Abstract
Despite the unavoidable, continuing growth of foreign populations in South Korea and Japan, both countries maintain highly restrictive immigration policies that tightly regulate the entrance of unskilled foreign labor and discourage or prohibit their settlement. Ethnic return migration is the exception to both countries’ largely closed labor migration policies. By opening the doors to co-ethnic migrant workers from abroad based on ethnic ties while making their full incorporation into Korean and Japanese society contingent on naturalization, the Korean and Japanese governments have exploited their “in-between” status to meet labor demands while maintaining relatively closed immigration and citizenship policies. Co-ethnic policies have also led to the development of noncitizen hierarchies whereby specific rights are associated with different levels of membership.
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Chung, E.A. (2019). Ethnic Return Migration and Noncitizen Hierarchies in South Korea and Japan. In: Tsuda, T., Song, C. (eds) Diasporic Returns to the Ethnic Homeland. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5_10
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