Comparative analysis of residential patterns of foreigners from rich and poor countries in Seoul

Abstract

As globalization proceeds, more people are migrating across borders, but in many cases, immigrants do not fully assimilate with the locals and tend to form residential clusters among themselves. Seoul is no exception to this trend. Foreigners there tend to show different residential patterns depending on their home countries’ socioeconomic level. To investigate such differences, this paper divided foreigners in Seoul into two groups, those from rich countries and those from poor countries, according to their home countries’ GDP per capita, using that of South Korea as a baseline, and identified their residential patterns using spatial statistical methods. To analyze the cause of their residential patterns and differences, spatial regression analysis was conducted. According to the results, the residential patterns of the two groups appeared to be different from each other. While foreigners from rich countries appear to be clustered in a relatively small area regardless of nationality, foreigners from poor countries are distributed relatively widely, with strong clusters based on each nationality. The factors that affect the residential pattern also appeared significantly different in each group. Through this analysis, we found that there is a clear difference in residential patterns among foreigners according to their home countries’ socioeconomic level.