Who is Korean? Migration, Immigration, and the Challenge of Multiculturalism in Homogeneous Societies

“I don’t know,” opines a 31-year old Korean woman. “I have always believed that Korea is a single-race country. And I’m proud of that. Somehow, Korea becoming a multiracial society doesn’t sound right.” This is not an unusual view. Indeed, the large majority of Koreans would likely agree that Korean society is inextricably tied to and defined by a unique Korean identity, one based on an uncompromising conflation of race and ethnicity. The strong tendency among Koreans to conflate race and ethnicity has important implications, the most salient of which is this: it has served to create an exceptionally rigid and narrow conceptualization of national identity and belongingness. To be “truly” Korean, one must not only have Korean blood, but must also embody the values, the mores, and the mind-set of Korean society. This helps explain why overseas Koreans (from China, Russia, Japan, the United States and other countries throughout the world) have not fit into Korean society as Koreans. They are different, “real” Koreans recognize, despite sharing the same blood. At the same time, those who lack a “pure blood” relationship, no matter how acculturated they may be, have also been rejected as outsiders. This rejection, more importantly, has generally led to severe forms of discrimination.

This is arguably most apparent with “Amerasians,” who, in South Korea, are primarily children born to a Korean woman and an American man, usually a U.S. soldier. It is important to note here that it was only in 1998 that non-Korean husbands gained legal rights to naturalize, while non-Korean wives have long had this right. At the same time, up until 1994, most “international marriages” in Korea were between a foreign man and Korean woman. According to the ethno-racial and patrilineal logic of belongingness in South Korea, then, Amerasians have been viewed as decidedly non-Korean interlopers who belong, if anywhere, in the land of their fathers. The ill treatment of Amerasians was, as Mary Lee and others have argued, exacerbated by a patriarchal and hyper-masculine sense of national identity: Amerasian children were associated with the “shame” and “humiliation” of a dominant Western power conquering and abusing Korean women for sexual pleasure. Not surprisingly, then, Amerasians have been ostracized from mainstream Korean society; they were not only subject to intense and pervasive interpersonal and social abuse, but also to institutional discrimination—Amerasian males, for example, were barred from serving in the South Korean military, which is mandatory for every other Korean male and is “an institutional rite of passage which enables access to citizen rights” (emphasis added) (This law was revised in 2006 so that “mixed-blood” Koreans could voluntarily enlist for military service.) In concrete terms, the discriminatory treatment of Amerasians has resulted in unusually high school drop out rates (and much lower levels of educational achievement overall), significantly higher rates of unemployment and underemployment, and much lower pay.

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