Governing through support: Migrant women’s affective labor and government services for migrant workers in South Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACTA central thread in migration studies is the various forms of state power that produce precarious conditions for migrants in favor of capital mobility and accumulation. The case of South Korea, which this paper pays attention to, shifts the analytical focus on overt state violence to explore heterogenous modes of governing foreign populations, namely, labor migrants and marriage migrants. Grounded in interviews and observational fieldwork in Ansan, South Korea’s ‘migrant city,’ the paper examines the policies, practices and political effects of everyday practices of government support: First, what kinds of governing rationality are embedded in South Korea’s bifurcated migration policy? Second, how does the affective labor of migrant women become entangled in practices of government support for labor migrants? Third, how and to what extent, does such support guide migrants, both the recipients (the labor migrants) and the service providers (the marriage migrants or staff members), to become governable subjects? The analysis obliges us to recast the analytical division between labor and marriage migrants often deployed in the literature of migration in the region. Furthermore, it highlights a pivotal role that gender plays to shape technologies and effects of governing for migrants.