메인메뉴 바로가기본문으로 바로가기
네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Who Is a Migrant Worker?

Do you think of yourself as a migrant worker?
I never have, no.

Is there another term that you might find more comfortable?
(pause)… Maybe expatriate.

Why would expatriate be more comfortable than migrant worker?
I don’t know. I have never thought of myself that way
and I don’t really know why.

Excerpt from an interview of an English teacher in Seoul, April 2009.


Who is a migrant worker? Technically, the answer is quite straightforward: a migrant in contemporary parlance is someone who crosses international borders (although a broader definition should include internal migrants as well). A migrant worker then must be an individual who crosses international borders for the purposes of employment. This definition would include a broad spectrum of individuals who come from different national, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds, and who work in a range of occupations. The Korean terms 외국인 노동자 (外國人勞動者) or 이주 노동자 (移住勞動者) would nominally seem equally open to a diverse interpretation of occupational types. Yet, as the above excerpt from an interview of an English teacher in Korea illustrates, the terms “migrant worker,” “foreign worker,” or their Korean analogues are not commonly used so broadly, either in the language that individuals employ to describe themselves or in the nomenclature of academics and the state.



Migrant Workers in Korea
Fieldwork that I have recently undertaken, with support from the Korea Foundation Fellowship for Field Research, has begun a process of investigating this issue in the context of increased inward migration into Korea and an increasing presence of non-Korean residents, particularly in Seoul and its metropolitan region (hereafter Seoul). More broadly, this research seeks to investigate the urban lives of two groups of temporary migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region, individuals like the interviewee above who teaches English, and temporary migrants who arrive under the Employment Permit System, and, at least in scholarly debates and state discourses, are much more easily referred to as “migrant workers” or “foreign workers.” The aim of the overall project is to improve our understanding of contemporary processes of transnational labor mobility into Korea, the ways in which mobility is differentiated between individuals on the basis of nationality and socio-economic position, and the implications for the everyday geographies of urban life in the Seoul.
A significant element of this project, then, is explicitly about bringing the lives of “English teachers” and “migrant workers” into academic conversation with each other. There are numerous motivations to this methodological maneuver, two of which I briefly will highlight here. Firstly, debating issues associated with “English teachers” and “migrant workers” in the same space highlights the interconnected reasons for their presence in Korea. Indeed, it is in the last two decades that the demand for both “English teachers” and “migrant workers” has grown, a connection that is not simply coincidental but rather reflects particular social, cultural, and economic transformations in Korea. This period has been witness to increasing wages and conditions for Korean workers, a shift toward high-tech industries, and “flexibilization” of the manufacturing process in Korea; all of which have led to labor shortages in unskilled areas and the need to fill them with what is perceived to be cheap and expendable foreign labor. Associated with these developments is an increasing level of education amongst younger Koreans, and a desire by individuals, private capital, and the state to be more globally connected, often through the attainment of forms of cultural capital which are globally recognizable. It is here that the increasing demand for English education (global cultural capital par excellence), and the subsequent need to import language teachers, is implicated in these same transformations as a key pillar of social and economic advancement at both a personal and national level. Put another way, the presence of both “migrant workers” and “English teachers” can be best characterized not as the result of distinct processes but in a relational way to the changing orientations of Koreans with regard to employment, education, and cultural capital.

‘English Teachers’
At the same time, scholars need to recognize that “English teachers” are migrant workers. This is not simply a pedantic clarification but rather an important part of understanding the lives of “English teachers” and their (dis)connections with “migrant workers.” Most English teachers involved in this research come to Korea primarily for economic reasons; certainly, there are other motivations, including travel, family, career interest in English teaching, or simply impulsive decision-making, but it is the economic imperative of finding a job, paying off debt, or simply earning a better salary that seems to be a key factor for most.
Indeed, the majority of “English teachers” in a survey of 698 respondents had a student loan, a figure that increased to nearly 70 per cent in the case of respondents who had been in Korea for less than a year. Interviewees also spoke about the lack of jobs, or the difficulty in getting a job in an area of expertise in their home town, city, or even country. Others spoke about saving to start a business, supporting family members back home, or simply trying to get ahead. None of this should be surprising. In each of the seven countries that “English teachers” come from – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.K., the U.S. – tertiary education has become increasingly common and yet there are often not jobs upon graduation, and even rarer are there jobs in the areas that students have studied.
Add to this the prevalence of student loans amongst graduates and it becomes all too clear that we cannot be surprised by the economic motivations of “English teachers.” Yet, this is surprising because we are not used to thinking of “English teachers” as economic migrants or migrant workers, but rather more commonly as travelers, sojourners, expatriates, and those on a cultural experience. This research has shown that while this may have been a primary driver of earlier English teacher migration, it is increasingly more immediate economic goals that motivate contemporary English teachers in Korea.
Where does this leave us? This effort to bring the lives of “English teachers” and “migrant workers” into academic conversation has considerable value for understanding contemporary experiences of migration and diversity in Korea. Indeed, aligning these different lives allows us to ask important questions about the different ways in which mobility is regulated by the state and the rights and responsibilities that different migrant subjects possess. It also raises important questions about the everyday geographies of migrant lives, the places where they live, work, and socialize, and the impact that they will have on urban space more generally.
Our focus need not be on English teachers and migrant workers per se, and neither is this an argument that should be limited to research in Korea. Rather, the point is that if we want to understand the multifarious roots and routes of contemporary migrants we need to take a methodological stance that will not only engage the singular categories of the state and common parlance but also draw together different lives and shed light on the politics through which they are differentiated.

SEARCH

통합검색

통합검색버튼
통합검색닫기

전체메뉴

전체메뉴 닫기