This paper investigates how ethnic Koreans migrating to South Korea from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have learned to adapt to precarity, tailoring their strategies to cope with an increasingly uncertain South Korean job market. Using archival analysis, participant observations, and in-depth interviews, the findings of this study demonstrate that the in-betweenness of those migrants’ ethnicity and nationality gives them licence to slip into the South Korean job market. They find employment, albeit part-time or contract-based work, further upsetting an already precarious job market. This research argues that Chosŏnjok, KoreanChinese migrants, have developed strategies to navigate unstable situations and use precarity to their advantage as a tactic to survive, relying on their Korean ethnicity to give them a foot in the door. In this paper, I explore the three strategies they employ to survive in increasingly precarious circumstances. One strategy is their willingness to seek employment through informal and unofficial job markets and broker systems. The second strategy is to engage in circular mobility, allowing Chosŏnjok to reap the benefits of citizenship in both South Korea and the PRC. The third strategy is place-making, and I used the enclave in the Kuro-Taerim area of Seoul, as an example. By engaging in South Korea’s unstable job market, Chosŏnjok’s precarious circumstances are exploited by employers while at the same time the migrants learn to exploit the precarity to their benefit.