Global Asian City: Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century Seoul

Chapter One

Introduction

On a cold morning in early 2008 I was travelling to the Gwacheon Government Complex to undertake an interview with the Korea Immigration Service. As so often happens, it was a chance meeting on this journey that crystallised neatly the context of this book. I was waiting in Samgakji¹ subway station in Seoul and was approached by a tall apparently non‐Korean man who spoke to me in a thick Texan accent. The stranger struck up our conversation by enquiring about what I was doing in Seoul and where I was travelling to on this occasion.² After I made it clear that I was on a journey to interview officials about labour migration the stranger explained that he owned a small manufacturing operation in Incheon where he hired ‘a few Filipinos’ because Koreans ‘expected too much money’. He added that the changes to labour laws for migrants through the Employment Permit System (EPS) meant that he was considering relocation to the Philippines where he could get ‘four workers for the price of one here’. As our relatively one‐sided conversation continued he informed me that things might get better if the then recently elected President Lee Myung‐bak kept his promises and supported businesses over workers; otherwise, ‘everyone’ was going to leave. Inserted in this commentary was a quip about the ‘Filipino condos’ he had built for his workers (converted shipping containers where many migrant workers are housed), and a variety of racist comments about the backwardness of Koreans – defended as ‘not racist’ because his mother is Korean.

The issues discussed in this conversation are demonstrative of the way in which migration has come to be articulated through a distantiation of migrant lives. For the stranger, migration would appear to be a strategy for capital accumulation – his investments in Incheon are an attempt to generate higher profits by employing workers for lower wages. As a mobile subject he is empowered by his American nationality, the business visa in his passport and the economic capital he possesses. His movement through local and transnational space appears to be relatively effortless and generated through individualised desires for capital accumulation. If circumstances do not suit he will simply relocate his business activities to a lower‐wage environment. He framed himself as an agentive subject of migration. In contrast, the ‘few Filipinos’ who work for him may have work visas but may also be undocumented; they have much more limited access to migration and under this stranger’s logic face the prospect of chasing capital back to their homeland only to be paid lower wages for probably greater work. Rather than being enabled by forms of desire their migration is framed as an outcome of wage differentials and the force of global capitalism.

These migrations are also articulated unevenly through the urban spaces that different migrants come to inhabit. On the one hand, the processes of labour migration to Seoul often takes shape through a peripheralisation of migrant lives. Migrant mobilities link into work and life in distant parts of the Seoul Metropolitan Region like areas in Incheon where small manufacturing operations continue to have a significant presence. Urban life here is often characterised by precarity – living in ersatz accommodation like converted containers, working long hours often for substandard pay and sometimes subject to abusive or exploitative employment. Mobility appears constrained, not only in migration but also in everyday life in the city. By contrast, for the stranger and indeed myself as a visiting researcher, mobility comes to articulate with urban space in quite different ways. We meet by chance in one of the classic foreigner neighbourhoods in central Seoul, reside in comfortable accommodations during our short visits and without the temporalisations of factory work would appear to be able to direct our mobilities through urban space according to our own desires.

By the mid‐2000s migration, and the uneven geographies of these and other migrant lives, was becoming an increasingly taken for granted feature of life in South Korea and especially Seoul and its broader metropolitan region, encompassing Gyeonggi Province and Incheon City (Kim, A.E. 2009). In 2007 the Korea Immigration Service announced with some jubilation that the foreign resident population in South Korea had surpassed one million, and that the country was now entering a ‘new era of multiculturalism’ (Kim, S. 2009); by 2016 the figure had surpassed two million (Korea Immigration Service 2017). For many in the media, politics and the general public, this represented a considerable departure from a national culture that has over the course of the twentieth century emphasised narratives of ethnic homogeneity and shared lineage (Han 2007). In the space of little over a decade, the presence of foreigners in South Korea had shifted from an interesting novelty to one of the critical issues facing society and its future (Kim, N. 2012). This was nowhere more the case than in Seoul, a city that has been represented as the crucible of indigenous economic development for half a century (Kim & Choe 1997) and is now home to the largest number and diversity of foreign residents in South Korea.

Global Asian City explores the entanglement of migratory processes and metropolitan transformations in contemporary Seoul. It does so through an empirical focus on the migration and urban lives of three categories of migrants who have become a common feature of life in Seoul over the last three decades: ‘migrant workers’, ‘English teachers’ and ‘international students’. The migrants who people these categories have become significant in Seoul both numerically and also in terms of the role of migration in reconfiguring elements of urban life. In 2016 there were 279,187 people holding work visas through the EPS that governs labour migration in South Korea, 76,040 people on student visas and 15,450 people holding language instructor visas of whom English teachers form over 90%. Ordinarily, these migrant populations are addressed in discrete ways in both policy orthodoxy and migration scholarship within South Korea and internationally. They are seen as low‐skilled, (potential) elite and middling respectively, and as a result are assumed to be drawn into migration for quite different reasons and to have distinct roles in urban life. Viewed separately, these migration patterns would appear to reflect quite different dimensions of South Korea’s recent political–economic history, from the growing labour shortages of the early 1990s (Kim, W. 2004), the transformation of nationally oriented universities into global institutions (Collins 2014a) and the increasing desire for English as a global lingua franca (Park, J.K. 2009). Despite their estrangement in scholarship and policy discourse I argue that these migrants and the precursors of their arrival must be conceived concurrently. Their presence, and indeed their socio‐political position in Seoul, is very much entangled in processes of national and metropolitan restructuring and in particular the material and imaginative rearticulation of Seoul vis‐à‐vis national, regional and global assemblages.

This book seeks to bring the narratives that account for these different migrations together and in the process to advance understandings of the relationship between migration and cities. It does so by bringing to the fore the manner that migrants negotiate both migration and urban life, not as distinct spatial locations and temporal phases of pre‐migration, migration and settlement but as always interlinked experiences. Focusing on the conceptual vocabulary of desire, assemblage and encounter, the key claim asserted here is that the urban is the spatial formation through which forms of migration are assembled but also drawn apart and made distinct. Urban spaces clearly play an important role in organising different forms of labour and their linkages into different categories of migrants that are established in the regimes that seek to govern migration. At the same time, the spaces, practices and subjectivities of migrants also need to be examined in terms of the active processes of desiring involved in migration, of seeking better futures, exploring alternative or unknown possibilities and transformations in one's position in the world.

In this opening chapter I set the scene for this contribution by first discussing the recent growth in scholarship on the relationship between migration and cities. Emerging within both geography and other social science disciplines this literature has advanced beyond a conception of migration as simply an addition of people to cities through a focus on pathways to incorporation, built environment changes and transnational linkages. Yet, the case I make is that there remains either a migration‐centric or an urban‐centric outlook in this scholarship where cities remain largely as a backdrop for migration, or the urban lives of migrants in cities are delinked from the generation and governmentality of migration itself. After exploring the geographical and historical backdrop of migration in Seoul and South Korea, the chapter then moves to provide a brief introduction to the conceptual vocabulary of desire, assemblage and encounter and its significance for studying migration and cities. Last, I introduce the research that informs this book, address the analytical challenges and potential of researching migration and cities through different experiences and outline the structure of the chapters that follow.

1.1 Migration and Cities

This book is about the relationship between different forms of migration and the making and transformation of cities. This is not a new concern for geographers or for social scientists. Indeed, the relationship between migration and cities is apparent in urban scholarship dating right back to the work of Robert Park and colleagues in Chicago who traced the arrival, settlement and succession patterns of migrants as part of their primary focus on ‘The Growth of the City’ (Park, Burgess & McKenzie 1925). Migration was understood as a process of populating cities, a pattern that has been observed in the role of international migration in the emergence of cities such as Chicago as well as processes of internal migration as part of urbanisation, that can be observed in rapidly growing cities throughout the world (McGee 1971). International migration has also often been observed for its impacts in specific parts of cities – the manifestations of ethnic enclaves (Portes & Jensen 1989), precincts (Rath 2007) or ethnoburbs (Li 1998) that capture a sense of not only additions to but also changes in the character of urban space. And, migration has formed an important part of arguments about international divisions of labour and socio‐spatial polarisation that have been so central in claims about the emergence of global cities (Sassen 2001).

While migration has long been recognised as having a relationship with cities it is less clear that scholars have focused on the specific components of this relationship. Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2009, 2011) argue that this has resulted from a lack of cross‐fertilisation between the fields of migration and urban studies. In migration scholarship, for example, ‘there are many studies of migration to cities and the life of migrants in cities but very little about the relationship of migrants and cities’, while in urban studies migrants appear as members of communities and labour markets but not as key actors in city‐making (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2011: 2). Put another way, there is a tendency for either migration‐centric or urban‐centric scholarship where only one side of this pairing is properly examined. There is ample literature that sees the city as a backdrop to migrant lives, for example, but does not consider how urban environments are actually reconfigured in the process. Similarly, Chicago scholars and global city theorists alike have focused primarily on what happens after migrants come to the city, not the process of migration itself or its implications in people’s urban lives.

Other attempts to explore migration and cities have advanced more focused conceptualisations of this relationship that draw attention to the positioning of cities and the implication this has for migration processes and experiences. Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2009, 2011), for example, have proposed a focus on varying pathways of ‘urban incorporation’ as key to exploring differences between cities and the varying ways in which migrants become part of urban life. Such an approach involves focusing not only on ‘individual migrants, [but also] the networks they form and the social fields that are created by their networks’ (2009: 179–180). Accordingly, migrants become ‘incorporated’ into urban life through different ‘pathways’ – work, neighbourhood, political and religious organisations for example. The availability of these pathways will differ depending on histories of migration and the ‘varying position of cities within global fields of power’ (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2009: 178). Another similar set of arguments has been offered by geographers Price and Benton‐Short (2008) who make a case for re‐examining the ‘immigrant gateway city’ concept in a manner that can address the dynamics of contemporary urban life. Here cities are interpreted as ‘critical entry points, nodes of collection and dispersion of goods and information, highly segregated settings, sites of global cultural exchange, turnstiles for other destinations, and immigrant destinations and settlements’ (Price & Benton‐Short 2008: 31). In both propositions, there is a clear sense of the ways in which cities influence the directionality and form of migration as well as scope to consider the broad implications of different types of migration on urban life.

Another set of contributions focuses on the role of migration in urban restructuring and its effects in the built environment of cities. Mitchell’s (2004) and Ley’s (2010) studies of transformations in Vancouver through migration from Hong Kong are indicative of this genre. Focused on discourse, neo‐liberalism and built form (Mitchell 2004) or the unevenness of migrants’ economic place in the city (Ley 2010) these studies show the ways in which Vancouver’s turn to the Pacific Rim involved not only the arrival of new migrants but also significant implications for the lived experience of urban spaces. Migration was associated with political rationalities of globalisation, economic success and development that would reconfigure the city as a safe space for footloose entrepreneurs. Migration also brought changes however, in the redevelopment of inner city areas, skyrocketing property prices and their association with migration and fear of ‘monster’ houses changing the character of ‘traditional’ neighbourhoods. Smith (2000: 5) who has provided his own account of migration, globalisation and built form in Los Angeles captures some of this dynamic in the notion of Transnational Urbanism:

[A] marker of the criss‐crossing transnational circuits of communication and cross‐cutting local, translocal, and transnational social practices that ‘come together’ in particular places at particular times and enter into the contested politics of place‐making, the social construction of power differentials, and the making of individual, group, national, and transnational identities, and their corresponding fields of difference.

Like Ley (2010) and Mitchell (2004), Smith offers a sense of the transnational dimensions of urban life and in particular the ways in which migration can link together different places and can shape the form and experience of cities.

Lastly, there are studies concerned with the co‐presence of migrants and other residents in cities and practices and policies of urban diversity and inclusion. Much has been made, for example, of Vertovec’s (2007: 1025) focus on ‘super‐diversity’ as a marker of overlap between ethno‐national differences and ‘divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents’. Migration's diversification in relation to contemporary immigration controls demands a renewed focus on class, gender, race and other axes of social difference in the city (Ye 2016a) that potentially alters presumptions about the pathways of urban incorporation available to migrants (Grzymala‐Kazlowska & Phillimore 2017). For Hall (2015), such urban multiculture also provides scope to explore more precisely the reconfiguration or indeed making of cities through the quotidian practices of migrants as ordinary urban residents (see also Collins 2012). In such ‘migrant urbanisms’ resides scope to move beyond the framing of migrants as particular kinds of ethnic others and to see the daily lives of people on the move as part of the reconfiguration of places rather than only additions to what already exists.

The approach developed in this book contributes to this growing interest in the relationship between cities and migration by foregrounding a conceptualisation of both migration and urbanisation or urban lives that links the drivers of migration to the different positions that migrants hold in society and the contested politics of everyday life. While the focus on urban multiculture, particularly in its quotidian manifestations, offers scope to examine the everyday constitution of space and the role of migrants as urban actors this is often disconnected from the very conditions that shape migration. In part, this limitation has emerged because research on migration and cities has focused primarily on western immigrant cities as a site for theory making (Collins 2012). In these urban contexts, scholars often take the drivers of migration as obvious (economic advancement, lifestyle, settlement and citizenship) because migration itself is so well established as part of the peopling of settler societies and cities. The experience, direction and implications of migration cannot be taken for granted however, and there is a need to examine how the imaginations of migrants, their desires and aspirations in migrating and the infrastructures that support their movements also reach into the daily constitution of urban life. Moreover, migration cannot be read as a flat experience of similar forms of mobility but rather there is also a need to focus closely on the different statuses accorded to migrants, the temporary forms of migrant entry that predominate in many parts of the world and how its regulation shapes the urban lives of migrants.

Figuring the drivers of migration alongside the varying conditions under which migration takes place is particularly critical to exploring the relationship of migration and cities in Asian contexts. This is not least because of the way that recent patterns of migration in Asia have been tied to the development and globalisation of cities like Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo that have rapidly become important nodes in migratory circuits (Collins 2012; Wong & Rigg 2010). Aside from Singapore, these are not cities with extant histories of international immigration or places that have been long established as desirable destinations for migrant mobilities. What then are the driving forces of migration in this context? How do states seek to manage and modulate migration? And what are the implications for the everyday lives of migrants and other residents in these cities? Global Asian City addresses these questions by focusing on the ways in which different types of migration have become viewed as an indispensable dimension of twenty‐first‐century Asian urbanisation (Battistella 2014; Lai et al. 2013; Ong 2007; Ye 2016a). Migration in many Asian contexts also poses fundamental challenges to extant modes of social and political life, particularly in nations like South Korea and Japan where notions of citizenship are built on seemingly inherent entanglements of race and nationality (Han 2015). Accordingly, the governmentality of migration in Asia has operated through forms of differential inclusion (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013), incorporating migrants as workers, students and spouses but minimizing or eliminating possibilities for other kinds of social and economic interpenetration (Lindquist, Xiang & Yeoh 2012; Seol & Skrentny 2009). Global Asian City focuses on the differences established between migrant types; as workers, professionals and students, the way in which they work through the desires migrants express to be mobile as well as shape the lives they can live in migration and the city.

1.2 Migration and Modernity in Global City Seoul

Migration needs to be situated in relation to the varying position of cities vis‐à‐vis national, regional and global reconfigurations (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2009). In the case of Seoul, this means accounting for the wider transformation of South Korea in the four decades since the end of the Korean War, a period regularly described as an ‘economic miracle’ characterised by ‘compressed modernisation’ (Chang 1999). Under the authoritarian governments of Park Chung‐hee and his successors, the Korean government invested heavily in export oriented industrialisation, encouraged rapid internal migration and enforced strict external controls on outward and inward migration. In the process, South Korean economy, society, culture and politics underwent radical change: a condensed period of industrialisation and economic growth; a subsequent alteration in social and cultural norms manifest most obviously in reshaping of urban life in Seoul and other major cities; tension and competition between familial and societal norms that cut across traditional, modern and seemingly ‘postmodern’ articulations and a compressed political transition from colonial rule, authoritarian dictatorship to a new political aristocracy operating under the banner of democracy (Chang 1999).

The growth of Seoul was extraordinary during this period as its population increased from 1.6 million in 1955 to 9.7 million in 1985 and in the decades since has sprawled into the wider metropolitan region of Gyeonggi Province and Incheon City where 25.5 million people live, nearly 50% of the country’s population. The city already held significant imaginative potential through its history as the Joseon Dynasty (1394–1910) capital of Hanyang and Japanese colonial (1910–1945) capital of Kyeongseong. But industrialisation and enhanced circulation of overseas culture fundamentally reshaped imaginings of the city during this period (Kim Watson 2011). As Jo (2015: 89) notes in her account of poverty and shame in twentieth‐century South Korea, ‘the city of Seoul was presented as a place of opportunity and hope, embodying a sense of zeal and the heartfelt aspirations of people for a better future’. The city generated a desire for migration and its possibilities that drew at its peak over 300,000 people to the city annually during the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, urban and national governments struggled to cope with this growth: the housing supply ratio reached a low of 53 percent by the mid‐1980s and concerns around sanitation, access to toilets and pollution from heating were widespread (Gelézeau 2008). In an indicative precursor to contemporary migration patterns, the reality of everyday life, especially for the large numbers of working migrants in Seoul, rarely met the idealised excitement of a modern metropolis but was rather often articulated through struggles to survive in the uneven and fragmentary spaces of the city. Indeed, as Kim W.B. (1999: 13) put it in his millennial reflection on Korean urbanisation, ‘cities were bases for production, rather than places of living.’

If the reconfiguration of Seoul in the mid‐twentieth century involved economic, social and cultural extensions into the Korean countryside, then its articulation into the early twenty‐first century articulated a transnational augmentation (Moon 2000). By the late 1980s and early 1990s urban challenges of housing, sanitation and heating were beginning to be resolved and the economy was shifting from intensive manufacturing towards high‐technology supported by increasing levels of education amongst youth cohorts. The 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympic Games drew South Korea socially and culturally into a wider set of connections through increased tourist circulation and when emigration controls were lifted in 1989 also enhanced possibilities for travel and migration. Globalisation also emerged on the national political agenda, captured most evocatively by former President Kim Young‐sam’s flagship policy of Segyehwa (literally globalisation):

Fellow citizens: Globalization is the shortcut which will lead us to building a first‐class country in the 21st century. This is why I revealed my plan for globalization and the government has concentrated all its energy in forging ahead with it. It is aimed at realizing globalization in all sectors – politics, foreign affairs, economy, society, education, culture and sports. To this end it is necessary to enhance our viewpoints, way of thinking, system and practices to the world‐class level. … We have no choice other than this

(Kim, S.S. 2000: 1)

Segyehwa was a nationalist project of securing the South Korean nation in the future in ways that seem paradoxical with many of the dominant narratives of globalization (Elden 2005). Rather than seeking to alter the social and cultural fabric of the nation, the policies of segyehwa have been first and foremost economic and when they have moved into social and cultural areas the focus has more often been on ‘upgrading’ Koreans’ capacity to operate in a wider world rather than dismantling the national project itself (Kim, S.S. 2000; Koo 2007). Globalisation, in this respect, was configured around potential deterritorialisations of economy, society and culture but always with an eye to shoring up the nation, to reterritorialising or stabilising the Korean nation as a transnationally distributed but nonetheless coherent arrangement.

It is also at this time that international migration first emerged as a feature of life in Seoul and South Korea more generally in ways that link to the lives of present migrant workers, English teachers and international students. By the late 1980s, many smaller firms, particularly in labour‐intensive sectors like garment manufacturing, were facing widespread labour shortages that related to wage increases demanded by an empowered union movement and increased automation and transnationalisation of production in large corporations in particular (Kim, W. 2004; Park, W.W. 2002). Small and medium sized firms in the ‘3D sectors’ (difficult, dirty and dangerous) faced an increasing shortage of Korean workers who were willing to accept the wages or conditions that had previously made these firms internationally competitive (Lim 2003). Transnational migrant labour, initially arriving undocumented but eventually regulated in different ways, provided the solution, a pool of labour that remained cheap and was not subject to the same regulations and rights as Korean workers.

Despite the absence of a labour‐importing scheme, records suggested that there were some 6,409 migrants working in South Korea in 1987, many of whom were likely to have arrived on the relaxed tourist visas created for the Asian and Olympic Games (Seol 2000). The number of migrant workers would grow considerably over the following years, to 14,610 in 1989, 21,235 in 1990 and 45,449 in 1991. In the early years, these migrants came from a small number of South Korea's Asian neighbours; China (particularly Korean‐Chinese), Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh (Kim, A.E. 2009). The government responded through forced repatriation and penalties for employers but they also moved towards providing legal avenues for labour migration through the establishment of the Industrial and Technical Training Program (ITTP) in 1991. Based on the Japanese migration regime, the ITTP allowed for migrants to enter as ‘trainees’ and then effectively be employed as ordinary workers but without any of the associated legal rights. Over the course of the next decade, the number of labour migrants would increase to 384,000 by 2002 including some 189,000 undocumented (Lim 2002). Under the reformed EPS that will be discussed in Chapter 3 as well as the revised ‘Visit and Employment’ scheme for Korean‐Chinese, these numbers have continued to increase to over 500,000 combined since 2010, including at least 50,000 undocumented workers according to official sources.

It is also over this same period that the number of English teachers began to increase as South Korea became more visible globally and as part of an increasing emphasis on forms of ‘global’ education signalled in the rhetoric of segyehwa (Park, J.S.Y. 2009). While English has been taught in Korea since at least the late nineteenth century it is only since the late 1980s that both Korean businesses and the state have viewed the acquisition of English as crucial to social and economic success. As larger Korean firms began to shift to less labour‐intensive, more service oriented and high‐tech activities they have increasingly viewed English as an essential skill in targeting export markets and engaging with foreign companies (Collins & Pak 2008). Essentially, for many large private sector companies ‘English is taken to be a sign that the worker is well positioned within the modern world and worthy of a company that aspires to expand globally’ (Shim & Park 2008: 148). As a form of ‘cultural capital’ for operating in a global world the learning of English clearly demands conversational competency that is associated with exposure to ‘native’ forms.

The focus on communicative competence amplified the emphasis on conversational ability and English‐only approaches to the classroom. ‘Native speakers’ became idealised as the best teachers of English, particularly in relation to Korean English teachers who may have been experts in linguistics but were often unable to teach English through English language itself. A significant private English education industry started to grow during the 1990s involving the recruitment of university graduates from several predetermined ‘western’ nations. In 1985 there were only around 600 individuals on the ‘teaching and research’ visa that covered language instruction and other education based migration at that time. The numbers remained low until the mid‐1990s, reaching 1,136 in 1993 on the new E2 ‘language instructor’ visa, 4,230 in 1995 and 7,607 in 1997, before declining heavily in the wake of the financial crisis and then reaching 6,414 by 2000. The growth in the number of foreign language instructors increased steadily during the 2000s, to reach 12,439 in 2005 and 23,317 in 2010. This resulted not least from government initiatives like the English Program in Korea (EPIK), and the provincial Gyeonggi English Program in Korea (GEPIK) that sought to place native speakers in the public schooling system. Since 2010 there have been incremental declines in the number of E2 visa holders to the current number of 15,450 in 2016.

More recently, this emphasis on educating ‘global subjects’ (Kang 2012) has also become incorporated into the restructuring of universities as ‘world class institutions’, through an increasing emphasis on research output and rankings and the related attraction and retention of international students. International students are particularly valued for the role they play in transforming campus spaces, and in providing Korean students in domestic institutions with exposure to a wider range of cultural and linguistic forms (Moon 2016). Moreover, international students are also being viewed as future skilled labour in training, and their presence has been conceived in terms of their potential role in ‘future international business and trade relations’ (Kim, S.K. 2013). Many international students originate from parts of Asia and their cross‐cultural skills and training is claimed to open opportunities for them in an increasingly transnationalised Korean economic sphere (Shin & Choi 2015). In contrast to migrant workers, then, who are positioned at the bottom of labour market hierarchies, and English teachers who occupy a unique middling niche, (graduating) international students are