Since the late 1980s, South Korea has experienced a surge in immigration from other parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Migrant workers, including many ethnic Koreans from China, but also from diverse areas of the world, have migrated to Korea in search of employment and better opportunities. The presence and integration of these migrant workers as well as permanent resident foreigners into society has increasingly challenged the notion that Korea is an ethnically and racially homogeneous nation. More recently, the increased numbers of international marriages between South Korean men from predominantly rural areas and Southeast Asian women, or “immigrant brides,” have introduced a noticeable gendered dimension to immigration to Korea.
This paper seeks to analyze the phenomenon of international marriage, and in doing so, to understand the broader issue of how Korea is coping with one of the varied forms of transnational migration in an increasingly globalized world. The paper will be divided into two parts. In the first section, policies introduced and implemented by national and local governments, such as citizenship requirements and visa regulations, to deal with the entry, settlement, and integration of immigrant brides will be examined. In doing so, the question to be answered is: how do immigrant brides challenge and change the institutional structures of citizenship regimes and policies? Second, the grassroots perspective will be addressed by looking at the role that NGOs and civil society organizations play in the social and even, political incorporation of immigrant brides, through programs such as language training and cultural learning. To better take scope of the gendered dimension, a particular emphasis will be placed on the activism and mobilization of women’s groups on the issue of immigrant brides.