Intersections of the Migration Regime and the Care Regime: The South Korean Case

The thesis investigates the intersections between the migration regime and the care regime in South Korea. The research is designed as an in-depth policy-oriented case study and adopts documentary analysis and expert interviews as research methods. From the mid-1990s Korea’s transition to a migrant destination country within Asia became evident and the migration inflows have been gendered and ethnised as well as classed. In response, Korea has developed a highly instrumental and differential migration regime: circulatory, anti-settlement policies for non-professional labour migrants in general but supportive and integrative for co-ethnic migrants and marriage migrants. Care, on the other hand, has become a major social policy issue since the early 2000s, facing a care crisis represented by population ageing and the low fertility. While the state began to assume a greater responsibility for care, care demands for children and older people have been differently addressed, and the distribution of care responsibility between genders within home remains largely unchanged. Consequently, home-based (child)care and eldercare areas tend to leave greater room for migrant care workers to get involved in. The government has facilitated co-ethnic migrant workers to work for the care (service) sector through various policy renovations. The Korean government has also supported female marriage migrants to successfully act as wives, mothers and daughters-in-law, who assume indispensable roles to maintain and regenerate the family. This research has shown that the Korean productivist/social investment welfare state has been operating on the transnational level to help secure reproductive labour. The Korean case of the intersections between the migration and care regimes complements the existing knowledge of care-migration nexus not only by broadening the regional application of the migration-care intersection scholarship to East Asia and its welfare regimes, but also by extending the theoretical application to new routes/patterns of migration - co-ethnic migration and marriage migration.