparative understanding about the development of immigrants’ rights and responsibilities in welfare states—specifically, of low-skilled labour migrants in two East Asian welfare states, Japan and Korea. Additionally, it theoretically and methodologically shows a more comprehensive approach in four aspects: first, showing bidirectional interactions between formal and substantive citizenship; second, taking note of responsibilities, another side of membership, in conceptualising immigrants’ rights and responsibilities while taking welfare and immigration regimes together into consideration; third, considering ideas and their interaction with institutions as a decisive factor in explaining their historical development; and lastly, adopting a mixed method methodology combining fuzzy set ideal-type analysis and comparative historical analysis.