Rethinking Belongingness in Korea: Transnational Migration, “Migrant Marriages” and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Abstract

In 2006, a 30-year-old American football player, Hines won the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in the Super Bowl. Mr. Ward happened to have a Korean mother and an African-American father. Virtually overnight, Mr. Ward became a veritable sensation in his birthplace, which was more than a bit ironic given the long and very intense discrimination by Koreans against mixed-blood (honhyol) children and their mothers. irony of the situation, as Mary Lee points out, was no accident. The social buzz over Hines Ward, Lee writes, can be read as an attempt to achieve some sort of expedited closure on the issue of long-standing discrimination against interracial people.1 Even more, this social buzz?which was much more like a chainsaw?marked, for the first time, a countrywide recognition that South Korea was in the midst of a potentially profound social transformation, with equally profound political, economic and cultural ramifications. basis for this social transformation is clear, namely, the rapid growth of transnational migration/immigration to South Korea. This story is now fairly well known: beginning in the late 1980s, there has been a constant and constantly growing inflow of foreign newcomers (primarily unskilled workers) to South Korea. In the space of less than two decades, from 1990 to 2007, the number of foreign residents2 in South Korea grew from just under 50,000 to over one million?a 2,000 percent increase. (By