Global Asian City

Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century Seoul

Francis L. Collins

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119380009, 9781119379980
• eBook ISBN: 9781119380047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Global Asian City provides a unique theoretical framework for studying the growth of cities and migration focused on the notion of desire as a major driver of international migration to Asian cities.

• Draws on more than 120 interviews of emigrants to Seoul—including migrant workers from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, English teachers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, UK and USA, and international students at two elite Korean universities
• Features a comparative account of different migrant populations and the ways in which national migration systems and urban processes create differences between these groups
• Focuses on the causes of international migrant to Seoul, South Korea, and reveals how migration has transformed the city and nation, especially in the last two decades

 

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 destinat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Desire, Assemblage and Encounter
• Chapter Three: Migration Regimes, Migrant Biographies and Discrepancy
• Chapter Four: Migration, the Urban Periphery and the Politics of Migrant Lives
• Chapter Five: Channelling Desire and Diversity
• Chapter Six: Negotiating Privilege and Precarity in Suburban Seoul
• Chapter Seven: Multicultural Presence and Fractured Futures
• Chapter Eight: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement