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Making global citizens: South Korean student and labor mobilities in the Global Age

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Making Global Citizens:
South Korean Student and Labor Mobilities in the Global Age

by
Carolyn Areum Choi

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SOCIOLOGY

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Carolyn Areum Choi

ii
DEDICATION

우리 리틀 가족에게

To Umma, because your move and sacrifice was not in vain but the beginning of something
beautiful.

To my sister Yuri, my forever ride or die. I’m here because of you.

And my guardian angel and companion Mr. Bobos. May you walk again.

To the deep seas where my ancestors came and across, healing came and started with you.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation was founded on the love, solidarity, and compassion of many people
in my life. I would not be here without them. This project is dedicated to the people who are not
with us today to tell their story. It is dedicated to those who have tirelessly fought and survived
to live another day and those who have dedicated their futures to challenging and uplifting up the
dignity of labor, life, and humanity.
This dissertation was built on the generosity, patience, and compassion of the many
South Korean migrants who I’ve met during this multi-year journey. I am especially thankful for
the friendships I’ve built along the way especially those I’ve met in Seoul, Yang Yang, Bacolod,
Bundaberg, and Los Angeles. I also wanted to give a special thanks to Sukyung for helping me
understand the nuances of Korean culture and guiding me through major breakthroughs.
Thank you to my Korean chosen family Yoonjeong, Jeenah, Martin, and Chiman; I am so
blessed to have you in my life and be able to call you my friends. Thank you Eun Jee for opening
up your heart and home in Daegu. Thank you Stephanie and Anat for spending so many hours
studying, exploring, and eating way too much gopchang with me. Our friendships are golden like
hodokwajas. Thank you to Junkyung, Hongi, Haejung, and Minkyung for your generosity and
friendship in navigating Korean life. Thank you halmoni, sookmo, and emo for being the best
second ummas and for extending so much love, support, endless homemade kimchi, and
homecooked meals throughout multiple stays in Korea. Of course, samchon.
Words cannot describe how thankful I am to my advisor Rhacel Parreñas for her patience,
brilliance, dedication, inspiration, labor of love and care. Thank you for never giving up on me
and offering me the opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you for playing such an impactful role in
my life, and I am so honored to have worked with you and to have gone through grad school as

iv
one of your students. Thank you for paving the way for students like myself. I also want to thank
my committee members David Kang, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Angie Chung. Thank you
for your patience, enthusiasm, and for your commitment in me, and for showing me what it is to
be a great mentor.
I also wanted to thank Robert Chala and Chelsea Johnson for whom looked over
countless drafts and whose friendships made me the person I am today. Robert, thank you for
believing in me when I didn’t, for inspiring me always, and for encouraging me to embracing
myself and the unknown. Your Buddhahood shines in me. Chelsea, I can’t express how much of
an impact you have made on my life. From Korea to Koreatown, I am so thankful for the
opportunity to grow together, explore our curiosities, and appreciate all the beauty that surrounds
us. I am me because of you. LaToya, thank you for being the best chosen family to nephew and
me, and for bringing so much joy, laughter healing especially over the last year. And to my big
sister, Maria Hwang, thank you for your love, generosity and compassion that is thicker than
blood, you are the big sister that I’ve always dreamed of, and I am so blessed to have you and
Bill as family.
I am also equally thankful and indebted to Julia Meszaros, April Hovav, Claudia Lopez,
Daniela Pila, Yuri Doolan, and Soo Mee Kim for their survival friendships throughout this
journey. Yuri, thank you for our soul-touching connections have nourished me. I am especially
thankful to my community of friends, sisters, and brothers out in the big world that have
sustained me, for the countless meals they cooked and covered for me, for listening to my never-
ending struggles on the struggle bus, for your patience in hearing me, and for your grace in
accepting and loving me the way that I am. Love you guys, Christine Yi, Nicholas Tokiuki Niiro,
Selina Zhong, Yujin Ko Yoon, Lila Nam, Minyi Lee, Terry So, Tina Won, Myra Kwak, Christy

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Chae, Sammy Chung, Joseph Kim, Priscilla Park, and Jessica James. Thank you to the Burocho
emos for feeding me, your soups and extra kakduggi I always asked for is what gave me the
energy and strength I needed to make it through. Thank you Sabuneem for being the best role
model, learning song and the buk through you has given me a platform to express my pain, and
your constant support and critical role in my growth has allowed me to be who I am today. Shout
out to my neighbor and brother Mario for your heartful conversations and cookouts that enriched
my spirit this past year. To my little mentees and Melody where ever you are, I am always
thinking of you.
Stachelle, as many others have echoed, your love, compassion, and humanity was what
allowed so many of just to stay and keeping on going. Thank you for being our guiding light, for
keeping your door open, and for just being an amazing inspiration in our lives. We are here
because of you. I also want to thank my lifelines Kelcie and Serena for holding my hand and
walking me to the finish line, I would not have made it without you.
Last but not least, I am indebted to my Umma, Apa, Yuri, and Mr. Bobos. Umma, thank
you for always wanting the best for me and for all of you sacrifices, patience, and love. Apa, I
am thankful that you fight another day and that life has brought us full circle to heal and work on
our relationship. Mr. Bobos, thanks for being the truest company and forever companion. Lastly
to my sister Yuri. It’s hard to describe how much impact you have on my life. You are my North
Star. Thank you for listening to me, for letting me cry on your shoulder, for feeding me eggrolls
on eggrolls, and for always believing in me.
Institutional support has been pivotal and I would like to thank them here: Department of
Education, Korea Foundation, Academy of Korean Studies, Fulbright Korea, Social Science
Research Council, USC Sociology, USC Career Center and Dartmouth College.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………viii

Chapter 1: Making Global Citizens and the Rise of Transnational Stratified Mobility…………..1
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1
Global Citizens at a Glance………………………………………………………...……...5
South Korean Case & Background……………………………………………...……….13
Literature Review………………………………………………………………………...20
In Between Student and Middling Mobilities……………………………………20
Mobility Pathways ………………………………………………………………26
Place-Making and Identity Formations…………………………………………..32
Chapter Breakdown……………………………………………………………………...38

Chapter 2: Setting up the South Korean Eduscape………………………………………………42
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………42
The United States………………………………………………………………...44
The Philippines…………………………………………………………………..47
Australia………………………………………………………………………….49
Multi-Sited Longitudinal Ethnographic Methods………………………………………..51
Global Longitudinal Ethnography, a Global-Trotting Business…………………54
Interviewing……………………………………………………………………...60
Return Migration Interviews……………………………………………………..61
Reading Aspirations and Positionality…………………………………………...62

Chapter 3: Transient Colonialism and the Philippines as Happy Chosun……………………….65
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………65
Philippines as the Last Resort……………………………………………………………70
Hyperbolic Time Chamber………………………………………………………73
Educational Camouflaging………………………………………………………76
Transient Colonialism and Compensatory Consumption………………………………..80
Geographic Arbitrage……………………………………………………………82
Neoliberal Enterprising and the Politics of Bounded Self Growth….…………………...90
Enterprising Self…………………………………………………………………94
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...100

Chapter 4: Blue Dreams Deferred: Enclave Migration in Los Angeles’ Koreatown…………..102
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..102
English Language School Gateways in Koreatown…………………………………….107
Co-Ethnic Economies: Comfort, Traps, and Places of Community……………………116
The Ills of Contesting “Illegality”….…………………………………………...122

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Fictive Kin Relations…….……………………………………………………..125
Mobility Pathway for Naturalization…………………………………………….……..130
Parlaying Social Mobility in and from Los Angeles…………………………….……..134
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….……..140

Chapter 5: Racialized Mobility and Australia as the Easy Destination………………….……..143
Introduction………………………………………………………………………..……143
South Koreans and Global Travel………………………………………………….…...145
Labor Market Segmentation……………………………………………………………148
Racialized Spatial Segregation…………………………………………………………154
Racialized Violence…………………………………………………………………….160
Downward Class Mobilities and Substantive Freedoms……………………………….163
Paradoxical Inclusions………………………………………………………………….167
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….……..169

Chapter 6: Unlearning Global English………………………………………………………….171
Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…….171
Unlearning English……………………………………………………………………..174
Migrant Categorizations………………………………………………………………...175
Gender……………………………………………………………………….………….176
Globalization and the Ghost of the Cold War…………………………………………..178
Other National Cases…………………………………………………………………...180
Where does China fit? ………………………………………………………………….181
Epilogue……………………………………………………………………….………..182

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….…………...184

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ABSTRACT
This is a longitudinal global ethnography that examines South Korean English language
learners as both students and workers across three countries including the Philippines, the United
States, and Australia. This dissertation uses 176 in-depth structured interviews with South
Korean educational migrants, educational agents, English school owners and teachers and six
years of multi-country longitudinal participant observation as its primary data. It introduces the
concept of transnational stratified mobility defined as geographic and social mobility combined
with the extension of class stratification afflicting prospective migrants in global and
transnational terrain. Transnational stratified mobility constitutes the everyday experiences of
South Korean student and labor migrants and is demonstrated in three key findings. This
includes the engagement of South Koreans in the Philippines in a practice I call transient
colonialism meaning temporary migration or tourism involving the reproduction of unequal
relations between migrants and locals through the use of economic, racial, and social power. The
second finding articulates the process of enclave migration in the destination of Los Angeles
which highlights the structural role that the co-ethnic market economy plays in shaping the
material realities of student-migrant workers as well as the creative ways they navigate and
parlay these systems in otherwise limited circumstances of social mobility. The last finding
demonstrates South Korea’s repositioning as a global power in the twenty first century. Migrant
experiences in countries like Australia where they work as labor migrants articulates the limits to
South Korean national power as racialized others indicating the experiences of racialized
mobility. The implications of this dissertation are as follows. In migration research, this work
challenges existing migrant categorizations through foregrounding new multi-national, multi-
directional mobility pathways. In studies of globalization, these findings contest assumptions

ix
about Asian ascendance and flexible citizenship through exposing South Koreans’ continued
racialization within white settler and advanced capitalist host countries. Lastly, this dissertation
contributes to studies of education by placing questions of educational inequality in the global
terrain and interrogating the thesis that the internationalization of education and higher education
operates as a global equalizer of social inequality.

1
CHAPTER 1: MAKING GLOBAL CITIZENS AND THE RISE OF TRANSNATIONAL
STRATIFIED MOBILITY
Introduction
Yaejin browses through her friend Yuri’s Instagram pictures showing her recent trip to
Las Vegas, Nevada. She lets out a deep sigh, seeming to reveal her envy and frustration. Yaejin
herself had just gotten back from a full day of packing strawberries at a produce farm in
Caboolture in Queensland, Australia, enduring sharp reprimands from her Korean speaking
manager who was dissatisfied with the overall production for the day. Harking back to a moment
from earlier on in the day, she recalls the words of her manager reverberating through her tired
and fatigued body, “Don’t think this is a working holiday without work.” It was no wonder that
Yaejin wanted to momentarily escape into the distractions of social media.
Yaejin and Yuri have known each other for less than a year. When I met Yaejin, it had
only been eleven months since the two friends first met at Oceanside English School, a small
private English-language institution in a provincial region of the Philippines. They had chosen
Oceanside in the rural region of Bacolod in the Visayas not just as a means to distance
themselves from the obvious distractions of the city but also because it was affordable and met
their lower price point ($1000 less than some schools in Cebu and Manila). Yaejin and Yuri were
two Korean women in their mid-twenties
1
who were coming from geographically different but
similar provincial cities in South Korea of Daejeon and the outskirts of Busan. Yaejin admits
only gone to Seoul (a mere three-hour train ride away) once as a child and does not have any
memories of this visit. While the two women had little to no experience of going or living abroad,
they possessed a strong desire not to miss out what they believed would be their “last chance” to

1
Pseudonyms have been used for all names of institutions, such as Oceanside English School, and participants.

2
live outside of South Korea before they had to settle down, gain a full-time job, and “god forbid,
find a partner.” After graduating from a college near her hometown and not having any luck
finding a professional job in the local labor market, Yaejin rotated in-and-out of several part-time
jobs until she picked up a barista shift at a local Starbucks where she was quickly promoted to
manager. Yuri, on the other hand, had slightly more opportunities than Yaejin, moving out of her
parent’s house for college and relocating to the dormitories in the nearby bustling metropolitan
city of Busan. She was in the middle of completing her bachelor’s degree in business
administration when an unanticipated split with a college boyfriend made her decide to take a
gap year abroad, which would mark her “staple” study-abroad experience a year before
graduation (see Bell 2002).
Perhaps due to the fact that both women were shy and timid, close in age, and were
embarking into the “outside world” for the first time, the two seemed utterly inseparable when I
first met them. My first encounter with them was in the Philippines during our English listening
course, where I observed them sitting next to each other, side-by-side. In class, they would
bounce off each other in conversations about life in South Korea and Korean culture, prompting
people to ask if they had known each other before Oceanside, to which they would shake their
heads from side to side. It made sense then that they spent most of their time together from
coordinating their meals in the cafeteria, buying each other mango smoothies at the student café,
and on the weekends, going on late night “inasal”
2
runs, which they found more addicting than
Korean fried chicken. Towards the end of their time at Oceanside, I was even invited out to their
weekend getaway to the beach of Boracay, where they planned to ditch the last week of classes
and go on a small island adventure for the first time in their life.

2
“Inasal” is barbeque chicken in Tagolog and is a popular dish in the Philippines.

3
As much as they were an inseparable pair at Oceanside, upon completing English-
language study in the Philippines, their paths took different turns. Yuri, who had a more
recognized college degree from a university in Busan, was well on her way to pursue another
English language course at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) with the financial
support of her parents. Gleaning from the likes of her Instagram pictures, Yuri was now about to
embark on a month-long cross-country trip with some of her new “non-Korean” friends she met
at language school before her intended return to South Korea. Yaejin, in contrast, was on a
different track with less prospects waiting for her back in South Korea. After paying an
educational consultant thousands of dollars in labor introduction fees, she moved to rural
Australia under a working holiday visa where she plans to find work and improve her English in
a place with “less Koreans and less job competition.” In a little over a month, she found
temporary full-time employment as a hotel housekeeper in Port Douglas, which she described as
“an ideal job” because of its stable hours hoping to earn enough to travel across Australia but
also to save for the journey back home. However, Australia’s heavily regulated working holiday
program restricts workers from maintaining jobs for extended periods, leaving Yaejin with no
choice but to leave behind her temporary post in Port Douglas and look for other lucrative
options. Now having relocated to work the strawberry fields in the rural town of Caboolture, the
reality of returning to South Korea started to settle in for Yaejin. Grimacing and riddled with
doubt, she turned to me and said: “When I go back to South Korea I will be 27—my English still
not good enough. Honestly, [who] would hire a farmer?”
Despite that it appeared that Yuri was well on her way to having the “signature” study
abroad experience in the United States, her situation in San Diego was different from what it
appeared on Instagram. While Yuri had enrolled in an expensive course with the help of her

4
parents, this was only for a few months. This “investment” was her sure-fire way of securing a
student visa to the United States and a way to avoid what had happened to her older cousin—
who had gotten her visa rejected on the grounds that her designated English language school was
not well-known. An educational consultant recommended that Yuri select a non-Los Angeles,
California-based location, as it is supposedly a good strategy for a smooth visa interview process.
With optics no longer an issue, Yuri ended up moving to Los Angeles after completing her
course at UCSD in order to find a job in the ethnic economy of Los Angeles Koreatown. Despite
that Yuri would be getting her college degree in Busan, she was anxious about her job prospects
back home and wanted to try out her options in the United States. With hopes of ultimately
enrolling in community college courses and getting college course credit, she enrolled in an
English language school in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and began working as a server to make
ends meet and prolong her pursuit of her particular version of the “American Dream.”
Juxtaposed, Yuri and Yaejin’s experiences are not exceptional but reflect those of the
growing number of young people in South Korea who leave home for language acquisition,
travel, study, work, and cultural exposure in spaces in and beyond traditional educational
destinations in countries of the Global North to new destinations that crisscross regions in the
Global South. South Korean youth’s student and labor mobility in the Philippines, Australia, and
other countries inhabit a middle zone between extended transnational stratification and
geographical and social mobility, a process and practice I call transnational stratified mobility.
This paradoxical position frames student and labor migration as a simultaneous process of social
mobility and structural limitation; the geographical mobility and limited social mobility afforded
by student and labor migration comes at the expense of the extension of existing inequalities
within South Korea transnationally, both across and within destinations.

5
From the major cities of Seoul and Busan to smaller provincial metropolitan regions like
Andong and Gumi, South Korean youth from all across the peninsula have been under
heightened pressure by the state to meet its twenty-first century expectations of “going global,”
urging them to study and work abroad and ultimately parlay their experiences into economic
rewards for the nation. Over half a century after South Korea’s “Economic Miracle on the Han
River,” such decisions to leave are also embedded and reflective of a larger remapping of South
Korean economic systems, where young people’s futures have been increasingly stalled and
stunted due to the onset of back-to-back economic meltdowns and sudden contractions of
employment opportunities due to the disappearance of standardized employment. This is despite
the fact that South Koreans hails some of the highest educational levels in the developed world in
recent years (Choi 2015). The convergence of neoliberal shifts in South Korea’s rapidly
changing economy has contributed to young people’s overwhelming sense of precarity amidst
their transition to normative conceptualizations of “adulthood” with a pragmatic and defeatist
sense of hope in achieving future social mobilities at home or in the globe.

Global Citizens at a Glance
Students constitute the world’s fastest-growing migrant group, with their numbers
increasing almost four times faster than the total international migration population (see King
and Raghuram 2013). Scholars like Robertson and colleagues (2018) and many others have
recognized that the current generation of youth are more likely to migrate than any other
previous generation of migrants (Robertson et al 2018). The International Consultants for
Education and Fairs (2015) reports that approximately five million college-age students pursue
postsecondary education outside of their home country, with close to two million engaged in

6
language study. In numerical terms, there has been over a 300 percent growth in tertiary degree
international students over the last three decades (see Collins 2013). (This does not include the
large number of students who do not enroll in postsecondary educational institutions or who use
visa-free policies or study permits to enter and exit destinations for study.) At the turn of the
twenty-first century, with rapid economic advancements among the “tiger economies” of South
Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the continent of Asia has emerged as one of the
largest sending regions of international students (Collins 2013), accounting for over 53 percent
of all students enrolled in higher-education institutions worldwide (OECD 2013). China, India,
and South Korea comprise of the largest sending countries of postsecondary students in the
world with South Koreans making up the third-largest pool with close to a quarter of a million
students (ICEF Monitor 2015).
International student mobility is a window to understanding the increasingly mobile nature
of the world and how higher education promotes greater global competition and movement
(Collins 2013). While travel has historically been used as symbolic and material good in
navigating class structures of societies, contemporary political economic and social conditions
have reinforced the connection between young people and geographic mobility, making it an
indispensable feature of our modern lives (see Robertson et al 2018; Conradson and Latham
2005). Mobility and travel are viewed as key to young people’s transition regimes (Wyn 2015;
see Robertson et al 2018) from adolescence to adulthood, which have become increasingly
prolonged in the modern global age as a means to secure better futures or outcomes. The
prolongation, non-standardization, and reversal of young people’s transition are tied to the trend
towards individualization under rapid globalization (Frandberg 2014). In this context, Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim (2002) introduced the concept of choice biographies to capture the situation of

7
young people confronting an increasing number of possibilities to choose between as well as the
demands to reflect on, justify, and take responsibility for the choices they have made. The
prolongation of youth is understood as a strategy to deal with the increasing insecurity associated
with globalization—with the idea that this choice biography goes beyond privileged groups
because of the normative power that these ideas carry (ibid).
While individualization models have often been used to explain global mobility originating
from Western countries, it does not entirely explain the rise of youth global travel coming from
the Asian context. In Asia, English language attainment has become a major driver of
transnational postsecondary educational flows, comprising two-thirds of all language students
globally (ICEF Monitor 2015). The pursuit of English as the global lingua franca is rooted in U.S.
and British colonial legacies and the geopolitics of the Cold War in Asia and the Pacific that
have sought to maintain influence and dominance in existing and former colonies and occupied
spaces. For the United States, this project is tied to the war against communism in the Third
World where the spread of the English language played an integral role in U.S. foreign policy
decisions to link developed and developing worlds (Lemberg 2021). In the middle of the
twentieth century, as the geopolitical power and imperative of US foreign policy shifted from
establishing hemispheric hegemony to global dominance via warfare, international development
activities of the United States anticommunist strategy supported educational expansion in new
and developing states, where English was promoted as the “language of wide communication” to
spread in the developing world (Lemberg 2018).
Such postcolonial and imperialist legacies have allowed English to represent a language of
importance within postcolonial, decolonialized, and enduring militarized regions within Asia and
the Pacific Islands. In the twenty first century, English has become widely accepted as the

8
international lingua franca, operating as the main language and currency of the global economy,
business, technology, and politics (Pennycook 2017). As linguist scholar Joseph Park (2011)
writes in the context of “English mania” in the U.S. occupied South Korea, “with English it is
believed one can get a better job, absorb knowledge and information from sources all over the
world, and ultimately be recognized as a better person, someone who is respected and
appreciated as well-rooted and competitive in the global market…in a broad sense: a conduit for
economic and social advancement” (443).
Despite the rise of other global languages like Chinese and Spanish, English language
today is actively endorsed by governments, businesses, and transnational organizations including
the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and G-20—especially in
places where English is not the native language—as key to achieving global competitiveness in
the global economy. The governments of Vietnam, South Korea, and Egypt, for instance, have
taken aggressive measures in implementing English curriculums as early as the primary
education level (Hoa and Tuan 2007; Nguyen 2013). In South Korea and Japan, English-
language assessments like the TOEIC (Test of English International Communication) have been
integrated into standardized rubrics for professional labor market hiring processes and
participation (Kobayashi 2007; Park 2011). With increased state pressures for South Korea’s
next generation to become “global citizens of the world,” it is no surprise that English language
education and its potential economic and positional benefits have become one of the major
drivers for studying and working abroad among South Korean youth like Yuri and Yaejin who
have made great temporal and financial commitments in undertaking creative global pathways
abroad.

9
Dominant literature on international student mobilities have largely examined mobility
flows from an East to West and South to North analytical framework. While recent literature has
looked at the emergence of intra-Asian mobilities (Collins 2013; Park and Bae 2009; Ge and Ho
2018), most discussions in this line of research have focused on youth from upper middle class
families of sending societies who accumulate credentials and cultural capital in Western
destinations for social class reproduction (Brooks and Waters, 2011; Waters, 2006; Ong 1999).
Such depictions have contributed to incomplete assumptions of student-migrants as “flexible
citizens” (Ong 1999), who represent privileged transnationals with documented status who move
frictionlessly across borders. Luthra and Platt (2016) have commented that these individuals are
seen as “best poised to appreciate the benefits of ‘new mobilities’ offered by modern
technologies for movement and increased communication (319).” Within the popular
imagination, discussions of flexible citizens, especially in the context of post-9/11 Islamophobia,
have combined with recurrent racializations of the “perpetual foreigner” to further reinforce their
image as “green card sharks.” These compounded perceptions of student-migrants have often
been used as a counterpoint to disadvantaged, lower class “proletariat migrations” that have
previously garnered the majority of attention of migration researchers.
3

My dissertation expands our understanding of educational migration and questions
assumptions of it as being solely a pathway of upward mobility. The South Korean youth I met
in the Philippines, Australia and the United States are different from the multi-passport wielding
flexible citizens observed on U.S. college campuses today. Sharing the same dreams and goals of

3
This reinforces what Saskia Sassen (2000) has pointed out as a binary model of
migration where global migration streams are comprised of 1) high skilled professionals whose
lifestyles and consumption practices engender the demand for low-wage workers that are often
met by the rise of “feminized survival circuits” of 2) marginalized migrant groups.

10
social mobility in South Korea as their privileged counterparts, they have benefitted from the
long history and expansion of Korean educational migration and undertake English language
programs abroad while simultaneously juggling work as karaoke hostesses, Korean BBQ servers,
masseurs and masseuses, farmers, factory workers, and coffee baristas taking your morning
orders in destination countries. They often need to labor as temporary migrant workers to
subsidize their educational dreams of making it overseas. While some are able to achieve legal
permanent residence in the United States, the majority of student-migrant-workers constitute an
unrecognized documented and undocumented migrant labor populations who are often subject to
state surveillance, deportation, and residential segregation. These migrants land somewhere in
the middle of the spectrum between the elite and impoverished classes, having a migration
experience that more closely aligns with what recent scholars like Robertson (2020) refer to as
“middling mobilities”: a term describing the everyday lives of non-elite migrants and movers
with access to visa regimes and other global privileges moving for interwoven cultural, lifestyle,
and economic motivations (see Conradson and Latham 2005).
Existing literature on middling transnationalisms, especially those focused on “middling
youth” have largely been based on experiences of Western youth or has exclusively focused on
the experiences of those coming from more privileged middle-class backgrounds (Conradson and
Latham 2005; Clark 2005; Collins 2014; Scott 2006; Inkson and Myers 2003). As a result, there
is a tendency for the literature to focus on downward patterns of activity and how migrants must
adjust their expectations upon their migration to destination countries. Such sacrifices allow
them to eventually find a source of stability in receiving destinations. These studies pay less
attention to the larger scope of more ambiguous, albeit upwardly-aspiring migrations of the
lower middle class, who do not make up the poorest of the poor but depend on geographic

11
mobility to improve their life prospects back in their home country. I extend current
conversations on middling transnationalisms by illuminating the experiences of upwardly
aspiring albeit resource-scarce youth migrants from globalizing nations like South Korea, whose
social dislocations and displacements in their home country have taken them down different
global pathways altogether.
Complicating more “trickle down” approaches to student mobilities, I empirically
foreground new migration pathways for lower middle class youth that increasingly involve
multi-country, multi-visa, and multi-purpose routes—not only to unpack their distinct contexts of
departure as “middle class migrants” but also to offer a window to understanding the ways in
which global inequalities and stratifications confronted at home are connected and extended with
their experiences abroad and on return. Illuminating the narratives of lower middle class youth
connects the scholarship and experiential mobility with political economic perspectives that shed
light on the social locations of young people in South Korea’s stratified society and the ways
mobility pathways continue to be structured and shaped by the material, social, and economic
realities that young people face back home (Chun and Han 2015; Choi 2021). This dissertation
investigates the intersections of student mobility, labor mobility, and upwardly aspiring middling
migration, ultimately showing how precarity follows them.
I illustrate their precarity by 1) tracing their migration; 2) foregrounding place in my
analysis of migrant experiences; and 3) establishing their limited mobility. This research asks
the following questions: What are the migration trajectories of lower middle class educational
migrants? What are their mobility pathways and what factors determine these pathways? What is
their identity formation processes? In addressing these questions, this research introduces a new
theoretical concept called transnational stratified mobility, which as I defined earlier refers to the

12
extension of the class stratification afflicting prospective migrants to a global and transnational
terrain. Lower resourced South Korean youth’s student and labor mobility in the Philippines,
Australia, and the United States inhabit an interstitial space of ongoing class stratification and
geographical and social mobility. This paradoxical position frames their student and labor
migration as one of stratified mobility; the geographical mobility afforded by their student and
labor migration offers limited social mobility and comes at the cost of reproducing existing
inequalities within South Korea transnationally, both across and within destinations. The
experience of gaining limited social mobility as segregated and manual workers or temporary
tourists involves both losses and gains. Most South Korean youth still appreciate and find
meaningful experiences as cosmopolitan migrants but often go back without meeting their goals
of interacting with native speakers or learning English. They return to South Korea lacking
socially valued skillsets to better poise themselves in the professional labor market like their
more upper middle class peers. The framework of transnational stratified mobility provides a
nuanced picture of South Korean youth’s experiences as student and labor migrants, one that
acknowledges their relative privilege as passport-carrying and visa-holding migrants who
maximize student or labor migration programs, but that simultaneously rejects the prevailing
wholesale discourses of “international students” that paints South Korean youth as frictionless
citizens who are disassociated from racialized identities of the “illegal immigrant.”
Relying on an extensive empirical foundation, this study is based on 176 in-depth
interviews with educational migrants, educational agents, English school owners, and English
school teachers as well as six years of multi-country longitudinal ethnography in the origin
country of South Korea and three key host destinations of Australia, the United States, and the
Philippines. My primary data draws from 116 in-depth semi-structured interviews with South

13
Korean young adult educational migrants and 39 follow-up interviews with select migrants three
to four years later. Twenty-two non-consecutive months of participation-observation was carried
out at adult English language schools in the United States and in the Philippines where I worked
as a volunteer tutor as well as at migrant worksites in Australia including farms where I worked
alongside migrants who exchange their labor for access to one to two year working holiday visas.
Given that capturing labor market outcomes of educational pursuits requires a longitudinal
research design, I identified research subjects in schools and worksites in each of the three host
destinations and selected a third of the initial group of migrants to trace their return home to
South Korea upon completing their migrations.

South Korean Case & Background
What distinguishes youth mobilities in the contemporary moment is that education and
social policies have served as a driving force facilitating the ubiquity of youth transnational
mobility. This occurs under the expectation that young people’s mobility will not only provide
individuals with enhanced life changes but that it will benefit local and national communities and
economies more broadly (Robertson et al 2018). This dissertation uses the case study of South
Korea as a country that has introduced aggressive youth mobility programs to examine the geo-
political and economic drivers of young people’s moves today. In doing so, this study
interrogates how recent political economic transformations and the ongoing stratification of
South Korean society impacts their mobility pathways abroad and upon their return. As one of
the largest senders of international students and national spenders of private education in the
world (Choi 2021), South Korea provides a lens for examining widening social inequalities
produced under globalization within the ever-expanding commercial global educational

14
marketplace. This case also reveals the role English language education has played in the context
of postcolonial, post-authoritarian regions within Asia as a key resource in staying globally
competitive in precarious labor markets across the increasingly compressing world stage and
economy. Despite that public figures such as President Barack Obama and Michael Gove, U.K.
education secretary, have hailed South Korean education as a model, this comes at a cost—with
private education accounting for 12 percent of the total household expenditure in South Korea
(Mundy 2014). The industry is estimated to be a $20 billion dollar private market in South Korea
alone (Mundy 2014) with English education making up a significant share.
This dissertation situates the South Korean case in the context of South Korea’s post-
democratization era following intense political oppression and popular struggle during the 1980s.
The 1990s witnessed a period of tremendous change. After decades of double-digit economic
growth and the establishment of a rising middle class (or at least in the popular imagination and
conception of it [see Yang 2018]) under President Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship (1963-
1979), the government of South Korea in the new millennium shifted its political and economic
agenda to reflect a more global orientation under the policy of segyehwa
4
or also known as
globalization. Under the country’s first civilian-elected President Kim Young Sam (1993-1998),
the segyehwa policy signified the country’s first step toward economic liberalization in the
global marketplace. The new policy direction not only allowed the previous “hermit kingdom” to
join the global economy, but it enabled the state to begin cutting back on the social assistance
and public services of earlier decades.
English education was viewed as a cornerstone of segyehwa’s neoliberalism (Park and
Abelmann 2004). Maximizing one’s English-language skills and competency was linked to

4
All Korean words in this dissertation have been romanized in the Revised Romanization of Korean version with
some exceptions. Note pseudonyms do not follow romanization rules.

15
economic principles of human capital development: individuals’ continuous development of
skills, knowledge, and experience was believed to shape the economic productivity of the nation.
However, in contrast to South Korea’s previous educational policies that aimed at educational
equalization, the government’s “Five Year Plan for English Education Revitalization”
deregulated South Korea’s educational systems (see Park and Abelmann 2004; Jeon 2009),
displacing the responsibility of state welfare and social services onto surrogate institutions like
the family, minimizing the dependency associated with the previous welfare state (Jeon 2009;
see also Borovoy 2005). This conceptual shift of education (and English education) from public
good to a private household matter led to the rise of a multi-billion-dollar private English-
education market in South Korea (Park and Abelmann 2004).
The 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis made way for a new phase of government-
sponsored neoliberal (i.e., liberalized market-focused) labor and educational policies (Song
2009). Under the control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), South Korea restructured its
economic systems, outsourcing technological and manufacture production and replacing lifetime
employment with part-time, contractual, precarious labor (Song 2009). With the volatile climate
and economic uncertainty, the newly formed middle-class South Korean families, some of whom
had saved up capital from the real estate boom (Yang 2018), began sending their children abroad
at disproportionate rates—what Abelmann and colleagues (2015) call South Korea’s
“educational exodus.” Many children were sent alone as “parachute kids” or with a family
member as part of “geese families.” The majority of educational migrants headed toward
Western and white-settler destinations, such as the United States, Australia, and Canada, where
English is the “native” language spoken by the settler white majority (Zhou 1998; Sun 2014;
Waters 2002; Brooks and Waters 2010; Lo et al 2017; Lee 2010; Koo and Lee 2006). At the

16
same time, scholars began to note nascent flows of pre-college educational migrants to former
colonial English-speaking countries, but largely as a stepping stone toward eventually attending
college in Western locations (Park and Bae 2011; Huang and Yeoh 2006).
South Korea’s neoliberal economic transformations began to fully materialize in the
following decade. The increasing scarcity of full-time stable employment had particularly strong
implications for everyday South Korean young people, who despite high levels of high school
and advanced degrees, saw some of the highest recorded rates of unemployment and irregular
employment throughout the mid 2000s and early 2010s (Chun and Han 2015; Yoon 2015;
Hyundai Research Institute 2018). Although youth unemployment was widespread throughout
the country, it further entrenched existing class divides (Abelmann et al. 2009) which polarized
across the middle classes (Koo 2007), particularly in the form of regional and educational
divisions. For instance, cities outside of Seoul, such as Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, and Incheon, had
higher rates of unemployment (Hyundai Research Institute 2018), and individuals with degrees
from schools outside of Seoul were further disadvantaged due to employer bias toward hiring
people with more “prestigious” degrees from the capital city of Seoul (Abelmann et al. 2009;
Chae and Hong 2009).
However, it was not until the advent of the neo-conversative Lee Myung Bak presidential
regime (2007-2013) when youth mobility programs began to be aggressively promoted and
sponsored by the state. In intensifying English education policies, the Lee administration posed
English competencies as a solution to youth unemployment, fueling private individual and
familial spending on domestic and transnational education. Sujung Kim (2018) describes how
the Lee and later Park administrations reinforced and expanded the policies of sending
prospective unemployed college students and graduates in diverse forms of low wage internships,

17
labor programs, and volunteering with minimal pay by glamorizing the potential to become
global leaders or what Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology officials have referred to
in a report as “KoGlosian.” K-Glosian is a compound word of “Korean,” “global citizen” and
“Asia” which indicates Koreans who go abroad.
In Lee’s inaugural New Year’s Day address, he describes the particular charge of the
KoGlosian generation:
The future of our nation is entrusted to the young people. The young Koreans of today
are the first generation in history to be a global generation in name and substance. We
can see everywhere young Koreans who do not hesitate to plunge into the world of global
adventure and competition armed with creativity and a burning spirit of challenge. I
would like to call them the ‘G-20 generation.’ The country should nurture them as the
protagonists for building a leading global nation. The country should motivate them to
love their country, forge ahead with passion, and take initiatives in world affairs as global
citizens.

The Lee administration’s policies were targeted toward what he referred to as the “G-20
generation,” representing individuals growing up during a time of South Korean economic
prosperity, whose national citizenship as South Koreans bestows on them both the benefits of the
nation’s strong economy and the duties of maintaining this strength and keeping the nation’s
economy globally competitive. The G-20 generation’s global expertise and experience is also
contingent upon their ability to master the lingua franca of global business with one member of
Lee’s presidential transition team declaring, “when all [Koreans] become able to freely speak in
English, the GDP of the nation will automatically rise by one percent” (cited in Lee 2008).
Cultivating the global generation is viewed as a remedy to resolve the “global issue” (Lee et al
2011, ix) of youth unemployment, which, “if the unemployment of young adults is consistent,
economic progress will be destroyed and social unrest will be compounded” (Lee et al. 2011, v,
cited in Kim 2018).

18
These nationalistic discourses reflect what anthropologist Vanessa Fong in her study of
Chinese migrant youth has observed as (2004) “filial nationalisms,” that is, a contemporary
expression of patriotic state-building strategies involving the labors of the younger generation.
Filial nationalisms draw on Asian familial principles of “filial piety” to compel young people to
invest in their own futures by undertaking costly study-abroad projects—in ways that allow
neoliberal states to further seal the connection between the reduction in welfare and social safety
net systems and greater calls for personal responsibility (Lukacs 2015). This follows the logic
that personal investments in overseas education and education at large are critical not just to their
own success but to the success of the nation (Fong 2004). Sujung Kim’s research on South
Korean youth further illustrates that policies to drive out “less-profitable domestic college
students and graduates out of Korea” can also be implicated in “precarity chains” (Silvey and
Parreñas 2019) that drive out “less-profitable” workers to go abroad as a means to contribute to
host countries’ economic development while opening market demand for lower-wage foreign
workers to South Korea that domestic manufacturers need (Kim 2018).
As a note, neoliberal labor and educational policies across the modern world reflect a
general trend among rapidly globalizing Asian nation-states to adopt knowledge and innovation
driven growth models utilizing human capital to expand and diversify the sources of national
economic growth. Under these policies, subjects are encouraged to view every experience and
investment of the self, especially those overseas, as part of a forward-moving project of
increasing the stock value of one’s “embodied human capital” (Anagnost 2013). As Michel
Feher (2000) argues, “the neoliberal art of government is…playing the human capital market,
about betting for or against certain behaviors…to shape the portfolios of conducts” (30).
Although investments in human capital no longer supports social upward mobility as it allegedly

19
did during the developmental state, neoliberal states promote human capital development as a
means to self-promotion and self-marketization while being confronted by rapidly eroding
systems of security. Anthropologist, Ann Anagnost (2013) laments on this tension:
This vision of never-ending self-development would seem to capitalize on the
energies and resilience of youth, while refusing to acknowledge the gradual erosion of
life and spirit by the stresses of constantly having to remake oneself. Workers become
terrorized by the specter of redundancy when their labor power will no longer be of any
“use to society.” Over the course of a lifetime, it becomes harder to maintain a forward-
moving life building project when one’s embodied value is constantly being negated (14-
15).

As part of these efforts, the deregulated South Korean for-profit educational marketplace
converged with the state’s extended global education provisions to provide opportunities for
working and middle class South Korean youth who were economically “left behind” by existing
domestic and overseas private educational structures. This included the rise of short-term English
language programs in places like Malta and the Philippines; multinational work-study schemes in
the Philippines and Australia; global youth leader and internship programs with minimal pay to
various countries (see Kim 2018); working holiday programs to places like Australia, New
Zealand, and Japan; and global internship programs to the United States. With the exception of
short-term English educational programs, many of these programs safeguarded individuals low
on resources with the option of participating in low-wage labor markets (Robertson 2013),
ideally by allowing students to subsidize their overseas language learning experiences while
abroad.
The introduction of state-sponsored market driven mobility projects were offered as a
compromise product for youth whom global social mobility was financially out-of-reach. In
other words, they were targeted towards students who wanted to study English or travel abroad
but did not have sufficient capital or resources to do so in traditionally capital-rich western

20
destinations. In the eyes of the state, such programs were a win-win situation: exporting
unemployed workers would allow South Korea to maintain its global reputation and high
economic standards at minimal cost (because labor remittances would be too low for the
country’s standards anyway) while receiving countries would be able to meet its labor deficit,
especially in rural regions of the country, as well as gain tourism dollars. The benefit for the
South Korea government would be that South Korean youth would be returning home with
English language skills and overseas experience that would support and bolster national
economic growth. Packaging these forms of mobility as “educational” or youth-based exchange
programs, in which migrants in question must be without children, have necessarily become the
safer choice for developing cultural diplomacy among nation-states while allowing for the
cultivation of multi and bilateral relations and labor exchanges without the traditional “costs”
associated with standard immigration regimes.

Literature Review
In Between Student and Middling Mobilities
The stories of young people like Yuri and Yaejin can be first situated within the vast
expanse of literature on international student and educational mobilities. Within the international
migration literature, international students were initially marked as a subset of highly skilled
migration (Waters 2012). International students were viewed as part of what economists and
migration scholars called the “brain drain,” that is, a unidirectional pattern of movement from
“poor” countries to more affluent countries in the Global North, where more lucrative careers
and access to a “higher quality” of life make students more likely to settle in destination
countries (Miyagiwa 1991). While contemporary scholarship especially in the field of

21
educational geography have helped to establish “international student mobilities” as a subfield
(Waters 2012), earlier literature played a critical role in solidifying the positionings of
international students and educational migrants within dominant conceptualizations of
international migration. That is, student-migrants are categorized as members of the globe elite
whose lifestyles and consumption practices are in stylized contrast to low-wage workers (Luthra
and Platt 2016), a demand largely met by disadvantaged migrant workers (Sassen 2000).
Despite the large emphasis on the ubiquity of travel in the twenty first century, theoretical
expectations about the characteristics and early integration patterns of student-migrants have
largely structured contemporary understandings of student mobilities. Researchers of student
mobilities who began following East to West or West to West flows have focused on the patterns
of movement among elite groups who study abroad to reproduce their privileged class status
(Ong 1999). These examinations are cast in instrumental terms and based on the accumulation of
human and cultural capital via the symbolic power of studying in Western countries. The
maximization of Western credentials for class reproduction furthermore provides competitive
edge and social prestige for elite to upper middle class groups faced with the general expansion
of higher education across countries in the modern world. As mentioned earlier, degree-seeking
international students represent part of what Ong (1999) has referred to as flexible citizens, that
is, members of a multiple-passport-carrying transnational elite who fluidly circumnavigate
professional opportunities at home and in overseas labor markets.
While research on elite student mobilities have offered structural critiques in exposing the
processes of capital accumulation underlying studying abroad (Brooks and Waters 2011), the
majority of research maintains a limited understanding of how this impacts the lives of the larger
majority of movers who may be “less flexible” and “less frictionless” in an era of heightened

22
internationalization of higher education. According to the laws of cumulative causation in studies
of international migration, as migration matures, migratory experience expands within a sending
country and becomes less selective with more working and lower-middle class participants
initiating migration later (Fussell and Massey 2004). In the post-Asian Financial Crisis era, the
arrival of more budget-friendly “regional educational hubs” in Asian cities like Singapore and
Hong Kong (Mok 2011; Sidhu et al 2014; Sidhu et al 2011; Collins 2013), combined with the
forging of creative pathways to traditional Western destinations, have gradually extended
participation in study abroad to middle class families (Park and Abelmann 2004). Research on
Asian student mobilities, in particular, have paid attention to new empirical developments of
what Francis Collins (2013) calls “regional pathways” in overseas higher education, which does
not only ease the financial burdens of studying afar among the growing global middle classes in
Asia but also allows students themselves to reimagine their futures more broadly in the context
of emerging markets within Asia.
Yet the continued focus on higher education pathways to prestigious destinations in the
West or affluent parts of Asia have left underexplored the emergence of new educational
destinations in the Global South and how these sites have been reconstituted by the global
expansion of the neoliberal educational marketplace. Existing analyses have often relied on a
“trickle down approach” to studying diverse student mobilities in Asia and the Global South
which often assumes the presence of these pathways as a simple outcome of “inferior” or
compromised set of choices (Yang 2018). Furthermore, research on Asian student mobilities
have also contributed to general perceptions of non-elite students as immobile or sedentary
subjects, with studies that do document their participation in international education doing so as
“immobile transnationals”—in situ students who access Western educational opportunities

23
through localized branch campuses not in the West (Waters and Leung 2013). Without further
unpacking the distinct dynamics of student mobilities on the margins, policymakers and
businesspersons continue to advocate for the liberalization of international education under the
pretext of “democratizing” or leveling educational access as a way to mask the retrenchment of
existing educational hierarchies across the globe (Madge et al. 2009; Waters 2012).
Influenced by the mobilities turn in research on globalization (Sheller and Urry 2016;
Giddens 1991; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), studies have expanded to a much wider focus
on “youth mobilities.” They view mobility as integral to the twenty first century global
experience that includes: “gappers” (Johan 2009; Luzecka 2016); “O.E.” travelers (Inkson and
Meyers 2003, Haverig 2011); working holidaymakers (Conradson and Latham 2005; Chun and
Han 2015; Yoon 2015; Clarke 2015; Tan and Lester 2012; Robertson 2014); second-language
learners (Pan 2011 Choi 2020); interns (Yoon 2014; Cuzzocrea and Cairns 2020); backpackers
(Allon et al 2008); volunteers (Smith et al 2019), au pairs (Oishi and Ono 2020); English
language teachers (Collins 2014); and global nomads (Richards 2015). Moving beyond the
tendency in student mobilities research to reduce travel to instrumental explanations, these newer
works have brought attention to the multifaceted cultural, emotional, and affective experiences of
young people on the move and how travel has become an integral component of young people’s
transitions to adulthood or navigation of the life-course in uncertain times (Robertson et al 2018).
The emphasis on mobilities as now an inclusive category for the previously immobile or
sedentary youth has introduced the idea that travel can be a liberating and valuable experience, if
not for instrumental or economic gains, and a means of personal development (Li et al. 1996;
King and Ruiz-Gelices 2003). Indeed, Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) have pointed out this
tendency of research to naturalize “diversity, mobility, and the differential ability to travel…[as]

24
linked and positively valued” (186). Other scholars like Beck and Beck-Gersheim (2008) have
unabashedly called this, “tools of the powerless.”
However, as anthropologist Pnina Werbner (1999) warns even earlier, the separations of
transnational cultures into diverse categories can hide a Eurocentric and class bias in our
narrations of it. Despite documenting the myriad ways young people move, researchers of youth
mobilities tend to frame their examinations in terms of what Conradson and Latham (2005) have
referred to as “middling transnationalisms,” a concept that highlights non-elite migrants and
movers with access to visa regimes and certain privileges and whose motives involve interwoven
cultural, lifestyle, and economic considerations. However with mostly Western parochial
examples, there is a tendency to narrowly define and fix the idea of the “middle class.” This has
subsequently led to an overemphasis on the experiences of downward mobility of migrants in
destination societies or what many scholars have called “de-skilling” (Ho and Ley 2014;
Robertson 2014; Baas 2017). The root of such assertions ignores the ways in which the concept
of the “middle class” has become extremely contested in many societies and can no longer serve
as a viable yardstick for understanding class inequality. In some “middle income” societies, the
conceptualization “middle class” has served a more ideological purpose of political legitimation
that has often eclipsed high rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, and educational
inequality (Kang and Abelmann 2011; Koo 2016, Yang 2018).
There has been a growing body of research that have complicated static assumptions
about the “middling” experiences of young people that have not only challenged definitions of
what is considered middle class in a global, comparative context but also assumptions about the
reification of travel as transformative. Drawing heavily from research based on hidden and hard-
to-reach populations, these works are situated within the intersections of labor and student

25
mobilities (Wyn and Dwyer 1999) and the simultaneous ways educationally channeled
migrations have also served as a conduit for manual or undocumented labor migrations (and vice
versa). From “scholarship students” in Denmark who are subject to labor quotas (Luthra and
Platt 2016; Valentin 2015; Wilken and Dahlberg 2017) to Korean sex workers in the United
States working to sustain their language education (Choi 2017), recent studies in this line of
research have highlighted the ways in which work-study arrangements, whether formally
instituted like in Denmark or operating side-door in the case of the United States, reproduce and
exacerbate social inequalities for migrants traversing precarious routes and seeking access to
labor markets in the destination. These studies have served to illuminate the greater
heterogeneity in the experiences, motivations, and desires of youths on the move (see Liu-Farrer
2009, Wattanacharoensil and Talawanich 2018; Choi 2017) and how different migrants are
embedded in larger local and regional political economic processes that stratify and shape
migrants’ lives on the ground as well as upon their return.
Building on this growing body of work, my dissertation seeks to extend the scope of
middling transnationalisms and look at a more understudied group: lower middle class young
people who are upwardly aspirational but confront a limited set of resources to move and
navigate their prospects abroad (and later back home). This dissertation connects the lives of
young South Koreans as diverse and widespread as cherry pickers in Bundaberg, chicken factory
workers in Perth, English language students in Iloilo, and sex workers in Los Angeles to
demonstrate how young people’s transnational struggles and moves across a hierarchized global
educational landscape – one that remains shaped by (neo)colonial imaginaries—magnify existing
inequalities in labor markets across home and abroad. In doing so, the concept of transnational
stratified mobility elaborates on how pathways for transnational educational and labor mobility

26
can extend existing inequalities within South Korea transnationally. It raises important questions
about the dominant narrative of educational migration as an automatically seamless pathway to
social mobility and social advancement. Such conceptualizations urge us to look beyond singular
upwardly mobile pathways to the West and examine the different ways in which educational
mobility that is increasingly tied to the global education and labor market have become
segmented, roundabout, and contingent. Transnational stratified mobility is a multi-dimensional
process that transpires socially, spatially and materially. For lower-middle class migrants, the
experience of transnational stratification punctuates their limited mobility and inhabitance of
social, spatial and material peripheries. Socially, it manifests in their segregation from dominant
members of society; spatially, in their inhabitance of peripheral locales; and lastly, materially, in
the limited capital gained from their education.
Mobility Pathways
US-centered analyses of migration have emphasized long-term migrations and settlement
(Portes and Rumbaut 2011, 2014; Le Espiritu 2003). Within the literature on immigrant
adaptation, the assimilation perspective has dominated sociological thinking on the matter for the
larger part of the twentieth century. Central to this perspective is the assumption that there is a
naturalized process by which diverse ethnic groups come to share a common culture and gain
access to the opportunity structure of the receiving society. The classic assimilation perspective
first formulated in the 1920s by sociologist Robert Park and his collaborators argued that
migration leads to a situation of the “marginal man” in which individual immigrants are pulled in
the direction of the host culture but are drawn back by the culture of their origin (Park 1928). In
spite of this two-way process, Park argued, immigrant groups from underprivileged backgrounds
are expected to eventually abandon their old ways of life and “melt” into mainstream society

27
through residential integration and socioeconomic mobility and achievement and sever home
connections.
Moving beyond Robert Park and his colleagues, contemporary migration scholars focus
on the 1965 immigrant generation to complicate earlier formulations, challenging the
applicability of classic assimilation theory to new immigrants. Portes and Bach’s (1985) study of
Mexican and Cuban immigrants in the United States was one of the first to contend that
immigrant groups actually encountered different “modes of incorporation,” where individuals are
placed at different positions at the entry of their immigration. This explained, for instance, why
European immigrants were able to integrate into mainstream society more easily than immigrants
of color. Identified within this concept was also the idea that receiving societies provided
different “contexts of reception” (Portes and Rumbaut 2014), concomitantly shaping
acculturation processes differently for immigrant groups. Since Portes and Bach (1985), the
literature on immigrant incorporation has focused on sharpening our understanding of the
contexts of reception among immigrant groups in receiving destinations. In a follow-up study,
Portes and Zhou (1993) applied such ideas to second generation U.S. immigrants and introduced
the idea of “segmented assimilation,” which they define as patterns of adaption emerging across
an intergenerational process of becoming American within an unequal society.
Challenging U.S.-centered analyses of migration, Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and
Christina Szanton (1994) introduced a transnational framework to challenge the assimilation
model and argued that migrants create and maintain multiple social relations that connect their
countries of origin and destination. Privileging anthropological approaches to research, many
transnational studies scholars have since emphasized micro and meso-level analyses of
individual and collective action as a means to identify the political, socio-cultural, and economic

28
activities of migrants across nations (ibid: 1994). Levitt (2001) then challenged this expansive
definition of transnationalism, suggesting that transnational migrants are those who are
incorporated into receiving countries, but remain active in countries of origin and should be
distinguished from travelers who frequently travel but remain home-bound in their perspectives.
Such critics argue that transnationalism is not an alternative to assimilation, but rather an
explanation of the varying degrees that migrants integrate into receiving societies (Kivisto 2001,
Levitt 2001).
However, as studies of transnationalism have shown, assimilation perspectives do not
capture the whole of migrant experiences especially within shifting social contexts. With the
increasing fortification of immigration regimes in the United States, recent research has focused
on how the law and government serves as exclusionary forces in limiting the settlement capacity
of migrants, documenting the rise of xenophobic sentiments, the tightening of immigration
borders (Massey and Pren 2012), to the rise of “noncitizens” (Goldring and Landolt 2013).
Similarly, research on undocumented migrants have focused on migrant exclusion and examined
the rise of deportation regimes (Golash-Boza 2009; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013).
Without dismissing the incorporation processes of migrants (Soysal 1994), Rhacel Parreñas
(2018) contends, “a focus on exclusion foregrounds the structural impediments and exclusionary
measures that narratives of immigration may potentially overlook, inviting further analysis on
migration patterns” (7). This growing body of work has encouraged a theoretical departure from
assimilation perspectives raising questions on what sorts of migration patterns may result.
Yet, what these scholars point out is not new. Earlier discussions on circular migration
underscore how the majority of temporary migrant workers in Asia engaged in non-linear
migrations between two countries due to their exclusion from permanent residency in the

29
receiving country. Harbingering discussions on this is Australian geographer Hugo (2009) who
observed that the majority of temporary migrant workers in Asia engaged in “recurrent
movement” between two countries as circular migrants. These forms of movements have also
been noted by migration scholars examining temporary labor migrants in Asia, the United States,
and Western Europe. For instance, Nicole Constable (2007) examined the settlement of domestic
workers in Hong Kong and how as circular migrants, workers feel ambivalent about their
settlement. She captures their state of being as “at home but not at home” in both destination and
origin country. Parreñas (2010) also found that migrant entertainers who engage in circular
migration between Japan and the Philippines are “homeward bound” as they earn income abroad
to set up their lives back in the Philippines. Likewise, research on Mexican migration to the
United States illustrate how numerical restrictions, as legislated in the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965, on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere reconstituted
as “illegal” individuals the bulk of long-standing migration flows from Mexico (De Genova
2005).
Studies on migration pathways have increased in recent years with analysis focusing on
how temporary labor migrants as well as student-migrants counter the exclusionary conditions of
migration through cross-border multi-country travel and circulation. Anju Mary Paul (2017)
describes the multi-country migration undertaken by migrant domestic workers who start in a
lower cost destination to eventually reach the high cost destination of Canada where they
ultimately settle as permanent residents. Here, migrant domestic workers accumulate “migrant
capital” to embark on a multinational migratory scheme of steady upward trajectory from one
country to the next that she calls “stepwise labor migration.” Diverging from this progressivist
trajectory, Shanthi Robertson (2019) captures the mobility patterns undertaken by prospective

30
Asian migrants in their pathway to permanent residence in Australia, a process that involves a
multitude of temporary visas (e.g. student, working holiday, and temporary labor) of varying
temporal trajectories. She describes this multi-national process to permanent residence as
“staggered migration,” which she defines as “contingent, multi-directional and multi-stage
mobility pathways – where the boundaries between temporariness and permanence (as both legal
status and subjective state) are increasingly blurry and mutable” (Robertson 2019: 170).
Yet studies on temporary forms of migration have also shown the ways in which
“discrepant logics and rationalities” can also shape the direction of migration pathways. These
discrepant logics as Peidong Yang (2018) demonstrate are more diffused and socially embedded
countering the idea that migration is a highly calculative and rationalistic enterprise of cost-
benefit analysis or investment-oriented calculations. Instead, it highlights how migration can take
shape as a process, over a long period of time, and are rarely in a moment of rationalistic
calculation. A number of scholars have demonstrated these logics embedded within different
migration pathways and patterns. For instance, Maria Hwang (2018) documents how Filipina
migrant sex workers shuttle back and forth from Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian cities,
which they access using visa-free programs that as Filipino nationals they can maximize to earn
income in informal labor markets. Parreñas and colleagues (2019) have also documented the
emergence of “serial labor migration” among migrant domestic workers who engage in itinerant
multi-national migrations across destinations. They describe how various exclusionary contexts
in “desirable” destinations can lead to migrant circulation in “less prestigious” labor destinations
such as those in the Middle East. Together, these studies demonstrate how various structural
factors including the threat of deportation, limited financial capital, and a lesser level of
educational qualifications can hamper migrant mobility, preventing workers from following

31
progressivist and planned trajectories of migration. Instead, they establish that migrants confront
structural forces that place ceilings on their mobility options and in many cases, thwart entry into
high-cost destinations.
This dissertation extends discussions on mobility pathways by providing insights that
challenge our understandings of settlement for temporary migrants. It also illustrates the
formation of discrepant logics and varying strategies of socio-economic mobility employed by
migrants as well as the structural forces that limit the scope and direction of their migration
trajectories. Due to the exclusionary conditions of membership that confront migrants, strategies
often exceed the territorial boundaries of host societies. For instance, South Korean young
people who cannot land within the limited quota cap for South Korean working holidaymakers in
more prestigious destinations like Canada will undertake working holiday schemes in Australia,
where there are no caps on South Korean nationals. Looking at the socio-economic mobility of
migrants beyond their integration into one host society allows us to examine cross-border
mobility pathways that move away from looking at membership in a given receiving society but
rather show how labor and student migrants are integrated into a larger global capitalist market
system. This occurs not only because of their freedom to cross borders or their accessibility to
certain destinations via passports or visas but also due to how they navigate stratified and
differentiated migration channels available to them. For student-migrants in this study, mobility
pathways constitute experiences that traverse the boundaries of a given host society and offer
perspectives on migrant experiences that extends our formulations of transnational migration
beyond binary flows that tie sending and receiving states.

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Place-Making and Identity-Formations
Accelerated globalization has led to an understanding of place as an increasingly
accessible reality, creating what Urry (1999) has called a “compulsion to mobility.” This
emerging body of work has challenged dominant explanations of migration as economically
driven and rationally determined, introducing the growing salience of cultural and personal
motivations that contribute to the increasing diversity of people, motivations, and periods spent
living abroad. This includes studying, developing a career—as part of travelling, or to
experiment with the possibility of emigrating. With current migration, education and social
policies encouraging and facilitating the infrastructures and access to mobility, scholars have
increasingly acknowledged that migration is becoming a taken-for-granted part of life in late
modern societies and in many ways a “rite of passage” for the younger generation who must
somehow and in some way navigate these uncertain and precarious times in today’s global age.
Elliot and Urry (2010) have noted that discussions of “identity have become
fundamentally recast in terms of capacities for movement as the globalization of mobility
extends into the core of the self” (3). Such discussions have been couched within theories of
reflexive individualism, a grand theory used to explain contemporary global and social and
economic shifts in modern societies that are shaping migration flows. These frameworks suggest
that in postindustrial, late modern societies the breakdown of previous fixed and linear systems
have compelled individuals to increasingly move away from rooted identities based on place and
social location towards hybrid and flexible forms of identity. As Torkington (2012) states,
“social differentiation has become less dependent on a fixed social hierarchy and individuals are
correspondingly less constrained by traditional social structures and categories” (73). At the
same time, these new systems, as complex and non-linear as they are, do not allow norms to be

33
abandoned altogether but rather require the proactive contributions of everyday people who are
forced to produce their own choice biographies. This comes in the form of “self-reflexive
projects,” where individuals confront the burden and vindication of constructing their own
identities for the very reason “we have no choice but to choose how to be and how to act”
(Giddens 1994: 75).
Such discussions of individualization and self-development have become the basis of
studies on youth mobilities expressed as “curiosity about the world and a desire to encounter
different people and places” (Tsai and Collins 2017). However, it is important to note that
dominant themes of youth travel and mobility originate from Western European constructions
which continue to shape contemporary analyses on youth, identity, and place. As O’Reilly
(2006) argues such paradigms of individualization are rooted in legacies of colonialism and
imperialism associated with privileges to undertake journeys to learn about faraway places (Tsai
and Collins 2017). For instance, scholars have discussed how return-oriented travel is a historical
extension of the “Grand Tour” in the seventeenth and eighteenth century among elite European
young men embarking on masculinist expeditions (see Tsai and Collins 2017). The New Zealand
“Overseas Experience” or OE is a contemporary manifestation founded on “the connections
generated by exploration, curiosity, trade and settlement between Britain and its antipodes”
(Wilson 2014: 20). As Bell (2002) states, this practice has become a “cultural institution” and
viewed as a significant crossroad within a young people’s transition into “normative adulthood.”
There have been increasing works which have sought to challenge these dominant
paradigms by offering a picture of non-Western youth mobilities (Tsai and Collins 2017; Bui et
al 2013; Ho et al 2014; Yoon 2014). These works signal the growing number of working
holidays and other forms of youth migrations from East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asian

34
nations—where as their nations start to globalize, they become increasingly incorporated in
bilateral and multilateral migration and travel programs to previously inaccessible Western
nations. This includes South Korean, Thai, Taiwanese, and Japanese working holiday makers in
Australia and New Zealand (Tsai and Collins 2017; Wang and Connell 2021 Yoon, 2014);
Pakistani and Nepalese “scholarship” student-workers in Denmark (Valentin 2015; Luthra and
Platt 2016); and Chinese international student-workers in Ireland (Pan 2011) and other
modernized countries like Japan (Liu-Farrer 2009). In fact, earlier works in this field have
emphasized the feminization of educational migration and how the largest sending countries of
educational migrants send more women than men to study abroad. For instance, in Northeast
Asia, eighty percent of Japanese nationals studying around are women while over fifty to sixty
percent of Koreans and Chinese studying abroad are women (Kim 2011).
These studies tend to fall under two main categories of analyses. The first body of work
emphasizes the cultural aspects of Asian youth travel arguing that the Confucian values,
collectivism, and cultural expectations of Asian culture shape young people’s motivations and
experiences abroad. Many of these works emphasize the filial piety or familial deference of
Asian youth and is linked to parental respect, obedience, and children’s feelings of indebtedness
(Yeh and Bedford 2003). Cultural explanations furthermore focus on the issues young people
face in navigating cultural transformations within their own societies from traditional to modern
and Eastern to Western norms. For instance, Youna Kim’s (2011) work examined how despite
that many Northeast Asian women migrated to London to escape parental surveillance and
cultural and gendered expectations of marriage and duty and embrace a process of
individualization, they nevertheless ended up reproducing their cultural networks and ties in the
host country due to their racialized and language-based alienation.

35
Another body of work departs from earlier cultural explanations as “more Asian youth
are travelling overseas…to ‘repackage themselves’ in ways that involves similarities with
western youth patterns” (Yoon 2014). Building on Western constructions, these works tend to
highlight the instrumental and strategic nature of youth mobilities especially as it relates to their
travel to Western countries. While acknowledging that global experiences are an imagined part
of the process of self-development, they also examine entanglements between education, work
and travel. Due to the intensification of competition in South Korea, there is a need for young
people to enhance their value and distinguish themselves to improve employment prospects,
particularly through the acquisition of English and global experiences. In other words, mobility
entails strategic and instrumental moves to increase one’s employability and is viewed as having
a transformative value on their career and labor prospects. As a result of these expectations,
however, scholars have discussed how young people’s expectations do not always match up to
their lived experiences with many ghettoized in low-paid employment in the receiving
destination or confronting high degrees of precarity and racialized encounters abroad
(Kawashima 2010; Chiu 2020; Yoon 2004; 2005). As Yoon (2014) critically notes, “the
seemingly independent and free nature…has been shaped by the overlapping interests and
practices of tourism industries, governments and media” (1015).
While such works have sought to fill much needed gaps within youth mobilities research,
existing conceptualizations subscribe to a binary reductive model of analysis that interpret richer
Western migrants as free-standing, cosmopolitan, and cultural while poorer non-Western
migrants as capital-hungry, economic, and strategic. These conceptualizations can reinscribe and
resurrect age-old Asian racializations of the “perpetual foreigner” or the “greedy Asian migrant”
in the context of white-settler societies that have historically excluded on the basis of what Iyko

36
Day (2016) calls the “contemporary economism of Asian racial form” (7). Such binary models of
First World migrants vs Third World migrants has for decades foreclosed discussions how
migrants are constantly negotiating the intersecting financial, cultural, social, gendered, classed,
and racial expectations of the places and spaces in which they enter.
In contrast, in the field of economic sociology, Viviana Zelizer (2009) has argued that the
idea of economics and culture existing in separate spheres is overly simplistic and that in reality
they are intertwined and connected. Instead, these spheres exist in relation to each other in ways
that recognize that people constantly navigate this nexus or what she calls “connected lives.”
Feminist migration researchers have begun to contest the essentializing tendencies of migration
studies (see Faist et al 2013) that take a more separate spheres approach by offering relational
approaches to recognizing a larger spectrum of economic, educational, cosmopolitan, romantic,
and familial intersections that more accurately make up the experiences of minoritarian subjects
(Chin 2013; Parreñas 2011; Choi 2017). For instance, Christine Chin’s (2013) work on non-
trafficked migrant sex workers in the global city of Kuala Lumpur sheds light on how migrant
women and their syndicate facilitators have taken advantage of expanding educational tourism
pathways for work and how varied cosmopolitan subjectivities are forged through women’s
migration. These studies together allow us to better understand how migrants are locally
emplaced and relational to one another within particular geographies and the ways in which this
translates into lived experiences on the ground.
Inspired by Zelizer’s relational model, my research will examine experiences of
subjectivity and identity-formation among non-elite student-migrants who must navigate
economic, cosmopolitan, and educational expectations in an increasingly globalized educational
marketplace. In doing so, my research additionally draws from Salazar’s (2011) theorizations on

37
mobile imaginaries to explore how postcolonial legacies shape the aspirations, decisions, and
pathways for South Korean youth on the move. Despite that South Koreans now study abroad in
a variety of educational destinations, the longstanding U.S. militarization of South Korea has
shaped dominant views of the hierarchy of education in which “the United States as an
educational destination and its broader hegemonic socio-cultural and geo-economic position is
internalized as normative goals by many students and their families” (Collins 2013: 482).
Degrees from these places are not only believed to have the potential to automatically enhance
class positions as a ticket to greater job opportunities but that time spent in these global
metropoles of cosmopolitanism, culture, art, and education will enhance language proficiencies
as well as global cultural capital. This explains why South Korean youth undertake multinational
mobility pathways to high-cost and desired educational destinations in the West even if this is at
the cost of exchanging their labor. How do we understand the symbolic power of place-based
Western and non-Western imaginaries? To what extent are these “places-in-the-mind”
performative and how are they experienced when actualized in a material space?
My research also looks closely at the ways in which migrants dis-identify with particular
spaces they traverse or experiences that they have. Torkington (2012) has observed how lifestyle
migrants who have relocated to less urban, coastal destinations employ strategies of spatially
repositioning themselves in conversations to legitimize their practices of place-making in their
new settlement. In particular, the author notes the ways in which lifestyle migrants construct
their homes as being away from the movement of tourists that sets them apart from their
transience and temporariness. Extending such frameworks to the study of South Korean
educational migration, I examine how young people draw boundaries in relation to the
transnational educational experiences and destinations they think employers will deem valuable

38
or less valuable upon their return to South Korea. I also explore the ways in which migrants
contest their own internalizations of dominant market driven definitions of place and experience
and the relational ways in which they find and make meaning in experiences that transcend
anxieties of labor market participation.

Chapter Breakdown
In Chapter 2: Setting up the South Korean Eduscape, I establish my field research sites,
explaining the significance of each educational destination: the Philippines, the United States,
and Australia. I then go into the selection process of destinations and provide justification for
each prominent educational location. I then turn towards elaborating on my extensive
methodology which employs a combination of ethnographic, interview-based, longitudinal, and
comparative methods. Towards the end of the first chapter, I offer an instructive model for
comparative ethnography for migration patterns that align with shifting patterns of global
migration today.

In Chapter 3, Transient Colonialism and the Philippines as Happy Chosun, I examine the
experiences of South Korean students in a provincial English language school in the Philippines.
It asks: What kinds of experiences do South Koreans gain in the Philippines and how does this
inform their projects of social mobility? How do young people reimagine the structural
constraints they face in educational destinations like the Philippines? Aware of the limitations of
their destinations, South Korean students adopt a neocolonial view of the Philippines and
reimagine it as a “training ground” to gain confidence, increase their test scores, and prepare
their moves back home or to other destinations. The view of the Philippines as a “training
ground” contributes to their momentary experiences of what I call transient colonialism,

39
meaning a temporary form of migration or tourism which involves the use of economic, racial,
social and consumptive power that reproduces unequal relations among the transient migrants
and the people of that region. In a similar vein to settler colonial practices, those engaging in
transient colonialism interact with locals and participate in consumptive practices that reproduce
unequal geopolitical relations, ultimately reinforcing the global capitalist order.

The chapter entitled Chapter 4 Blue Dreams Deferred: Enclave Migration in Los Angeles’
Koreatown underscores the implications of the ethnic economy on the everyday lives of migrants.
It pays close attention to English language schools, labor markets, and social relations and
networks. It introduces the concept of enclave migration, highlighting the structural role that the
co-ethnic market economy plays in shaping the material realities and experiences of student-
migrant workers. Because international students on F-1 or F-2 visas are not allowed to work
outside of their educational institutions, they must rely on co-ethnic economies for their
economic survival in the United States as unauthorized migrant workers. While the cash-based
co-ethnic economy of Los Angeles Koreatown can serve as a “ethnic mobility trap” that further
exacerbates migrants’ precariousness, I also show how migrants creatively reimagine and
circumnavigate the hurdles they confront during their migration as they weigh important life
decisions about economic opportunities, home-making and settling. This chapter contributes to
the larger literature on international migration by examining how the “ethnic economy”
intersects with other state immigration systems in shaping migrants’ lives on the ground in their
relationships, family lives, livelihoods and futures.

40
In Chapter 5 Racialized Mobility and Australia as the Easy Destination, I situate the everyday
experiences of South Korean working holiday makers in Australia in the larger contextual
narrative of South Korea’s global ascendance. While South Korea’s repositioning as a global
power has opened doors to liberalize travel and other forms of global citizenship, their
experiences in these countries often tell a different story that continues to express the limits to
their national power as racialized others in a white-settler nation. It looks at the ways Asian
migrants are racialized in Western nations outside the U.S. context. While South Korean
migrants travel to Australia with optimistic views about learning English from white native
English speakers, they instead find themselves conscripted into a migrant labor system that
precariously positions them as unfamiliar outsiders. They face racialized labor market
segmentation, limited social interactions with white Australians and find themselves isolated in
rural areas where they are subject to various forces of racialized violence. I ultimately argue that
migrant workers bargain for paradoxical inclusion as they accept their subordinate racialized
positioning in Australian society as a way to carve out cosmopolitan experiences. This paradox
illuminates how race limits the social standing of South Koreans despite their country’s
economic ascendance.

The final chapter entitled Chapter 6 Unlearning Global English summarizes the main themes of
the dissertation. While more affluent South Korean families have the ability to send their
children abroad to prestigious countries, this is specific to flexible citizens with access to
multiple passports, visas, destinations, or world-class educational institutions. The majority of
young people, however, reflect the growing precarious under/unemployed population of South
Korea. As servers, baristas, convenience store clerks, contingent workers, and sex workers in

41
South Korea and abroad, they remain a few steps away from poverty in an increasingly class
polarized society (Koo 2006). The conclusion ends with a discussion of the dissertation’s
implications to our understanding of learning English, gender, and globalization.

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CHAPTER 2
SETTING UP THE SOUTH KOREAN EDUSCAPE
Introduction
South Koreans study in a myriad of educational destinations. These include English and
non-English speaking educational destinations such as Canada, United States, Ireland, Malta,
Germany, England, Hungary, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, China, Saipan,
Guam, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, India, among others. Though recent studies
signaled the rise of China and the Chinese language as the next frontier of educational
destinations (Curran 2020), English speaking destinations continue to be the most sought-after
countries for short-term language study programs, reinforcing the dominant ideologies of English
as the dominant language of global business.
Learning English as an international language is increasingly promoted in many parts of
the world, most notably in the non-English speaking or English as a dual language world.
English is now viewed as the lingua franca of the global economy and global business.
Underlying this emphasis is that English language competency is integral to a development of a
new global economy. Therefore, cultivating English language skills is viewed as strengthening a
nation’s economic competitiveness and increasing individual economic returns. These
assumptions constitute a discourse of what Ryuko Kubota (2011) calls “linguistic
instrumentalism,” which highlights the usefulness of language skills in achieving utilitarian goals
such as economic development and social mobility. These discourses have been particularly
prevalent in Outer Circle countries (Kachru 1985) like South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, among
other countries where English is not a primary language, and have also been constructed and

43
perpetuated in language education policies and language teaching industry within these regions
(Park and Abelmann 2004).
While Western countries like the United States, Canada, and England have always
remained the most prominent English educational destinations, in the last couple of decades,
with the global expansion of higher education, there has been a growing shift towards non-
Western educational destinations in formerly occupied countries. Most prominent have been
formerly occupied or militarized destinations in the Asia and Pacific such as the Philippines,
Guam, and the Mariana Islands. (In more recently years we have seen the rise of postcolonial and
distinct destinations like India and Malta). These English language immersion destinations in
Asia and the Pacific Islands share a history of imperial rule by the United States, creating
wartime and postwar conditions of military invasion, occupation, and violence in the aftermath
of Japanese imperialism and later the Cold War. Scholars have argued that the interconnections
within the Asia and Pacific Islands region constitute an important site of analysis for the current
state of geopolitics, militarized movements, and migration since the twentieth century which
sustains American as well as Japanese colonialisms through trans-Pacific arrangements and
entanglements (Espiritu et al 2017).
As Crystal Baik (2019) points out Cold War/Korean War is no longer just a “bomber jet”
but “surfaces in the foods we consume, the spaces we inhabit, the immobilities that mark our
lives, the personal histories we are unable to access, and the people we are forbidden to or cannot
name” (6). In many ways, the commodification of the English language is also an accumulated
form of racialized, gendered and unequal power relations that have recodified across space and
time into language policies, migration, cultural globalization, and profitable enterprises that are
removed from the immediacies of warfare. Following feminist diasporic scholars, this

44
dissertation seeks to capture connections that denaturalize temporalities, presumptions and
historical knowledges about the globalization of English and its meaning and significance within
the context of global Asia. This chapter seeks to mediate “epistemological openings” in the
analysis by gesturing to experiences, stories, and imaginaries that exceed Cold War historical
narrations of the United States. These are the very narratives that promote the United States as
the benevolent liberator of South Korea and other parts of the globe and compel our subscription
to certain globalized logics and ideologies of language hegemony and dominance.
There are 67 countries where English is recognized as an official language as well as 27
non-sovereign lands. There are also 142 countries in the world where English is a mandatory
element of the national education policy including South Korea. Despite that there are 94
destinations where travelers can achieve an “immersive” and interactive English engaging
experience, there are a handful of educational destinations that have established a booming
English export industry. These countries include the Philippines, Singapore, Saipan, Guam, India,
New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, Malta, among other countries. This dissertation
focuses on three of the most prominent educational destinations for English language acquisition.
These destinations serve as strategic sites for understanding contemporary patterns of student and
labor migration and the ways in which the two forms have become increasingly blurred for the
purposes of “English engagement.” The three countries I focus on are the United States,
Australia and the Philippines.
The United States
The United States is by far the most prominent destination for English language study.
South Korea makes up one of the top source countries for international students in the United
States with Korean students enrolled in U.S. tertiary educational institutions skyrocketing from

45
45,685 to 75,065 from 2000 to 2008. With the historical backdrop of U.S. militarized legacies
and capital investment in South Korea since World War II (Kim 2010; Baik 2019), the U.S.
empire has maintained a symbolic purchase in the South Korean imaginary intimately linked to
“long-term consumption… proliferating media texts, images, new concepts and alternative
lifestyles constantly transcending national borders and entering everyday consciousness.” (Kim
2011: 73). As many Korean studies feminist scholars have noted, these legacies are related to the
postwar groundwork of the United States as colonial liberator from Japan and Korean War savior
from communism. Despite that the pro-American regimes following the postwar period waned,
these historical memories remain a central component to how South Korea student migration
flows to the United States have been informed.
The United States is also home to the largest Korean diaspora outside of South Korea.
With some exceptions, the majority of South Koreans in the contemporary period have arrived
via skilled immigration schemes or family reunification policies during the mid-1960s due to a
combination of landmark changes in U.S. and South Korean immigration policies. South
Korean-U.S. immigration narratives have focused on how the 1965 Immigration Act lifted racial
quotas and jumpstarted South Korean immigration to the United States. However South Korea
was also undergoing immigration policy shifts. South Korea’s equation of the United States as a
“modern nation” was initially pushed by social mobility barriers within the country. Park Chung
Hee’s authoritarian regime was at odds with people’s aspirations for a middle-class life;
migration to the United States aimed to subvert these barriers as people strived to improve their
material conditions. In particular, the history of student migration in the United States served as
an important conduit for American images. As Abelmann and Lie (1995) argue, “these images
show how elite careers have come to fruition in the United States and the U.S. degrees and

46
institutions of higher learning confer legitimacy in both the public and private spheres of South
Korea (71).
In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, we have seen the rise of more
heterogenous migration through the rise of student and tourist visa schemes. Abelmann and
colleagues’ (2014) work on geese families have observed the ways in which transnational split
family arrangements are a highly stratified enterprise distinct from previous forms of
professional migration and is reflective of South Korea’s class stratified structure. In fact, South
Korea’s entry into the United States’ visa-waiver program, which allows South Korean passport
holders to travel to the United States without a visa for three months, created unprecedented
levels of temporary flows for informal labor—which in my prior research demonstrates its
operation as a revolving door for sex worker migrants (Choi 2017). (Interestingly, South Korea’s
increased global ascendance is what has allowed more heterogenous migration flows from South
Korea to circulate). These institutional shifts have activated diversified migration flows
especially those originating from outside of the metropolitan regions of Seoul.
While South Korean student mobility is dispersed throughout the United States, the Los
Angeles-Orange County region comprises one of the largest concentrations of student migrants
in the country including those from Korea. The region hails a large diverse educational hub,
hosting many different types of tertiary higher learning institutions including two dozen English
language schools, forty religious seminaries, fifty vocational training schools, and over eighty
degree-granting accredited and unaccredited universities. Los Angeles is also a strategic site to
access California’s extensive public college transfer system, where junior colleges operate a
pipeline program for transfer to state public four-year universities. Such programs have become
especially popular among international students looking to gain U.S. degrees. Los Angeles has

47
become a strategic site to understand contemporary heterogenous flows of student migrations
(and side door labor migrations) and to show the contradictions inherent in the United States as
the most prestigious and elite educational destination.
The Philippines
Since the 1990s, the Philippines has emerged as the next frontier of English language
study. Drawn by tropical weather and pristine beaches, lower costs of living, and proximity,
South Koreans are now the top tourists in the country with over one million visitors in 2019.
Aside from short-term visits, there are more than 100,000 South Koreans who are long-term
residents in the Philippines (Pack 2018). These include businesspeople, students, and
missionaries.
South Korean-Philippine mobility flows are grounded in a number of transformative
shifts. Following the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund, the Marcos
administration began opening up manufacturing hubs and tourism to garner foreign currencies
(Rodriguez 2010). This facilitated the rise of Export Processing Zones (EPZ) and invited foreign
companies to hire local labor at lost costs. According to Dohye Kim (2018), the Arroyo
administration was another moment that strengthened such policies governing migration.
Declaring herself the “CEO of a profitable global enterprise” (Rodriguez 2020: x, cited in Kim
2018), President Arroyo mobilized policies including aggressive strategies including 1) overseas
employment of migrant workers but also domestic ventures such as 2) promoting retirement
migration (ibid). South Koreans were identified as “desirable foreigners” and promoted the
Philippines as a second home for South Koreans. That is, the Philippine government marketed
itself as a potential gold mine for Korean nationals as a place where middle class Koreans can
pursue cheaper places to live and invest their retirement savings (ibid).

48
The South Korean media also played a role in this effort. Since 2004, the South Korean
media started highlighting Korean male “retirees” who found financial and emotional happiness
in the Philippines. The Philippines was a preferred destinations among the more affordable and
non-Western Southeast Asian countries because of its benefits of speaking English. Kim (2018)
elaborates on how Korean male retirees on the verge of financial collapse in the aftermath of the
1998 Asian Financial Crisis found alternatives in the Philippines where they could start their
“second lives.” Korean men found economic and emotional sustainability through opening up
businesses and enjoying a stress free life of leisure (on the labor of Filipino workers). These
discourses were circulated through media coverage and shows which featured Koreans living
like “royalty” (see Kim 2018).
South Koreans currently make up the largest group of foreign students in the country
with approximately 30,000 Korean students enrolled in universities, language programs, or pre-
postsecondary institutions (Choe 2016). Ninety percent of the student population are Special
Study Permit holders which are issued to international students studying on non-degree courses
for a period not exceeding one year (ibid). My interviews with Philippine-based English
language school owners confirm that the industry was pioneered by South Korean entrepreneurs,
capitalizing on the “English mania” in South Korea by offering cheaper classes with English-
speaking Filipino tutors. In 2011, the number of such private language academies was estimated
to be 280 (Choe 2016). Furthermore, it was reported that Korean students were spending over
425 million US dollars annually in the Philippines (KEDI, 2012).
The Philippines is also one of the primary destinations for yonge yonsu (Chun & Han,
2015) or coordinated study-work travel programs. Private educational brokers in South Korea
first introduced this program to enable educational migrants to study in a low-cost destination

49
before working (via working holiday) in a Western high-cost destination. As a result, the
Philippines is also a strategic site to encounter educational migrants headed to working holiday
destinations in Australia, New Zealand among other countries. While earlier schools started in
Manila and Cebu, over time English language school spread beyond major cities to secondary
cities and provincial regions including Baguio, Davao, Bacolod, Clark, and Iloilo, which are
more affordable with less entertainment distractions and lower crime rates. Given that this study
is interested in capturing socioeconomic diversity in educational migration, I strategically
selected an English language school in the more provincial city of Bacolod as my main field site
due to its cheaper price points for students compared to language schools in other areas ($1000
per month including class, meals, and housing). This school is known here as Oceanside English
Academy.
Australia
This dissertation approaches Australia differently than the other English language study
destinations, as Australia is a labor migration destination that is not mediated by enrollment in an
educational institution. Despite that Australia is also a prominent host for South Korean
international students, the working holiday visa scheme is a prominent mode of entry for South
Korean youth who make up the second largest foreign national group of working holiday makers
in the country. Australia hosts 33,000 South Korean working holiday makers per year (Working
Holiday Info Center 2014) and is the world’s largest working holiday destination. The bilateral
South Korea-Australia working holiday scheme allows childless young people between the ages
of 18-30 to live, work, and study abroad in each other’s country for up to two years.
Unlike other destinations, most South Koreans do not enter Australia on the student visa
but take advantage of the extensive working holiday program. While Australia does offer student

50
visa schemes, students must maintain enrollment in schools to maintain their legal status, which
can be a costly endeavor. Furthermore, the working holiday allows students to study English at
an English school for up to four months. The remainder of the time on working holiday, students
are given the opportunity to work within the country. With the exception of the second visa,
working holiday makers can live and work anywhere in the country for a full year staying with
one employer for up to six months. They are allowed to apply to the same jobs as Australian
nationals in the formal labor market, which gives them a chance to “interact” with native English
speakers and accumulate cosmopolitan work experiences. Although they have full legal access to
the formal labor market, working holiday makers are typically concentrated in industries that rely
heavily on temporary migrant labor including hotel concierge, hotel cleaning, retail work, food
service, office work, tourism-related work, and regional work including farm work such as crop-
picking. These temporary jobs are largely tied to the low-paid flexible labor market,
characterized by part-time, temporary, casualized and contingent labor (Standing 2011).
Temporary migration is an important source of labor in the Australian economy. With
more migrants arriving in Australia under temporary visas now more than ever, ten percent of the
Australian workforce as a whole has temporary migrant status (Robertson 2014). Yet
implications of temporary migration have remained hidden because such schemes have been
constructed as not commonly associated with labor migration. In Australia, both working holiday
makers and temporary graduate workers who are designated as “tourists” and “students,”
respectively are core components in labor migration schemes. They are, however, not officially
positioned as part of labor migration policies which leaves under-the-radar significant numbers
of temporary workers (Robertson 2014).

51
The hidden dynamics of these temporary labor migration schemes offer some explanation
for why many Korean working holiday makers in Australia end up in “certain kinds” of jobs.
Migrants initially come with plans to have a well-rounded working experience in Australia with
a combination of office work, food and janitorial service, and regional work notably in farming,
cleaning, factory work or crop-picking. Scholars examining South Korean working holiday
makers in Canada however have previously shown the lack of opportunities for South Koreans to
work in “decent jobs” that would be “more related” to return-oriented career goals of working a
professional job in South Korea (Yoon 2015). In a similar vein, South Koreans on working
holiday in Australia come with high hopes of gaining an authentic cosmopolitan experience and
learning English through working and interacting with native English speakers. In fact, I found
that one third of South Koreans I spoke with were on multi-country work-study programs,
starting in the Philippines to learn English as a way to prepare for idealized authentic interactions
in Australia. Because Australia does not offer a visa cap on the number of South Korean working
holiday makers, it is often viewed as an “easy destination” for migrants who want to easily
access English speaking destinations as a place to live, work, study, and interact with “native”
English speakers.

Multi-Sited Longitudinal Ethnographic Methods
This qualitative study employs 176 in-depth interviews with student and labor migrants,
educational agents, English school owners, and English school teachers as well as six years of
multi-country longitudinal ethnography in the origin country of South Korea and three key host
destinations of Australia, the United States, and the Philippines. Primary findings are based on
116 in-depth semi-structured interviews with South Korean young adult educational migrants

52
and 39 follow-up interviews with select migrants three to four years later. This dissertation
involved twenty-two non-consecutive months of participation-observation at adult English
language schools in the United States and in the Philippines where I worked as a volunteer tutor
as well as at migrant worksites in Australia including farms. There, I worked alongside migrants
who exchange their labor for access to two year working holiday visas.
With some exceptions, most studies of migration are cross-sectional in nature and only
tend to capture a snapshot of migrants’ experiences or intentions—whether goals have been
realized or not. While there are some longitudinal studies that follow migrants across time and
space, these studies tend to be expensive and involve difficulties in maintain contacts with
original participants (Paul and Yeoh 2020). Yet at a time when migration patterns are
increasingly multi-directional, non-linear, and complex, there is a need to reevaluate more long-
term approaches to studying migration processes that can fit and work within institutional limits
and boundaries (ibid).
Methodological practices that pay attention to the multi-spatial, extended temporal and
complex dimensions of people on the move have informed the ways in which I have chosen my
field sites and undertook data collection as a participant observer (Paul and Yeoh 2020). At core,
this project engages in what Gille and Riain (2002) call a global ethnography or a research
method that seeks to destabilize the embeddedness of social relations in communities and places.
Global ethnographies emphasize that place-making happens in multiple sites. Yet this
dissertation is not only concerned about mapping multiple sites; it is situated within a larger (and
longer) framework that seeks to capture a broader experience of migrants’ trajectories at a time
when mobility is no longer a singular event but a process that reoccurs across a life course.
Paying attention to temporal dimensions of migration, I introduce a concept called “global

53
longitudinal ethnography” which follows a methodological agenda that prioritizes focus on the
dynamics, aspirations, and outcomes of migrants’ larger trajectories by following migrants to
other destinations but also back home. Global longitudinal ethnographic methods are most
feasible in situations where migrants undertake mobile trajectories that are under five years (or
the conventional time it takes to finish long-term book project). As such, the field often follows
us back home and is ever present in the analysis and writing process. This approach, I argue,
allows us to deal with some of the practical and logistical problems of studying multi-sited
migrations across time and space.
To begin elaborating on this method, I carried out research across three main phases: a
preliminary part-time fieldwork phase where I was building ties and thinking through realities of
what I was observing; a second phase of more intensive and deliberate engagement, where I
undertook participation-observation in schools in the United States (more specifically Los
Angeles) and the Philippines; and a third phase where I followed-up with migrants who moved
back to South Korea and other destinations where they migrated. My first phase of research was
a critical time in sharpening my research focus on the understudied population of lower middle
to working class educational migrants and the ways it overlaps with undocumented global labor
chains. The second phase of my research corresponded to the wave of immigration raids and the
outlawing of unaccredited English language schools (suspected as pay-to-stay schemes) and the
recognition that marginal flows for education were also heading to new destinations, such as the
Philippines. This phase involved in-depth participant-observation as a language school tutor at
English language schools in the Philippines and the United States. The last phase also
incorporated undertaking follow-up interviews with participants I met in the first and second
stage of research but also recruiting returnees in South Korea. I also added supplemental

54
participant observation in farms and working boarding houses in Australia, which came up as an
additional field site (secondary stop/destination) upon completing the second phase.
Global Longitudinal Ethnography, a Globe-Trotting Business
This dissertation focuses on the adult English language school as a strategic site to
understand the production of inequalities in educational mobility flows. Most of the literature
and research has been centered on postsecondary educational institutions such as junior colleges
and universities. English language schools are a black box in education and higher education
research; and there is very little readily available demographics that focus on this population. In
fact, English language schools did not enter the larger educational imaginary until the aftermath
of 9/11 attack, when it was confirmed that the attackers used student visas to enter and remain in
the country. Since then, English language schools have been the center of media and public
panics over illegal “pay-to-stay” schemes, which Gracia Liu-Farrier (2006) has critically referred
to as “side door migrations.” My research will focus on the English language school as a window
into understanding more peripheral flows of international students. Due to the lower barriers to
entry in English language schools both financially and scholastically, student visa regimes have
emerged as a primary vehicle for facilitating youth migration flows to various destinations. In
contributing to new bodies of sociological work on transpacific educational mobilities, this
dissertation will focus on student migrants who begin their transnational educational journeys at
English language schools to capture the growing inequalities within the increasingly neoliberal
global educational marketplace.
Starting mid-2013, I undertook participant observation and in-depth interviews with two
dozen South Korean students an English language school and at a cafe in Los Angeles
Koreatown. At the school, I made some preliminary observations while attending classroom

55
sessions alongside some of the students I knew. The café, on the other hand, mostly employed
informal South Korean student-workers. Cafes, alongside bars and restaurants, are some of the
most common places where student-migrants find under-the-table, part-time work. The café was
located in the same building as a well-known English language school in the neighborhood of
Koreatown, creating a revolving door of access to different populations of student-migrants in
Los Angeles. I worked “under-the-table” as a barista for one year, giving me an opportunity to
intimately engage with student migrant workers, who remain a largely hidden and hard-to-reach
population. This period involved working shifts together, attending team-building trips, co-
habiting with them, giving them rides home, and helping them with their English assignments.
During this time, I also volunteered at an LA-based Korean international student rights
organization that held its meeting at the café, where I found myself also interacting with students
enrolled in community colleges and four-year colleges. It was in this context that I began to
recognize the stratification among different groups of student-migrants as well as the ways in
which immigration policies, educational institutions, and other organizational intersected to
shape unequal pathways for different groups of youth.
Before moving onto the second phase, my research included an interstitial step in
expanding my scope to other field sites. While researching student-worker migrants in Los
Angeles, I observed that post 9/11 immigration controls that were initiated in the previous era
began to materialize and unfold while in the field. Following a number of high-profile raids of
“pay-to-stay” English language schools in New Jersey and San Jose, many more affordable
English language schools near me began to shutdown to due new legislation requiring higher
accreditation, effectively placing a class ban on student migrations. In South Korea, these shifts
were already evident: while studies showed higher proportions of young adults studying and

56
learning languages abroad, there was a steady decline in numbers heading to the United States,
which from the onset, has been the most sought-after educational destination (ICEF Monitor
2014). In fact, newly marketed educational destinations in South and Southeast Asia such as Fiji,
India, Philippines began overshadowing the numbers headed to Western countries forging novel
pathways, participants, and motivations (ICEF Monitor 2014). These newer flows constituted
diverse flows of young people reflecting a wider expanse of the South Korean youth population
distinct from previous flows.
As one of the most popular educational destinations for English language education, the
Philippines emerged as a natural counterpoint to my existing research in Los Angeles. The
appeal of learning English in the Philippines lies in the affordable price points, where
administrators can charge less due to the cheaper cost of labor in the Philippines. The emergence
of more affordable destinations has lowered barriers to exit for young people in South Korea
(and other countries) previously stymied financially from going abroad. Further facilitating what
some have called the “massification” (Altbach 2012) of study abroad in South Korea, many
language schools in the Philippines are well embedded in South Korea’s ever-expansive global
private educational industry, where brokers, staff, and advertisers connect student flows with
both non-Korean and Korean owned and operated schools in other countries.
To extend my inquiry, I traveled to South Korea in 2015 to meet with educational brokers
and find access to English language schools in the Philippines. Having worked as an educational
consultant in South Korea, I relied on professional contacts and networks to speak (and later
conduct interviews) with educational brokers across different companies. Notably, the majority
of student migrants (and working holidaymakers) use brokers to facilitate their travel to other
countries. I additionally attended study abroad fairs in Seoul, the capital and largest city in South

57
Korea, and Busan, the second largest city located in the South. This is where I observed the
onboarding process of recruitment and school selection. These events, and the representatives I
met there, opened doors to visit campuses in the Philippines. At the beginning of 2016, I
undertook a three-week research feasibility trip to the Philippines, where I traveled and visited
English language school campuses in Cebu, Baguio, Bacolod, Iloilo City, and Manila. During
this time, I conducted my first set of interviews with teachers, principals, staff, and students.
Starting in summer 2016, I launched the core of the second phase of my research, which
entailed two months of extensive participant-observation at Oceanside English Academy in the
Philippines. I choose this school because it offered by far the most affordable tuition rates
compared to larger English language schools in metropolitan areas like Cebu or Manila,
attracting a more diverse group of English language learners.
5
Access to school facilities and
classrooms were granted in exchange for facilitating a weekly conversation class and providing
one-on-one tutoring for two students. Participant-observation encompassed a range of activities
such as taking classes alongside students, eating meals with students at the cafeteria, studying
with students at the study hall, attending school-sponsored events, and taking excursions together
in the city. Classes held class sizes of 3-5 students. I observed student discussions, wrote notes,
and audio-recorded class sessions, sometimes being asked by the teacher of the class to
participate as a teacher’s assistant or aide. I furthermore participating in outings with students
outside of the classroom in a variety of informal settings like markets, massage parlors,
restaurants, coffee shops, and nightclubs. For non-classroom activities, I wrote down jottings
daily and typed up extensive field notes each week.

5
As a general rule, and with the exception of Cebu, most of the English language schools have now migrated out of
busier metropolitan areas partially as a means to lower overhead costs and offer more competitive rates to overseas
students.

58
I returned to Los Angeles to undertake parallel observations at and English language
school in the neighborhood of Koreatown from 2016-2017 and parts of 2018. Beyond Los
Angeles being home to the largest concentration of international students in the United States
(including the third largest group of South Koreans), the neighborhood of Los Angeles’
Koreatown has historically served as a gateway city for Korean immigrants. Similar to my
process in the Philippines, I choose Cali English language school in Los Angeles Koreatown as
my main field site based upon the calculus that schools with more affordable tuition rates attract
a larger diversity of Korean English language students.
6
In order to have a larger representation
of students who fall outside the conventional definitions of “international students,” I attended
both day and night classes, the latter of which catered to students who worked a full time job in
the informal economy during the day. I would write down notes during class and transcribe them
when I returned home. These classes were larger than those in the Philippines and typically
comprised of 10-20 students. In exchange for access, I worked as a volunteer tutor holding
classes once a week for approximately eleven months.
After completing the second research phase, I transitioned into my last phase of research.
This involved two main components. Initially, I planned to compare students’ migration and
return migration experiences across two different educational destinations. This plan changed
once I entered the Philippines. When I began meeting with students, I quickly realized that a
large number of migrants studying at the school in the Philippines were part of both brokered and
independently-navigated two-step study-work programs, where the Philippines served as a
“stopover.” This allowed students to stock up on language skills before heading to a more
“desired” society that are viewed as “originators” of the English language. The majority of

6
In this case I was most interested in the more marginal groups whose experiences in Los Angeles comprise of more
hours in the informal ethnic economy.

59
students were headed to Australia, which had an open bilateral working holiday program that
allowed childless South Koreans age 18-30 to live in Australia with the opportunity to work. In
recent years, the number of South Korean youth attending working holiday programs in Australia
have rivaled those headed to some of the most popular educational destinations like the United
States and the Philippines, making it a useful point of inquiry to understand alternative means to
learn English and study abroad.
Upon adding this third research site, I traveled to Australia mid-2017 for one month
approximately one year after my initial interviewees relocated there from the Philippines. I
conducted participant observation in their work sites and carried out follow up interviews. While
I visited a number of worksites such as Perth and Caboolture, participant observation was largely
anchored in the town of Bundaberg, where many South Korean youth go to undertake work as
farm workers. This is under the legal condition that they would be allowed to extend their
working holiday visa for an extra year. Bundaberg is a rural farming town located in Eastern part
of Australia in Queensland and is a known hub for labor markets such as dairying, sawmilling,
crop-picking, and shipbuilding. It is sometimes referred to as “sugar town” because of the high
concentration of fruit-based goods and produce that is cultivated out of this region. In Bundaberg,
I observed migrants by living within them in boarding houses, worked alongside them in the
fields, and attended social gatherings and other events. Living and working alongside migrants,
as I did in Los Angeles, allowed me to build rapport and access the intimate lives of workers.
The last component involved an extended period of follow up interviews in South Korea.
From 2017 to 2019, I conducted a gradual process of re-interviewing migrants that I had met in
Australia and the Philippines. Because many interviewees came back home at different times, it
was important to have a larger window to conduct follow up interview. As the majority of the

60
participants I met in the Philippines and Australia were from cities outside of the metropolitan
region of Seoul, I divide my time between Busan, Jeju, Daegu, Daejun, Jeju, Gwangju,
Gangleung as well as smaller cities in between such as Yang Yang and Mapo. While my plan
was to spend one month in each city due to migrants’ schedules, I adjusted my fieldwork plan
and often undertook multiple trips to one provincial destination to accommodate the schedules of
potential interviewees. In the cities, I would meet up with interview participants multiple times
during the trip often at a café and sometimes at the hostel where I stayed. Weekends were
especially important as they were migrants’ off days. This allowed me to shadow their routines.
Spending extended time in their hometowns was critical to the interview process as I was able to
address more sensitive topics over multiple conversations after trust-building and rapport were in
place. I would also make sure to take my tape recorder and ask them permission to record our
conversations during subsequent meet-ups.
Interviewing
To capture how participants thought about and inhabited South Korea’s global
educational economy, I completed a total of 176 semi-structured in-depth interviews with
students, school owners, educational brokers, teachers, and educators. My primary data comes
from the 116 interviews I completed with educational migrants themselves. Almost all of the
interviews were conducted in Korean with some interviews in the United States conducted in
both Korean and English. Initial interviews covered 1) the pre-departure process and the key
facilitating factors e.g. presence of social networks, private educational brokers, online and
offline materials; 2) migration experiences including school life, work experience, recreation and
3) where they saw themselves in 2 to 5 years. Each interview was approximately one to three
hours. Sample interview questions include:

61
How did you come to study abroad and what were some of the factors facilitating
migration?
What does your migration trajectory look like?
What were some of your expectations studying abroad?
What is the biggest motivation for studying abroad?
Describe to me what you think your life would be five years.

Interviewees were recruited typically the schools where I conducted research. At the end
of each interview, I would ask interviewees to refer other students to participate so as to create a
“snowball” effect. Interviewees were recruited with attention to class, gender, and regional
diversity and geographic location. Class became a more salient factor in ensuring diversity.
Though there are studies that show women study abroad in higher numbers (Kim 2011), this is
limited to postsecondary education and does not give accurate information on language school
students. Region of origin also mattered as I quickly learned that a large majority of my sample
in the Philippines and Australia, especially, skewed towards students from the mid- and smaller
size provincial and metropolitan areas, largely outside of Seoul. As such, I concentrated on
making this rural/urban divide better reflect in my research to show the deeper patterns that are
occurring in the global context.
Return Migration Interviews
Return migration interviews were a crucial part of the multi-sited longitudinal
ethnographic process. I conducted a total of 39 in-depth semi-structure interviews with student
migrants who I met in Australia and the Philippines. Some (n =15) had not been included in the
initial group of research participants but are those who I had been introduced to by other
educational migrant returnees. Interview questions with returnees include:
How was your experience acclimating?
Did you face any difficulties entering the labor market?
How did studying abroad for an extended period of time impact your dating or romantic
life?

62
Many migration researchers have documented the difficulties of doing longitudinal analysis
(Paul and Yeoh 2020). Some of the ways in which I was able to circumvent some of the issues of
interviewee retention was carrying out regular check-ins with interviewees via the Korean
messaging application Kakao. One of the most important strategies I used to maintain ties with
interviewees was by making sure I send e-greetings on Korean holidays such as Chuseok and
Lunar New Year, which often worked to jumpstart conversations that have grown stale. Another
important strategy was making sure respondents chose our meeting location. As mentioned,
because many of my participants lived outside of Seoul, I made sure to make trips to these cities
regularly.
Reading Aspirations and Positionality
In the first round of analysis, I examined fieldnotes and transcribed interviews to identify
different transnational pathways for education that youth forged to meet neoliberal demands of
“going global.” I then telescoped out to investigate the broader spectrum of young people’s
experiences of leisure, labor, and learning upon migration and how these experiences land with
existing expectations and imaginaries for what “the global” represents for them. I also paid
attention to the ways actors themselves articulate understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class,
and other forms of difference in relation to the South Korean global eduscape. The final step
involved utilizing the return migration data to show how migrant aspirations and experiences are
realized and played out upon their return home. As part of this analysis, I began to link themes I
found to larger structural shifts that were occurring during this time to understand the “why” of
certain findings. I often found that interviewees presented clear explanations to what and how
these were linked to shifting global landscapes of power, labor, education, and inequality.

63
As I continued to write and analyze, I found myself trying to see how my own position
produced “situated knowledges,” meaning embodied and particular knowledge based on my own
subject position (Haraway 1988). Most of my interviewees referred to me in Korean as “nuna”
or “unni.” This is a Korean word of endearment meant to signal an older sibling who identifies as
a woman. While it was the appropriate title for me because I was older in age than most of my
interviewees, it also served as a great middle ground in mediating some of the dynamics of
power and privilege that my interviewees must have felt when interacting with me. Because I
was Korean American and a doctoral student, this was viewed as a position of power especially
within South Korea’s educational contexts (Suh 2017). This could have been a reason to create
distance. I managed to make them more comfortable by insisting they call me by my first name
or if they liked, “unni” or “nuna,” and after doing so, I noticed that they were able to open up
more because it made us feel closer and more comfortable.
It was also important for me to live, study, and work alongside students to gain their trust
and build strong connections. Because I often gained access through school administrators (who
gladly welcomed me in exchange for volunteer teaching), it was easier for the students and tutors
to view me as part of the administration. This was also true in the farming town and café, where I
was able to gain access through managerial gatekeepers. However, these initial judgements faded
as I began to build strong bonds with the students themselves by “doing what they do.” What
students did, I did, and where students went, I went. They also relied on me for rides (because of
my access to a car in Los Angeles) and also for information during the Trump administration’s
travel ban, where I was able to get students connected with local community-based non-profits
for essential needs. Gradually, I was able to transform their aloof images of educated Korean
Americans and become like an older sister to them.

64
Of course, there were times when these efforts failed. The power dynamics were an
especially difficult terrain to navigate with Filipino teachers who would feel that I had a better
command of English language than they did because I was educated and from the United States.
(Even though this is not true, and I am not qualified to teach English to students). This is why I
only entered and observed classrooms which were led by teachers and tutors with whom I had
established bonds with. This ensured that my presence as an “authority figure” in the classroom
would not be a threat to the teacher’s authority and would not disrupt or upend class dynamics.
This also allowed tutors to rely on me as a teacher’s aide in asking me for the “American
perspective” or how a certain social activity or event would play out in the American context.
While it was always difficult to navigate in the beginning, I was able to navigate these dynamics
over time and alleviate some of the power associated with my position as a U.S. researcher.

65
CHAPTER 3
TRANSIENT COLONIALISM AND THE PHILIPPINES AS HAPPY CHOSUN
Introduction
Don’t just sit around here and complain that it’s “Hell Chosun” (young people). If you
can’t get a job, you look towards (Southeast Asia), you will see “Happy Chosun.”

During a bilateral economic development conference in South Korea with 200 companies
in attendance, economic advisor Kim Hyun Chull to the South Korean President Moon Jae-in,
two administrations after the neo-conversative Lee Myung Bak administration, discussed how
unemployed young South Koreans should proactively look towards the Philippines and other
Southeast Asian countries as a solution to economic instability in South Korea. Despite changes
in administration, neoliberal social governance policies continue to not only promote the vision
of transforming the next generation of young South Koreans into the next “global citizens” but
also underscore the idea of Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines, as the next frontier of
global opportunity.
The rebranding of Southeast Asia as “Happy Chosun” meaning a “Happy South Korea”
intimates the ways in which the South Korean state reimagines these sites as temporary havens
of opportunity and refuge, where young people can gain cosmopolitan experiences, earn income,
and take part in South Korea’s larger efforts for global ascendance. Such messages also imply
the temporary elision from structural economic shifts by asking young people to voluntarily
displace themselves to countries where their skills, education, and their won (Korean currency)
will be welcome. Towards the end of his speech, Kim also urged on other unemployed
populations of older South Koreans, which one can’t help but think is also meant for youth to
hear: “Don’t just take hikes in your back hills but take a chance and go to Southeast Asia. Be like

66
Coach Park who went to Vietnam at a late stage of his career and turned the Vietnamese soccer
team around.”
South Korean temporary educational migration to the Philippines has emerged within a
larger political economic context of increasing youth unemployment, the regionalization between
East Asia and Southeast Asia, and South Korea’s aspirations for global ascendance. The South
Korean state’s continued endorsement of the Philippines as the “land of opportunity” combined
with the Philippine government’s identification of South Koreans as “desirable foreigners”
facilitated the rise of educational migration flows to the Philippines with the English language
industry expanding throughout the islands upwards of 300 academies (Kim 2018; Nobutaka
2019). While earlier English commercial industries were based in larger metropolitan areas,
schools began to diffuse into more provincial regions in sites like Davao, Baguio, Clark, and
Bacolod by the end of the 2000s. Due to the relative affordability of English speaking labor
pools (as a result of nearby emerging regional call centers), these destinations were marketed as
affordable, crime-free, and proximate to paradise-like vacation getaways (Choi, forthcoming).
Many of these businesses are operated by South Korean entrepreneurs who maximize the
Philippine government’s foreign direct investment policies and its dependence on a revolving
door of temporary transnational student-consumers. Estimates suggest that there are roughly
30,000 South Korean students enrolled in both private and public educational institutions in the
Philippines with 90 percent presumed to be enrolled on short-term intensive English programs
(Choe 2016).
There has been a growing body of scholarship looking at the Global South as an
educational destination in-and-of themselves as affordable alternatives for international
educational programs compared to affluent countries in Asia and the West. Most of these works

67
focus on the instrumental moves of educational mobility to less prestigious destinations where
destinations become a “recourse” in the absence of resources and opportunities to more
prestigious institutions back home or elsewhere. This includes postcolonial English-speaking
destinations like the Philippines, Fiji, and India, where both local and transnational providers
capitalize on the linguistic strengths of the formerly colonized, local population by offering
cheaper alternatives for international language provisions (Ortiga 2018). In more recent years,
scholars have also examined the rise of non-traditionally English-speaking countries like China
as destinations. Yang (2018), for instance, examines the rise of Indian pre-medical students in a
English-medium Chinese university where students’ inability to gain admissions in a local
medical program combined with their misinformation around easier-to-access foreign pre-
medical programs results in further structural barriers for social mobility (via entrance into
medical programs) back in India.
At the same time, studies have overlooked not only the larger scope of non-elite students’
experiences abroad but also the ways in which students can creatively juggle and navigate
“recourse” destinations or unexpected, non-traditional educational migration itineraries to reach
their migration specific goals. Studies tend to either focus on the outcomes or the individualized
failures and mishaps of student-migrants without putting young people’s experiences in a larger
context of life transitions, increased economic insecurity, and state projects to globalize (Fang et
al 2016; see Abelmann and Kang 2014). Applying frameworks from youth studies, there is a
need for educational migration researchers to take into consideration a more holistic approach to
understanding young people’s mobilities beyond just their instrumental motivations and towards
an analysis of how their experiences serve as a window into larger shifting social processes in an
increasingly global and uncertain age. In this way, we can illustrate the complex and

68
simultaneous experiences of loss and gain in educational migration as an indication of
transnational stratified mobility. We must not only pay attention to how students adopt
transnational practices to adapt to the limitations produced by their social im/mobility but also
attend to how students reimagine their futures more broadly and creatively in the context of
emerging and expanding global markets in Asia and beyond.
This chapter examines the experiences of learning, leisure, and self-development among
South Korean students in a provincial English language school in Bacolod, Philippines which I
refer to as Oceanside.
7
It asks: What kinds of experiences do South Koreans gain in the
Philippines and how does this inform their projects of social mobility? How do young people
reimagine the structural constraints they face in educational destinations like the Philippines?
South Korean students adopt a neocolonial view of the Philippines and reimagine it as a “training
ground” to gain confidence, increase their test scores, and prepare for their next moves, whether
it is back home or another destination. The view of the Philippines as a “training ground”
contributes to their momentary experience of what I call transient colonialism, meaning a
temporary form of migration or tourism which involves the use of economic, racial, social, and
consumptive power that reproduces unequal relations among transient migrants and the people of
that region. Transient colonialism operates similarly to neocolonialism which has been used to
describe the presence of contemporary white settlers who use their economic, political or cultural
power to influence people in former dependent countries. The concept of transient colonialism is
based in critical paradigm-shifting work on Asian settler colonialisms, especially in the case of
Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese immigrants in the occupied indigenous land of Hawai’i
(Fujikane 2008; Saranillio 2013). These works offer critical interventions that expose how Asian

7
Oceanside and all other institutions use pseudonyms throughout this dissertation.

69
settlers in places like Hawaii can end up reproducing colonial claims akin to white settler
historiography (Fujikane 2008). Transient colonialism is a reflection of transnational stratified
mobility and how migrants experience limited social mobility in a global terrain but at the cost of
reproducing existing geopolitical relations and inequalities in localize contexts as tourists and
temporary visitors who do not hold the same ties to the land.
In a similar vein, interactions of South Koreans with locals and their participation in
economic and consumptive practices reproduce unequal geopolitical relations between the
Philippines and more advanced Asian economies like South Korea. These interactions and
practices ultimately reinforce the global capitalist order. Transient colonialisms effectively
foreground the rise of unequal exchanges among neighboring countries in Asia in the context of
South Korea’s projects for global ascendancy, signaling the rise of an Asian political economy
outside the singular West vs. Rest narrative. On the ground, this form of contemporary migration
manifests in the everyday practices of consumption, gender relations, and “self-care” practices
whereby South Koreans maximize the unequal exchange between countries to compensate for
the material realities denied to them back home as less-resourced individuals. Their experiences
also shape their projects of self-growth where young people participate in entrepreneurial
inspiration and idea-generation that strategically and creatively attempt to challenge their
marginal positions within South Korea’s highly stratified neoliberal society.
Transient colonialism signals a reconfiguration of different positionalities. It is not just
limited to South Korean educational migrants in the Philippines but also retirement migrants in
Ecquador (Hayes 2018), digital nomads in Thailand (Green 2020), yoga retreat tourists in India
(Korpela 2009), and sex tourists in Costa Rica (Rivers-Moore 2016) and Brazil (Mitchell 2011).
As global capitalist production becomes increasingly contracted and outsourced from the core to

70
the periphery, traditionally peripheral economies have become reconfigured in new sites of
accumulation that reproduce unequal exchanges and social relations that to resemble traditional
forms of colonialism. This chapter and the conceptualization of transient colonialism help to
foreground the larger processes of stratified mobilities, where pathways to mobility are limited
not just in contexts of departure but reinforced through their migration in destinations that are
accessible to them. In the process, differential experiences across the hierarchized global
educational landscape are produced.

Philippines as the Last Resort
The United States has always been my dream. Top of my bucket list has been to go to
Time Square on 12/31. They count down and sing “New York, New York.” I want to do
that, I also want to go to California, Hawaii, and want to gamble in Las Vegas. You can’t
do all that in one trip. I will try to go one day.

Taegun sips the last drop of his coffee. The twenty-seven year-old Korean office worker
from Daejun was sitting with me outside the patio of a South Korean coffee shop chain in a
busier part of town. We were not in South Korea but in a Bacolod, a small city with a recently
redeveloped sugarcane economy but still a relatively undeveloped region of the Philippines.
Despite that we might have been the farthest away from the city lights of New York, this
comment was not unfamiliar to me. Time and time again, I heard from South Korean students
learning English in the Philippines that they did not want to be there. While the idea of studying
English in a foreign country was viewed positively, when probing about their choice of
destination, it became very clear to me that the Philippines was not their first choice. Instead,
most students agreed that if money or resources were not an issue, they would have preferred to
study abroad in “more prestigious” places like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or
even Australia.

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Presented as a taken-for-granted backdrop, Western destinations have been glamorized in
the context of migrant imaginaries as centers of economic development, world-class education,
modern lifestyle, freedom, and richness of cultural heritage (Mai 2005; Fujita 2004; Bui et al
2013). In South Korea and other occupied parts of Asia and the Pacific (Kim 2010; Baik 2019),
the historical legacies of the United States as “liberator” from war, poverty, and destitution has
leveraged a form of indebtedness for ongoing ideological imperialism that informs the long-term
consumption of the symbolic West via media, texts, images, contexts, and alternative lifestyles
(Kim 2011). In addition to the spectacle of the West, driving young people’s attraction (Kim
2011) is also instrumental considerations with regards to credentials, degrees, and experience
from the West as these represent powerful indexes of money, prestige, and social mobility. In
many parts of Asia, English is viewed as key to material success in the globalizing world, and as
linguistic scholar Joseph Park (2011) notes, “[English] allows disadvantaged people to escape
abject poverty, immigrants to English speaking countries to find a home, and underdeveloped
states to participate in the global economy and all its glory” (443).
The Philippines is considered to rank lower on the English educational destination
hierarchy with authentic English speakers in the Philippines often not perceived as “legitimate
speakers” (Jang 2018). Linguist scholar Kurbota (2009) has written about the incongruity
between authenticity and legitimacy and argued that a speaker’s legitimacy is linked to non-
linguistic features affecting power relations. The Philippine state’s commercialization of English
competence as an exported source of global labor has informed larger international perceptions
around its legitimacy. From sponsoring overseas Filipino domestic workers to building out its
domestic call center labor force, the production of Filipino labor as “servants of globalization”
(Parreñas 2001) informs the devaluation of its language authenticity as characteristic of “scripts

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of servitude” (Lorente 2017). The larger global image of Filipino English as “service English”
helps to explain the overall resigned attitude regarding learning English in the Philippines. As
Taegun remarks, “Who fantasizes about learning English in the middle of Philippine sugarcane
country?” Such themes of English language hierarchies are also echoed in my conversations with
other Korean student-migrants throughout the Philippines.
Thirty-two year-old Chan was one such student. As one of the older students at
Oceanside who left South Korea in the middle of a career transition, Chan, always dressed head-
to-toe in dry fit gear, seemed ready to leave before he got there. Upon the school administrator’s
approval, he would leave most weekends, visiting vacation spots or other nearby islands, and if
he was not on a trip, he would be hanging out at the bars and cafes downtown. The final
destination on his travel itinerary was not the Philippines but the outbacks of Australia, where his
plan was to work in the farms (to subsidize his travel) and gain an “authentic experience of
learning English” in a “bone fide English speaking country.” What Chan means by having an
“authentic experience” (Jang 2018) is that he wants to invest in learning an accepted variety of
Australian English (not one with a Filipino accent), which he believed would appeal to South
Korean employers back home. Chan’s comments point to the ways in which his desires for the
West are tied to narrow definitions of language and overseas experiential legitimacy in South
Korea, where a hierarchical labor structure determines whether and which experiences are
deemed valuable. Instead, learning English with Filipino teachers gives him the training and
preparation needed to speak with “white native speakers” during his “real adventure” in
Australia:
For Australia, as I mentioned, even if I want to go study English, it’s not like the
Australians are going be teaching you English. I have to just to get your hands dirty and
bump into it but that’s just not that easy. If I just go to Australia without any plan it’s not
like I will naturally learn English. You have to study at a school or be intentional, but

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people don’t really have the capacity to do that. That’s why there are a lot of people who
fail in Australia. For the Philippines, they just go to the Philippines to learn the basics.
That was the same with me...Without knowing any English, I chose to go because I
wanted to become familiar with English as much as possible in a short period. That’s why
I decided to go to the Philippines.

Yet Chan’s desire to leave the Philippines belies the situation in which he found
himself—that a few months earlier he had enrolled in a semi-Sparta-style English cram school,
where strict guidelines governed his time and outside access. Many schools operated “Sparta” or
“Semi-Sparta” campuses, which denotes a strict, disciplinary campus culture where mandatory
study hours, limited off campus access, and “English only” zones were enforced during the
weekdays.
8
This promoted a self-contained study environment including the conveniences and
support of daily meals, cleaning services, laundry and three to four hours of one-on-one English
classes with Filipino tutors. (All this for less than $1000 USD per month, an affordable deal for
such wrap-around services). While students often complained about the strict rules, they were at
the same time relieved they had chosen such an environment where a “no-frills” approach to
study preparation allows them to see real changes in their test scores or speaking abilities. This
allowed students like Chan, who felt behind in mastering English language skills, to take
advantage of this opportunity and catch up on their English training in ways that would help
open doors to new possibilities.
Hyperbolic Time Chamber
In contrast to Chan are students who wanted to maximize their time in the Philippines.
These students are those who were in-between schools and taking English language exams to get
into a college or those seeking to transfer from a two-year college to a four-year college in South

8
Militarized learning environments are not unique to Philippine language schools but are a part of the larger cultural
ethos of South Korean education and youth development, where the government has historically embraced strict and
disciplinary forms of education to control the population since the Cold War.

74
Korea. Tucked away from life’s distractions, their time in the Philippines signaled an opportunity
to improve their entrance exam scores, engage in rigorous and intensive English training, and
concentrate in a strict, no-nonsense study environment. Many young people described their
experience in the Philippines as a “training ground” where they could accumulate intermediate
forms of cultural and educational capital to better position themselves back home or at other
destinations. The idea that migrants can accumulate capital along the way has been
conceptualized by labor migration scholar Anju Mary Paul (2015). Her concept of “migrant
capital” describes how migrants accrue human, economic, cultural and social resources to help
facilitate their incremental movement across destinations, offering less advantaged migrants
alternative channels for capital-building between destinations.
This was the case for twenty-six year-old Banjang from Andong, a smaller city in Eastern
South Korea. He was preparing to go back to college in South Korea at an older age as a non-
traditional student. Banjang dropped out of high school in his last year due to his father’s
financial troubles, making a living as a food delivery motorist for several years. While Banjang
originally had no intention of going back to school, he had a change of heart after his friend
introduced him to the world of stock trading where he later began dreaming of a future in
financial advising. After earning his General Equivalency Diploma, Banjang began looking for
college preparatory academies which could help prepare him for the exam to enter college.
However, Banjang did not have a large concentration of college preparatory academies as most
education centers were located in larger cities like Seoul where a big move like that would cost
thousands of dollars in monthly housing and tuition alone. It was for this reason that Banjang
decided to invest his savings on his education in an English language school in the Philippines,
where he has since maximized the limited time he had towards improving his exam scores. As he

75
explained, he wanted to “stop the clock” and catch up on what he felt was his years of
educational lag in a concentrated amount of time:
It doesn’t feel like real life sometimes. It is removed from our daily realities and
worries in South Korea. It’s like in Dragonball Z. Have you ever watched it? There is
this place in outer space that the characters go when they need to train and get stronger.
They’ll go and become this bigger and stronger person that they need to be in order to
save the world…But the Philippines is a place where we can train and get better. It’s a
second chance for us to get that dream job or start our paths right.

Banjang refers to his time in the Philippines as “not real life.” Here, he alludes to an
idealized place in the Japan animation Dragonball Z known as the hyperbolic time chamber—a
space where one can train and get stronger in a short amount of time. The chamber is a separate
dimension from earth reflecting a compression of time where one day inside equals one year on
the outside. David Harvey (1990) has introduced the concept of “time-space compression” to
refer to processes that cause the relative distances between places to contract and make them
grow “closer.” He argues that time-space compression is a general process of capitalist
commodity production and capital accumulation, particularly the reduction in the turnover time
of capital. Because students like Banjang now have access to educational tourist markets like the
Philippines through direct flights and the strengthened value of the Korean won, their
participation in international education programs can work to reproduce historical colonial
systems and relations of oppression in the local context.
For instance, Banjang’s feelings of the Philippines existing outside time and space is
arguably a colonial feature of the historical literature on Western tourism – where travel is
viewed as an “estrangement” from instantaneous time and undifferentiated places in modern
society (Lefebvre 1991; Baudrillard & Foss 1983). The discussion of non-Western tourist
destinations as the “last frontier” underlies persistent themes within the colonial frontier
literature on the history of European contact, which often portrayed indigenous people as

76
“timeless” (Waitt and Head 2001). Frontier narratives place “marginalized locations” outside of
the ambit of human society. The neocolonial gaze of Korean student migrants and their transient
colonial practices reflect the enduring logic of marginalized non-white spaces as estranged from
the modern world.
Educational Camouflaging
The idea of the Philippines as beyond space and time is exemplified no more clearly than
in young people’s anxieties and fears about returning home. Similar to Chan’s worries about his
experiences in the Philippines being illegible, many complained that their “third world
credentials” would not necessarily be recognized by South Korean employers. In an interview
with twenty eight year old Jae Yeon from Gwangju near Seoul, he explains:
Of course, I have some remorse about not being able to have my specs recognized. But
the Philippines is not an English speaking country. Our graduation certificates are not
going to be of much use when you actually try to use it in a job interview or job
application. It might not help at all. In fact, it might even work against me. A future
employer might even read me as poor or below middle class because I couldn’t afford to
study in an English speaking country. It can be used as a class marker. So if it’s not going
to count, I would rather just leave it out [of my resume altogether].

With an eye towards the South Korean labor market, the overwhelming anxiety young
people have towards their self-worth in the job market is linked to the South Korean cultural
practice of specsaggi (spec short from specification meaning qualification and saggi meaning to
accumulate). Specsaggi describes the resume-building consumption activities for pre-market job
seekers to appeal to future employers by studying abroad, gaining internships, and earning high
test scores (Hae-Joang 2015). In the context of the recent structural shift in the labor market from
having mostly fulltime secured employment to mostly flexible part-time labor, specsaggi has
become even more intensified with some students even delaying their college graduation (Chun
and Han 2015; Yoon 2015). It is also aligned with the belief that students must accept personal

77
responsibility for the changing circumstances of the labor market. Learning English remains the
single most important spec; it signals a person’s effort to position themselves as a successfully
self-developing individual, displaying initiative, vitality, flexibility and responsibility (Rose
1999).
Heightened job market competition combined with the reinforcement of “rank-based”
hierarchies in the expansion of higher education have compelled students to assume that South
Korean employers will trivialize their experiences and credentials gained in the Philippines. It is
true that not all types of spoken and written English are valued equally. The global English
language teaching industry occupies an unequal and unevenly stratified and unified linguistic
market that accords different values to different varieties of English (Tupas 2015). This linguistic
market is identified through national-level markers that play a major role in the inculcation of a
shared order among speakers where “linguistic homogeneity is seen as a natural and fundamental
basis for the definition of national identity” (Bourdieu 2018; Anderson 2006). This informs an
internal structure marked by different hierarchical positions. In this sense, the South Korean
labor market espouses ideologies that delegitimize certain forms of English borne out of
pressures to subscribe to American Standard English and the belief in the inherent superiority of
‘native speakers’ of English and their varieties.
If the Philippine experience does not count as legitimized spec, what are students getting
in return beyond dedicated study time? In the absence of “Western credentials,” South Korean
youth engage in practices that camouflage their educational experiences. South Koreans gain
non-recognizable educational resources that can later transform into recognizable returns in the
South Korean context. Educational sociologists have previously discussed the significance of
non-dominant cultural capital in minority communities (see Carter 2003). Cipollone and Stitch’s

78
(2017) work on “shadow capital” illuminates the existence of “less visible” versions of cultural
capital that fail to produce a premier exchange value. In their study, disadvantaged young people,
misled by illusory features of college preparatory programs, do not translate their educational
experiences into real educational returns. Similarly, South Korean youth in the Philippines
understand that their shadow capital from the Philippines will not in-and-of-itself facilitate their
labor market mobility. Instead, they accumulate non-dominant precursory specs as a form of
intermediate migrant capital, which can provide a practical work-around to the realities of how
their experiences in a less prestigious destination would be received back home. Shadow capital
allows for educational camouflaging, providing a precursory step in accumulating dominant
cultural capital. This is something which later can be parlayed into “valued” credentials and
qualifications in the South Korean labor market.
English assessment exams potentially transform the pre-cultural capital acquired in the
Philippines into valuable cultural capital. English has become increasingly incorporated into
standardized assessment exams for high school graduation, college admission, college graduation,
college transfer admissions and the professional labor market in South Korea. Regardless of
whether a job requires English communication skills, major corporations like Samsung or LG
require English language competency scores such as the TOEIC (Test of English for
International Communication) in job hiring. English language schools in the Philippines operate
as English testing cram schools, where students can improve their scores on English-based
assessment exams necessary to surmount educational and labor market hurdles. This practice of
capitalizing on shadow capital has been solidified by the large number of college partnerships
that Oceanside has with universities in South Korea. These universities funnel students who need
to meet minimum TOEIC requirements for college graduation to Oceanside.

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Twenty-five year-old college student Jaeeun from Gwangju was one such student on a
college partnership with Oceanside. Jaeeun was encouraged by her parents to stay close to home
for college to help out with the family business. She ended up attending a trade college for hotel
business administration—an ideal compromise for her because her college did not require
college entrance exam scores which might have intimidated her from applying in the first place.
While she knew little about hotel business administration, she thought it was a “practical major”
in finding a permanent job in Gwangju, where local and international tourism has made the
hospitality sector a thriving industry. While she knew English was important to securing a job in
the future, she did not think it would be a requirement to graduate:
I never really learned English in high school, so it was a challenge to learn it in college. I
guess it is good that we have to take the TOEIC before we graduate because it forces us
to prepare for the exam…I probably would not have spent so much time on it if I was not
expected to. In the long run, it is good for me and my career.

Luckily Jaeeun’s college covered part of her tuition for a two-month English language study
program in the Philippines, which was available to hotel administration majors. Many regional
colleges require TOEIC scores for graduation as a way to increase their rankings and
employment numbers. For these colleges, high TOEIC scores provide a form of educational
camouflaging that would allow graduates to meet high employment criteria and standards,
subverting rank-based discrimination in the South Korean educational landscape.
Like Taegun, Jaeeun and many others in my study, we can glean the everyday struggles
of non-elite South Korean youth straddling to meet demands for English that have been called up
by the South Korean state, labor market, and society. They are part of the final sweep of ordinary
South Korean youth who have been compelled to invest in their English education due to
changing expectations in the labor market and education system. Many of them are from
peripheral cities outside of South Korea. They tend to face more spatial, class, and education

80
related inequalities than metropolitan youth. Their experiences demonstrate the ways in which
class stratification becomes extended in a transnational context (Kang and Abelmann 2011) and
show how migrants themselves navigate the stratifying effects of educational migration
hierarchies in creative ways.

Transient Colonialism and Compensatory Consumption
It could be that my belly is too full but you just have to try hard and be grateful for what
you have…If you aren’t going to immigrate and live in South Korea, you have to work
hard. It’s hard to own your own house. College tuition is expensive. It’s not like you’ll
get a good job just because you graduate from college. It just seems like our system is
shifting towards Western culture. That’s why it’s not easy. But don’t you think it’s better
than what our parents lived through? You have to graduate from a college “in Seoul.” But
most of the people who try to “dopi” are people who don’t make it to “in Seoul.” That’s
why so many people try so hard to get into colleges “in Seoul.” That’s what people don’t
like about South Korea…I see a lot of young people complain about the higher ups. But
those higher ups, they worked really hard to get to that position when we were all fooling
around…How hard must [they] have tried. If you don’t study and don’t go to a good
college you can’t get a good job and it’ll be hard to survive in South Korea. That’s why
people “dopi”…My family is not rich so I will have to spend what I make and try to save.
(Anna, 22 years old)

For many students, their trip to the Philippines often marked their first time traveling
outside of the country or the region with a large number of them living away from their parent’s
home for the first time. However, transnational educational moves reveal larger political
economic shifts in East Asian societies where “without steady employment, fewer youth are
marrying, having children, or leaving parental homes” (Lukacs 2015). In a sobering conversation
with twenty-four year-old college student Anna who left for the Philippines during her third year
in a near-Seoul college, she illuminates on how the Korean word dopi means more than just a
simplified escape. Instead, she argues that it intimates young people’s anxieties and fears in an
increasingly precarious and competitive society, where meeting basic needs for survival have
become increasingly unattainable. As Cho Hae-joang warned, “The upcoming generation of

81
South Koreans is only slowly beginning to realize their overinvestment in education will neither
necessarily help them attain job security nor enhance their changes of social upward mobility”
(cited in Lukcas 2015: 394). From gaining admission into an “in Seoul” college to owning a
home to paying for college, young people in South Korea have largely felt their aspirations for
economic stability deferred as they continue to make moves in their shaky transitions into
“adulthood.” With “adulthood” operating as a moving target, missing “conventional milestones”
have increasingly attracted young people to the idea of leaving, albeit temporarily, even
including someone like Anna, “whose belly might be full.”
Such political economic backdrops have engendered a cynical view of life in South
Korea that has resulted in an overall feeling of fatigue and burnout. Students recall the constant
anxieties of always having to look over their shoulders and having parents and family members
compare them with peers. South Korea’s globalization campaigns have also added a layer to
young people’s pressures to perform with expectations to now be global, well-traveled, and
versed in the global language of English. Alienated and forced to take a backseat from their own
lives, students describe South Korea as “Hell Chosun.” Ahjung, who left Busan for a six month
study holiday to the Philippines, describes these sentiments exactly:
The fact that they drift from this company to that company. Even if you do get a job, you
can’t even keep up with the work. I first thought that it was just me and it was my fault
but I quickly realized that I wasn’t alone. A lot of kids can’t handle it. There’s a lot of
talk these days that young people are quick to complain even if it’s a little hard but in my
eyes it’s not just on the people, it is definitely a problem with the companies as well.
They want to exploit people for cheap. The cost of living keeps going up. Even if you
work hard for a month, it’s just barely enough to survive. How are you going to save, get
married, have children? If you look at all that, that’s Hell Chosun.

Unlike the developmental state that at least initially was wedded to the provision of employment
security, the neoliberal state has adopted the principles of flexible accumulation to draw on
workers who can adapt to mobile and precarious work conditions. Neoliberal states incorporate

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youth in its growth strategies because they—especially the unmarried and childless—satisfy
demands for labor flexibility and mobility. The new expectation in South Korea is for youth to
embrace mobility, with the mainstreaming of nonstandard employment forcing young workers to
move from one short-term job to another. Rather than simply maximizing returns, the goal is to
project oneself into the future in the face of rapidly eroding social systems. This never-ending
process of development that serves the interests of employers becomes the basis of young
people’s fears and anxieties over their future well-being—that they will be left behind in such a
competitive environment (Jang 2018).
Geographic Arbitrage
Never-ending projects of self-development however are put in hiatus when students come
to the Philippines. Students not only catch up on their educational preparation but also express
their feelings of global fatigue and dopi through new and familiar forms of educational and
material consumption in “Happy Chosun.” During my first day at Oceanside, my new
roommates volunteered to take me around town to shop for supplies and toiletries. In my field
notes I recount how I was struck by the dramatic transformation of the city scape from the ride
from school into town:
“Woogahlong!” Dahae cried out in her accented Hiligaynon as she handed the passenger
next to her a handful of pesos to pass down to the driver in front of the jeepney. It was
my first day at Oceanside, and Dahae, my roommate for the next three months, asked me
to join her for dinner and drinks after classes in the center of town. While I was used to
the mostly rural landscape where Oceanside English was based, I was shocked to see at
the center of town a spanking new, football stadium-sized megamall with the letters SM
inscribed on top juxtaposed to a flurry of street vendors, local Filipino passers-by,
jeepneys, and tricycles cabs. As the bus came to a full stop, there unloaded an outpour of
South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese students from Oceanside and other nearby
English language schools gleefully stepping off the bus, some with shopping totes in
hand. Filled with eager excitement, the students all began to walk through the pedestrian
traffic into the entrance of the mall, marking the beginning of their weekend ritual of
luxurious consumption, leisure, and middle class living (excerpt from field notes).

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Unbeknownst to me, provincial educational destinations like Bacolod transform into thriving
entertainment enclaves for the residents, local tourists, and the large transient international
student population on the weekends. In the past couple decades, the rural and underpopulated
landscape of sugarcane fields have dramatically transformed into a global “consumptionscape”
fueled by the rise of remittance flows, call center growth, emigration, redevelopment, and
tourism. Study holiday tourism has contributed to an accelerated expansion of consumption
culture, which over time has become increasingly global in terms of provisions but also spending
practices. While free export zones in the Northern Philippines like Clark and Subic Bay operate
more as sites of economic exchange (see Reyes 2020), consumptionscapes are anchored in local
consumption practices where tourists and locals use their consumption of global goods to
reposition themselves in localized age, gender, and class hierarchies. As one of Angela Ragusa’s
(2013) lifestyle migrants note, “it’s like being a big fish in a small pond.”
In Bacolod, like many other provincial regions of the Philippines, the air-conditioned SM
megamall is the central feature of the local consumptionscape. Started by a Chinese immigrant
retailer (Nikkei Asia 2016), the SM megamall is the largest department store chain in the
Philippines and cater to international consumers, middle class locals with international taste, and
anyone wishing to escape the heat waves outdoors. Inside the vast emporium are global brands
and restaurants including McDonalds, KFC, Uniqlo, Home Depot, and Roxy Surf Shop to name
a few. Many of the price tags for clothing equal half a month’s salary for some local workers.
Consumption is not just exclusive to air-conditioned confines of the mall. It has also spawned a
thriving “adult playground” a few blocks away of pubs, karaoke bars, hostess bars, and coffee
shops. The food options are international, varying from Korean to American, Thai, and Filipino.
When I arrived, there was even a South Korean coffee shop chain Tom n Toms that was opening

84
for business. For roughly the cost of what would be one month’s worth of bus fares ($200 USD)
in South Korea, young South Koreans can spread these funds to a month and participate liberally
and exorbitantly in a consumption wonderland of fine dining, self-care, and middle class luxuries
in the low cost corridor of the Philippines otherwise inaccessible to them back home.
Driving the growth of consumptionscapes is what migration scholar Matthew Hayes
(2018) refers to as “geographic arbitrage.” Examining North American retirees in Ecuador,
Hayes defines it as the accumulating strategies of economically constrained migrants from
higher-income countries who relocate to low-cost countries where their money can stretch
further. The existence of low-cost countries is linked to deeper histories of western colonialism
and its constructions of a global division of labor that continues to work in the interests of people
in “higher latitudes who can purchase the labor power of those in “lower latitudes” (Ong 2016).
Leaning into the increased purchasing power of the Korean won, young people participate in
middle class luxuries such as shopping, eating out, and traveling that are otherwise inaccessible
to them back home as members of the largely un/underemployed “underclass” of South Korea.
Examining the complex and precarious positionings of Koreans in the Philippines offers a
chance to unpack the intersecting geopolitical, economic, and racial power relations that overlay
contemporary global racialized hierarchies in ways that expose the deeper workings of global
privilege.
Weekend excursions were a highlight for many including Bomi. Coming from the
outskirts of Busan, this was Bomi’s first time studying abroad, let alone traveling outside of
South Korea. She admits she has only been to Seoul two times in her life and once to visit the
Korean Disneyland, Lotte World. Back in her hometown, Bomi describes living out a “slow
death.” For the past two years, she has been out of work, with her longest job out of college

85
being a personal assistant for a professor who underpaid her. Bomi struggled to find a fulltime
job despite her degree in graphic design:
Back at home, these days, I’m probably one step above the homeless at Seoul Station.
I mostly eat at home and try to cut down my spending as much as I can. It’s been hard for
me to even meet up with my friends these days. When they go out, they eat out and get
drinks. I love drinking, but I dare not go. When I get thirsty, I could waste away my
whole savings in one night. [Being without spending cash] makes me feel crazy
sometimes.

Yet in the low-cost consumer market of Bacolod, Bomi remarks, “I can Y.O.L.O. [you only live
once]. She can purchase Tom n Toms coffee anytime she wants, go to the department store
without intimidation, and be “generous” with her friends by buying them a meal or two. Bomi’s
Y.O.L.O. lifestyle allows her to compensate for her feelings of missing out on the “ordinary”
consumption practices of middle class South Korean youth. What Bomi is participating in is a
form of transnational compensatory consumption, which marketing and consumer researchers
have defined as a “reaction” to systemic lack of self-esteem and powerlessness in society
(Rucker and Galinksy 2008). The lack of power fosters a desire to acquire products associated
with status. While compensatory consumption sometimes demonstrates what Veblen (1967) and
other consumption scholars point out as conspicuous displays of wealth, it also relieves
frustrations related to the lack of employment and financial precarity by allowing actors to “catch
up” on middle class leisurely pursuits denied to them back home. For a couple hundred dollars
per month, students can enjoy a wide array of consumptive activities on the weekend including
spa treatments, massages, manicures, steak dinners, desserts at upscale bakeries, and ironically,
countless cups of the Korean brand Tom n Toms coffee. Another educational migrant in his late
twenties, Chulsoo, provides a play-by-play of a typical “night out” in Cebu:
During the week we plan our weekend getaway. As soon as we leave the pearly school
gates, we make a run for the restaurant. It’s dinner time. If we want to eat pasta, we go
eat pasta. If we want to go eat pizza, we go eat pizza. If we are feeling thirsty for a drink

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would go to a Korean pub and drink soju and if we are feeling it we would go to a
karaoke bar and if we are feeling it even more we would go to a club…We basically play
until then. We don’t even sleep. We go karaoke or go to a massage shop…This night of
debauchery would cost us in total 20 to 30 dollars. We would never be able to do that in
South Korea. It would be very difficult. I mean you could once in a while but you
wouldn’t be able to do that often.

As Chulsoo recounts, weekend nights become hedonistic pursuits of fun, recreation, and pleasure.
Students will also get together for day trips at nearby hotel resorts where they can rent rooms or
use the pool for a fee. At least once or twice during their stay students will typically take trips to
the nearby beach resorts and island destinations such as Bohol, Dumaguete, Boracay, and Cebu,
which are sometimes organized by the English language school. These kind of small-scale jumps
in social status through consumptive practices signal the transnational stratified mobility of
young South Koreans who carve out a global experience on a budget.
Students’ faux-luxurious and consumptive lifestyles lead to a form of unequal forms of
exchange between South Koreans and Filipinos that are articulated as practices of transient
colonialism. Enabled by the tourist consumptionscape in which they dwell, transient colonialism
provides a temporary boost in social and economic status. Low resourced South Korean youth
are able to gain a sense of wealth and status while in the Philippines, allowing them to
temporarily negotiate their lower status in South Korea through their socioeconomic, geopolitical,
or perceived racial power over local Filipino laborers in the Philippines. At the same time, their
neocolonizing practices are but momentary experiences that come to a close at the end of their
trip. South Koreans who return to South Korea must eventually juggle their shift in status when
they reenter a labor and consumer society where they continue to be under/unemployed.
Similarly, as I address in a later chapter, youth who continue to Australia take an even deeper
social status dip when they find themselves working as manual laborers in farms and factories.

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Shopping sprees and all, South Korean young people do not just navigate their
compensatory consumption practices through the experiences of newfound wealth. Transient
colonialism also operates relationally and shapes the ways South Korean students interact with
their Filipino friends and tutors while navigating this newfound terrain from a position of
economic power. In her concept of “connected lives,” Viviana Zelizer (2009) illustrates how
social actors find appropriate matches between relationships and their economic transactions for
the purposes at hand. In the Philippines, I observed similar negotiations between South Korean
youth and their Filipino tutors with whom students come into close contact. South Korean youth
and their tutors are both in their twenties and thirties. Making it easier for them to relate is the
rise of Hallyu and Korean pop. It makes it no surprise that students and their tutors become
friends quickly, which blurs their professional relationship at school.
However, friendships between students and tutors are complicated by the economic and
racial differences between Koreans and Filipinos. Dohye Kim’s (2018) work on South Korean
retirees in the Philippines shows how South Korea’s sense of racial supremacy due to their
economic success shapes their interactions with Filipinos whom they view as people from a
failed economically poor nation. Kim (2016) argues that the fact that the Filipinos that Koreans
come into regular contact with tend to be employees in subservient positions magnifies their
feelings of superiority. While the younger South Koreans I interviewed did not explicitly hold
similar views as the Korean boomer generation, economic and intra-Asian racial dynamics still
inform everyday interactions between students and tutors. This is particularly acute when they
engage in the leisure related consumption activities involved in “friends getting to know each
other.” This includes going on trips, grabbing drinks, going to parties, or even running errands
together at the mall.

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While students like Bomi are finally able to spend money without the fear of depleting
their savings, their relational consumption practices put pressure on Filipino tutors who only earn
close to $100 to $150 per month. Because tutors speak the local language and are from the area,
students rely on their tutor friends for important sources of information or ask them to be their
tour guides when exploring local tourist sites and landmarks. As “friends,” such forms of social
interaction are not necessarily transactional. Yet, many young South Korean students often seem
unaware of the economic burden they impose when asking their tutors to go on middle-class
excursions. For instance, as one tutor Mary explains:
The students have never been here so they want to go to as many places as possible. I do
like traveling and going out, but it can add up. I have to be selective about what activities
I choose to go. I can’t just go to everything because I am saving for school. It gets hard
sometimes to maintain the friendship.

Some students sometimes offer to “repay in kind” by buying meals or drinks for their tutors.
Other students who do not have a lot of cash in hand will give tutors used and new items that
they brought from home such as make-up or clothing. While students were generally well-
meaning in their intentions and did such acts to show their appreciation to their Filipino friends,
they often failed to see how inequality defines their relationships with locals. As another tutor
Santa remarks, “I don’t like to accept meals or gifts from them because over time it starts to feel
awkward. They pay for me and there’s pressure. Taking them out can sometimes feel like a part-
time job. It might be just me giving myself pressure. I just want it to be normal, nothing more or
less. Some are generous though.” Santa explains that tutors and students can enter “awkward”
situations of patronage. While students might feel that they are “helping out” tutors by paying for
their outings, tutors can also feel more pressure to “do things” for their student-friends or as
Santa says “feel like a part-time job.” The power dynamics and the economic disparities between

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countries shape Filipino-Korean relationships that undergird South Korean experiences of
transient colonialism.
Relational forms of consumption have also been observed within the romantic or fleeting
sexual relations between Korean male students and local Filipina women. These relations are
also a classed process as men who are not privileged at home can step closer to the ideals of
hegemonic Korean masculinity, mediated through Hallyu and Kpop (Jung 2010). In Sam Pack’s
(2020) study of Korean sex tourism in the Philippines, he describes Filipinas drawn to Korean
men for their “reputation as being tall, fair-skilled, clad in colorful clothing, and always equipped
with the latest and most expensive gadgets” (169). As Illouz points out, intimacies have long
been defined by the ability to consume goods and leisure with “the romance-consumption link
becoming an integral part of the middle-class lifestyle” (1997: 37). For non-elite men who
struggle economically at home, the notion that they can “wine and dine” local women affordably
allow them to gain a sense of new economic and social power. Many of the male migrants I
spoke to explained how their constant employment instability had interfered with their dating
prospects in South Korea. Economics not only plays into making one a more “attractive partner”
but it also defines the pragmatics of dating in South Korea, where most of the young population
live at home and dating requires meeting up outside.
In contrast, in the Philippines, young men can gain access to a different space of
consumption where their own value in terms of status increases along with their ability to
participate in a dating economy. As one Korean male migrant describes in our interview:
You take her out and buy her alcohol. Alcohol is only ten thousand won ($10 USD) for
me but for them it is an extremely big amount. If you get lucky you take her to a hotel
and pay for the hotel. In Korea, hotels are fifty thousand won ($50 USD) but here it’s
barely ten or twenty thousand won ($10-$20 USD). Even if you finish the night off, you
might have not even spent one hundred thousand won ($100 USD). You are spending an
amount of money they can’t even think about so that’s how they start to become

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interested. When they go home you even give them money for a cab. At best the cab is at
most two thousand won ($2). I met one girl in the Philippines and she was rich. She
actually bought me food. (He laughs). I was more intrigued. I thought to myself jokingly.
Should I get married?

Though spatially and temporally contained, Korean male students enjoy a form of
racialized social and sexual mobility while in the rural Philippines. Working class Korean men
take up a transnational response to their experiences of disempowerment in traveling and
purchasing sex and romances in developing countries. Relationships with Filipina women are
key to masculinizing practices that allow men to achieve a bounded and temporary sense of
social mobility in their encounters. These Korean men seem to have internalized a racial,
economic, and geopolitical hierarchy whereby they perceive Filipino counterparts as ranking
lower on the global order of national groups. At the same time, relations between Koreans and
Filipinos have been overshadowed by the growing perceptions of Koreans “overstaying their
welcome” within Philippine society due to their reckless sex tourism. These short-sided sexual
encounters have come under fire, with Philippine (and later Korean) media outlets warning of
“bad Korean men.” In fact, there has been increasing research and media coverage on the rise of
“Kopinos” or children of short-term Korean men and Filipino women romances (Pack 2018).
Economies of compensatory consumption combined with gendered relations reveal the ways in
which geographic arbitrage operates to masculinize and build the confidence of less affluent
Korean men, exposing the larger gendered and racial dynamics that come into play in classed
social encounters.

Neoliberal Enterprising and the Politics of Bounded Self Growth
When you are in Korea, you just work. You just want to take a break sometimes. I am
someone who likes to be outside so before I came here I looked for places here and there
I could relieve stress…After work I learned dancing or learned guitar, I tried to be

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productive. When I decided that I want to learn something, there’s something that slows
me down because I work eight hour shifts and because my work is busy. If I want to learn
something, I would need to go every day after work or the days I am not scheduled for
work but I can’t because I am junior level and I am always on call and at the mercy of my
superiors. That’s why even if I want to take time for myself, it’s not up to me. I tried to
make time and relieve my stress…in the Philippines there is always a weekend where we
rest. When class is over the rest is time for me. I love that about the Philippines. It’s not
eight hour shifts but you study five days a week and you get two days of rest every single
week. You don’t have to ask your superior, “Can I take a day off? Can I get this day off?”
You don’t have to ask, it’s just a given. You can go hang out on the weekend, go swim,
go watch movies. After class, I eat often with my classmates, even if you play all the time,
there’s really no negative impact on your studies…That was impossible in South Korea.
After my first weekend back from the Philippines, I really appreciated that time off and
realized the importance of having weekends off. Just knowing that I had weekends made
me so happy.

A nurse in her mid-twenties from Jeju City on Jeju Island, Sookyoung does not recount
difficulty finding work in South Korea compared to some of her peers. Instead, she maintains a
carefree attitude toward returning. “Nurses are always in high demand,” she explained. Despite
her relatively more robust economic status, Sookyoung was attracted to studying in the
Philippines because of the overwhelming feeling of being trapped—subject to a perpetual cycle
of eight-hour graveyard shifts, where she had little control over own schedule. Because she was a
junior nurse at her hospital, Sookyoung was not comfortable asking for vacation and often felt
like she was at the mercy of older nurses who kept her “on call” and gave her their unwanted
shift times. Despite that Sookoung might have had the economic resources to pursue self-care
and her own personal development projects, her age, gender, and geographical limitations on
Jeju Island impedes her from taking care of herself and “relieving her stress.”
Sookyoung’s story points to the illusionary nature of ‘self-actualization’ or self-
development projects in late capitalism. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens (2008) argues
that “class divisions and other fundamental lines of inequality, such as those connected with
gender and ethnicity, can be partly defined in terms of differential access to forms of self-

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actualization and empowerment” (6). What Giddens intimates is that certain groups may
experience limitations of actualizing these projects in their “existing political and social settings”
(Giddens 2008: 6) or in other words the societies in which they are based. However, what
happens when actors are removed from their existing political and social settings? What kind of
settings help facilitate projects of self-growth and social mobility that are impeded back in their
own societies? It is within small, pocketed encounters of transient colonialism, albeit momentary
and temporary, that valuable spaces can be materialized for under-resourced youth to initiate
reflexive projects of their desires. South Korean youth detach themselves from neoliberal
pressures of stability, employment, and conformity through migration into a low-cost destination
and their consequent participation in heightened consumption for the purpose of self-care and
self-making projects.
Self-care or “healing” as the South Koreans call it, is an important element of self-
actualization project and central to the mobility experiences of young South Koreans in the
Philippines. Healing has become a trendy catchphrase among younger South Koreans, who have
stressed the importance of mental health, balanced life, and healthy living as a reaction against
the neoliberal mode of lucrative employment or prestigious education. Leaving South Korea
allowed students to become more attuned to their own feelings of pain, fatigue, and exhaustion in
ways that enable them to reflect on their own life, stress, workload, family concerns, hopes and
dreams and connect with progressive ways of putting themselves first. They do so by temporarily
and transnationally “checking out” and devoting space and time to focus on taking care of
themselves. As Sookyoung reports:
Just grinding in South Korea is not the only way. When I went to the Philippines and
Australia, I felt that people in those countries had a lot more of their “personal time” than
people in Korea. If you have more time, you can be emotionally healthier. This is because
you have more time to take care of yourself. But when I see my friends in Korea, they are

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exhausted when they get off work and sleep until they have to go to work again. There’s
no time for yourself…If you go abroad there more people who have more time and there
are a lot ways to relieve your emotional stress. In my country, there aren’t a lot of spaces
to relieve your stress. When I look at my friends, the only thing they have to relieve stress
is drinking alcohol…Here, there are more opportunities to… be emotionally and
psychologically healthy.

Here Sookyoung discusses the relationship between more “personal time” and emotional health.
She describes how because of her work schedule, she does not have the time to relieve her
emotional stress from work and life – even if she has the will to do so. She points out that the
lack of outlets can lead to more drinking, which she already sees as an increasing problem
among her other nurse friends. Unlike her life in South Korea, Sookyoung has her weekends
back in the Philippines, where she is able to go work out, swim, and watch movies with her
friends. Recent work on gender and activist research has taken seriously individualized forms of
self-care expressions as new and important forms of resistance. Works looking at non-movement
based self-care activities (Council, forthcoming) push back on older definitions of what counts as
“self-care” (Barry and Dordevic 2008) arguing that individualized self-care is important in the
absence of state-centered solutions to the oppression of women and people of color (Nash 2018).
While individualized acts of self might not transform structures, these works argue that it is one
avenue of looking at change and surviving the conditions of life, stress, workload, and family
concerns (see Council, forthcoming). As Sookyoung succinctly puts it, after getting her first ever
massage during her first week in the Philippines: “I didn’t know that my body was in this much
pain.”
Low-cost destinations also financially enable regularized forms of self-care practices
including getting massages, taking vacation, and exercising regularly. Twenty-six year-old social
work college student Gee from Andong was one to take advantage of this opportunity. Gee used
her time in the Philippines to prioritize the physical healing activities she felt like she was denied

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in South Korea. Being a non-traditional college student, Gee returned to obtain her degree after
having children. When her program offered her a scholarship to study English in the Philippines,
she also saw it as an opportunity to “heal” and enrolled in a gym where she got private personal
training classes – what she described as a costly activity in South Korea:
I got a personal trainer when I joined a gym in the Philippines. PT (personal training) is
expensive in South Korea. But in the Philippines, it is affordable and the price doesn’t
make me feel guilty for spending money on myself. Back in South Korea, I don’t put
myself first and school, work, and my kids take most of my time. I was lucky I got my
parents to watch my kids while I go away for a month. I saw this as my chance to heal. I
want to take advantage while I’m here.

Students complained about the emotional struggles of navigating the unstable job market,
which are aggravated for those with responsibility for others like Gee or those who live at home
subjected to their parents’ judgement. Students who were burnt out from the emotional and
psychological stressors of their school-to-work transition were able to stop the job market clock
and take stock in leisure trips or other self-preserving activities that would help them rebuild
strength to continue to participate in the competitive labor market of South Korea. So, even as
the credentials that educational migrants earn in peripheral destinations are not considered
valuable spec, the bounded mobility students enjoy can offer a valuable experience that partially
and temporarily offsets the pressures of neoliberal competition at home.
Enterprising Self
Aside from turning inward, self-development projects also involve discourses of “self-
manageable” and “self-enterprising” subjects that have manifested in young people’s business
related projects and idea-generation in the Philippines. Abelmann and colleagues’ (2015)
research have spotlighted how young people in South Korea have increasingly turned towards
aspirations to find “business items” that would help them discover their own talent or nurture
their own passions. Everyday aspirations for self-enterprise are couched within the South Korea

95
government’s larger promotion of entrepreneurship via gig economies, venture capital
companies, and creative industries among unemployed youth to manage increasing labor
precarity post 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (Song 2009). In Jesook Song’s (2007) research, she
examined how college-educated “creative intellectuals” in South Korea are now turning to jobs
in the venture industries via increased government support, illustrating the shifting ethical
commitments towards the “enterprising self” by organizing lives according to market principles
of calculated future profit and enhanced economy (Rose 1999).
While South Korean young people in the Philippines might be another expression of
larger discourses and pressures for the “enterprising self,” the ways in which they are situated
within South Korea’s hierarchical society and extended migration landscape offers vastly
different experiences than those of students in South Korea who are starting venture capital
companies and creative industries. How are projects of self-enterprise experienced for more
marginalized youth who don’t have other options but to enter into self-business? In South Korea,
the connection between entrepreneurship and economic precarity is not new; the self-employed
in South Korea represent a large share of the precarious, insecure, and fragile class of workers
9

(Shin 2011). Yang (2018) points out the connection between self-employment and ageism and
how small businesses served as the final recourse for middle class workers who were pushed into
early retirement after the Crisis – symbolized by the caricature of the Korean fried chicken shop.
However, ageism in the labor market is not exclusive to older workers. In her study of
Japanese women living abroad in western countries, Kelsky (2001) describes how young women
returning with advanced foreign degrees often confront an experience of “ageing out” in Japan
because they are viewed as “too old” and “overqualified” to fill the secretarial positions typically

9
Self-employed persons with no employees constituting sixty percent of the total self-employed population in 2011

96
designated for women. Therefore, younger workers in their late twenties and early thirties
seeking a career change or who are coming back from living overseas also tend to turn to self-
employment to make a living. This was also the case for thirty year-old June from Goyangsi near
Seoul, who was actually returning to the Philippines for a second time after undertaking a
working holiday in Australia. June finished college in his late twenties because of the long
journey it took for him to transfer from a two-year to a four-year college and complete his
compulsory military service. While June had planned to transition to permanent residency, a
pathway the Australian government provides for some “skilled workers” after completing a
working holiday, he decided to return home after a bad breakup with his girlfriend, another
Korean working holiday-maker in Australia. On his way back to South Korea, June decided to
do a three-month stint in the Philippines in order to take the time to think about what he wanted
to do back in South Korea. Demonstrating great apprehension about his return, June explains:
When I go back to South Korea I will be thirty with no professional work experience. I
can’t use my work at the banana farm in Australia on my resume. Even if I wanted to
start over and from the bottom, South Korean employers don’t want to hire people over
thirty for entry-level positions because it is more uncomfortable managing an older
person. Your manager might be younger than you, for example, and it creates an age and
positional mismatch. They prefer someone who is fresh out of college, who is more easily
controlled. People over thirty are not the ideal new workers.

Many South Korean young adults I interviewed are like June. When it comes to those in
the upper age range, they leave South Korea with hopes of acquiring global skills and credentials
only to later realize that their experience would not necessarily provide a career boost. For them,
however, study abroad comes with the risk of exacerbating their constrained job prospects
because of extended gaps in their professional work history from being overseas. June’s
reservations about his prospects in South Korea pushed him to look into small business
opportunities he could pursue in South Korea while in the Philippines. He then decided to pursue

97
a pasta business in South Korea, pointing out that it became his favorite meal while in Australia.
He planned to learn how to make pasta in South Korea from a family acquaintance who runs a
small but lucrative pasta making business, using the money he saved up from his working
holiday in Australia, and use the rest of the money to purchase equipment to help him either sell
the food online or street-vend his food to reduce the cost of renting space. Also aggravating the
labor market precarity of returnees such as June are their lack of the right educational credentials,
which blocks their ability to obtain secure salaried jobs.
June’s entrepreneurial ideas are distinct from the “venture capital” and “creative
companies” that were discussed in Song’s (2007) research. Instead, these students rely more
heavily on more artisan, manual, and hands-on skills for business ideas and items. This was
especially true for students who attended trade colleges and or were stuck in “transitional”
periods for a long time. Take for example twenty-five year-old trade school graduate Arang from
the northern Chungcheong provincial region. After graduating from beauty school, Arang
worked as an assistant hair stylist with dreams of starting her own salon. However, after an
accident at work that left her working hand injured, Arang was unemployed for several months
during which she received treatment before looking for work again. Feeling unmotivated but
needing to work in order to survive, she picked up a shift as a cashier at Dunkin Donuts. While
she had only planned to work there temporarily, she ended up staying longer due to convenience.
It was only when her wealthy uncle, concerned about Arang’s future, offered to send her abroad
that she decided to go to the Philippines. Having never been abroad, Arang decided to take the
opportunity to figure out what she wanted to do while learning English -- a “guiltless
compromise” for her to stay “productive” while taking a break from the emotional stressors of
“figuring out a career” back home.

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Leaving soon after her uncle offered her the opportunity, Arang remarked that she was
not as invested in learning. In the Philippines, she skipped classes regularly and sometimes
ventured for mid-day trips to the mall. Arang’s off-campus excursions would always involve a
stop at her favorite dessert shop where she would get a Filipino dessert called Halo Halo. Calling
herself a “sweets expert,” Arang often talked about how it would be great to sell Halo Halo in
South Korea and that it was a dessert that accurately fit the “Korean taste buds.” Our frequent
trips to the Halo Halo shop eventually led us to becoming friendly with the owner of the shop
Hugo, a middle-aged Filipino man. During our weekly visits, Hugo would often strike up a
conversation with us and Arang would share her love for the dessert and how she wanted to sell
it back in South Korea. Before Arang left, Hugo offered to give Arang a lesson on how to make
Halo Halo to help her introduce Filipino food to South Koreans-- something Hugo said would
make him proud to be Filipino who has never gone to South Korea. While Arang was not
strategically looking to find a business idea, her consumption activities inspired her to think of an
alternative livelihood that she could not have imagined before. Selling a single dessert, she
thought, would be a lot more manageable than owning a brick and mortar restaurant for someone
with low resources like her, because she could save on costs through renting a kiosk, cart, or a
small space inside a store or mall. Such enterprising imaginings were a common feature among
South Korean youth in the older age bracket who did not see themselves as going back to school
or being able to obtain a white collar job at a larger company.
Other students I met revealed more premeditated plans to maximize their time in the
Philippines beyond English language learning by learning a new trade. This was the case for
thirty-one-year-old Jiman, who was working as a mid-level salesperson in South Korea before
undertaking a multi-destination itinerary to the Philippines and Australia. When his sister got

99
married and could no longer support their parents, he decided it was the right moment to shift
gears and find another job: “My parents are getting older, and I need to take care of them. While
I make enough for me, but it’s not enough to be a family man.” Jiman marked his transition out
of full-time employment by undertaking a multi-year and multi-destination trip, starting with the
Philippines. Jiman would not only brush up on his English language skills in the Philippines, but
also solidify concrete career plans. In his eyes, the only right move was to start his own business,
which he believed was the only way a person his age could earn a higher living without going
back to school. One of his ideas was to learn how to scuba dive and start a scuba diving school
back in South Korea. He planned to obtain his scuba diving license in the Philippines and
maximize his time scuba diving there to avoid the high fees of scuba diving training in Australia.
Jokingly, he said that he did need to pick up an Australian English accent when he is there, so
that people would be more convinced when he calls his business, the “Great Barrier Reef
Korea.”
Because Jiman was focused on learning scuba diving, he would often miss class to take
frequent side-trips to nearby beaches. Such entrepreneurial orientations demonstrate the ways in
which economically constrained young people maximize their study abroad experiences in order
to facilitate their survival back in South Korea. The Philippines as a spatially removed “time
chamber” offers young South Koreans a chance to embark on creative and reflexive self-growth
projects as an outcome of their exposure to leisure sports, food, and other cultural practices.
While their experiences might be born out of the necessity to relieve anxieties about their
structural exclusions back home, marginalized young people’s relative access to experiences in
the Philippines, such as taking surfing or cooking classes, grants them means to alternative
capital-building as tourist-students that could hold value for them beyond any labor market

100
ascendance. While their consumptive practices do produce bounded experiences of self-growth
and self-actualization projects that show the broad scope and horizons of stratified mobilities, we
are also compelled to pay attention to their increased agency and meaning-making (although not
without social and structural repercussions to their local environment). Experiences of bounded
self-growth will be further explored in the next chapter on South Korean students in Australia
where we find how state-mandated residential segregation in rural parts of Australia also shape
such experiences and projects of self-growth.

Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates how low-resourced South Korean young adults studying in
budget English educational programs in the Philippines challenge the stratifying effects of their
segmentation in transnational educational contexts through both strategic and organically
experienced consumption and capital accumulation practices. The examples in this chapter
demonstrate the losses and gains involved in transnational stratified mobility and the ways in
which migration for education is not a positive-sum game. While researchers have shed light on
how recent developments in South Korean governance have proved as a promising site for
understanding the implementation of neoliberal policies on the labor power of youth, such
studies have yet to examine how such policies have not only traveled but expanded
geographically through the increasing deregulation of the international education market and the
liberalization of youth travel and migration.
At first glance, educational migration to the Philippines might seem caught in a “catch-
22” where they are pressured by the government and prospective employers in South Korea to
become English fluent “global citizens” but recognize that their “third world” English credentials

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and overseas study experience in the Philippines will be undervalued upon their return home in a
professional labor market that continues to privilege credentials from the Global North. Such
temporary and bounded forms of mobility describe an alternative strategy taken on by low-
resourced South Korean young adults who opt for budget private English education programs in
peripheral locations like the Philippines. South Korean youth engage in low-cost migration
pathways with the understanding that upon returning home, their experiences will not be globally
legitimized in a similar way as elite study abroad programs in the Global North. Even though
their credentials are undervalued, my research reveals that their empowered experiences which
involve maximizing unequal social relations between two differently positioned countries
provide forms of pre-cultural capital, compensatory middle class consumption, and
entrepreneurial inspiration that strategically and creatively challenge working-class migrants’
marginal positions within South Korea’s highly stratified and increasingly neoliberal society.

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CHAPTER 4
BLUE DREAMS DEFERRED: ENCLAVE MIGRATION IN LOS ANGELES’
KOREATOWN
Introduction
In reconnecting Korean immigrants to the Korea, they left behind, Blue Dreams—the
color associated with dreams, hopes, and aspirations in Korea is blue, like the clear blue
sky—highlights…the enormous diversity of the people essentialized into the easy
receptacle of “Koreans” or “Korean Americans.” Further, the stereotype image of the
Korean American…which validates the ideal of the American dream, breaks down
against the recalcitrant reality of Korean immigrant lives in the United States. South
Korean dreams have turned into American nightmares, oneiric blue into ominous blues
(Abelmann and Lie 1995; ix).

Outside of family members who had to leave Los Angeles due their inability to legalize
their immigrant status, I am most thankful for my friend Jungmin who exposed and introduced
me to everyday lives of South Korean student-migrant-workers in Los Angeles struggling to
make ends meet. I first met Jungmin in the mid-2000s when I began working at a hostess bar in
Los Angeles. A petite and slender feminine woman from Seoul, Jungmin had a distinctive air of
confidence and steadfast resilience despite being just a few years my senior. Arriving in Los
Angeles the year prior bearing an itemized bucket list of things she wanted to accomplish in the
United States, from going back to college to getting her cosmetology license, owning her own
business, finding a partner, and having children. Having just turned twenty-one when I met her,
Jungmin took me under her wing as her dongsang or younger sister, bringing me into her
intricate inner world of Koreatown that was often invisible at the surface of passers-by and
tourists. She took me to after-hour bars where the workers drank, let me tag along to nighttime
classes at the language school, shared with me stories about “border runs” (to maintain legal
status) (see Hwang 2018) to Mexico and Canada with friends, and even invited me to live with
her when my commute to school got too hard.

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It was not long after I met Jungmin that I learned the common thread weaving together
members of my family, the migrant hostesses I worked alongside, and the young people working
at the Korean BBQ restaurants, shops, and grocery stores that I encountered on a daily basis in
Los Angeles’ Koreatown. In contrast to the simplified view of Asian international students
(Waters 2011), instead, these migrants entered the United States on F-1 student visas enrolling in
English language schools where they gradually saw their lives transformed and interrupted by
the political, economic, and social circumstances of their liminal status and the precarious
conditionality of their visa (Robertson 2019). Migrating to the USA, which is the most expensive
educational destination in the world, is a costly endeavor. Non-degree programs like English
language schools range from $5,000 to $10,000 per year while degree programs range from
$10,000 to $40,000 in tuition alone. Cities like Los Angeles have traditionally served as
immigrant gateways, but this comes at the expense of one’s standard of living because monthly
costs of living are high and have skyrocketed in recent years.
10
It is not uncommon for student-
migrants to share one-bedroom apartments with multiple roommates or even search pay-to-stay
school schemes that allow student migrants to juggle their multiple low-wage jobs. Facing
insurmountable tuition fees and juggling high costs of living, these migrants saw their fates
intimately linked with their participation in the local co-ethnic enclave economy, where they toil
as undocumented workers alongside other migrants with precarious legal statuses as they
navigate social, legal, and economic exclusions governing the vital spheres of their everyday
existence. Telescoping out to their broader impact, we see how their work has become a beating
lifeline sustaining Koreatown as a transnational migrant and immigrant hub, which serves as a

10
At the time when this research was conducted, rents ranged from $1,200 to $2,000 –added on to the costs of
having a car and auto insurance due to the absence of reliable public transportation.

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haven, second home, and refuge for many in the Korean migrant community. Yet, this work has
for the most part stayed invisible in public narratives of Koreatown.
For many of these migrants, the dynamics of “ethnic economy” constitute a key
mechanism shaping their everyday lives in the United States. Previous literature has examined
variations in ethnic economies, including Japanese immigrants in Hawaii (Hirschman and Wong
1986); Cuban immigrants in Miami (Portes and Bach 1985), and Korean immigrants in Los
Angeles (Light and Bonacich 1988). There are two main perspectives that dominate this area of
research. First, Alejandro Portes and colleagues introduced the concept of an ethnic enclave
economy drawing on the labor segmentation framework to highlight human capital returns and
locational clustering (Portes and Bach 1985; Portes and Jensen 1987; Jensen and Portes 1992).
This view holds that immigrants largely confined to ethnic labor markets gain wages equal to or
greater than the primary labor market. The second view represents the work of Edna Bonacich
and associates building on middleman minority theory to explain ethnic economies as including
the self-employed and their co-ethnic employees (Bonacich and Modell 1980; Light 1972; Light
et al 1994). By focusing on the high rates of self-employed immigrants instead of location, this
concept is more inclusive of varied immigrant labor configurations. This view, alongside
successive scholars like Victor Nee, contested Portes’ enclave thesis’ assumption about increased
wages and material benefits, suggesting that the benefits from paternalism (Portes and Bach
1985) do not necessary surpass those in other labor markets or circumvent co-ethnic exploitation
(Bates 1997; Sanders and Nee 1987; Sanders and Nee 1992; Alba and Nee 2003). Subsequent
scholarship has also examined how ethnic enclaves shape patterns of integration for second-
generation immigrants (Portes and Zhou 1993; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996; Gold and Light
2000). More specifically, segmented assimilation theories proposed that there are different

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stratified contexts of reception into U.S. society for post-1965 immigrants, finding that
immigrant groups with ethnic economies encounter “delayed incorporation” into mainstream
culture (Portes and Zhou 1993). According to this model, ethnic economies serve as a significant
source of upward mobility for the second generation as they function as a social buffer against
downward assimilation and eventually allow the new second generation to move away from
parental economic activities and integrate into mainstream labor markets.
Contemporary analyses on ethnic economies tend to end at this juncture with the second
generation leaving the ethnic economy (see Kim 2006 for exceptions). Several works have
documented labor transformations within dominant immigrant labor niches from co-ethnic to
mostly Latinx immigrant labor (Kim 1999; Min 2007). For instance, studies on Korean ethnic
economies such as Los Angeles Koreatown have discussed the change from Korean to Latinx
labor populations since the 1970s with the decline of Korean labor being “less available and
costly” (Park 2012). In the aftermath of the 1992 Civil Unrest, these works have described
Korean and Latinx relations as both positive and negative: positive due to cultural similarities
and mutually beneficial work arrangements (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999) but exploitative
due to what Lawrence Bobo and colleagues (1994) calls a “hidden conflict,” which accounted for
high levels of violence directed at Korean merchants during the unrest (see Park 2012). At the
same time, other works have emphasized coalition-building efforts between Korean and Latinx
groups that have helped to rebuild Los Angeles after the unrest.
11
Such works have begun to shift
some of the existing discourses on discussions of labor dynamics in ethnic economies and
communities.

11
For instance, in 1994, Korean American organizations came to the aid of the predominately Latinx hotel union
workers against the Korean conglomerate Hanjin who were undergoing a change in ownership of the Downtown
Los Angeles Hilton (Park 2004).

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With these exceptions, newer works looking at the flows of recent co-ethnic labor tend to
do so as a contrasting counterpoint to Latinx workers. Koreans are portrayed as front stage
workers who have opportunities for promotion while Latinx workers continue to be underpaid as
“backstage” workers, unintentionally pitting one group of workers against another (Sanchez et al
2012). We still know little about the experiences that newer co-ethnic Korean migrants have in
the labor market and the processes by which these workers gain access to jobs. In addition,
existing studies on undocumented workers in the U.S. mostly draw on data from the Latinx
population and thus, making it difficult to know whether migrants of different backgrounds,
especially Asian undocumented migrants, share similar employment experiences. This is
particularly important considering that Asian migrants are the fastest growing undocumented
population in the United States (see Semple 2012). By empirically foregrounding co-ethnic
South Korean undocumented workers in Los Angeles Koreatown, this chapter complicates long-
standing “exploitation” vs “beneficial” debates on ethnic economies and enclaves, demonstrating
instead how ethnic economies can serve as both exploitative and protective safety nets for
undocumented workers including those on student visas.
Returning to Jungmin’s story, she is someone who does not venture outside of Los
Angeles Koreatown; she goes to school, finds jobs, and hangs out at cafes during her days off
within the confines of the enclave. “It feels like I am stuck in 1970s Korea,” she remarks,
referring to the older buildings established during earlier waves of Korean immigration to Los
Angeles. What are the factors that make up her migration experiences? How does her migration
add to our understanding of migration at large? Jungmin’s experiences constitute what I call
enclave migration, highlighting the structural role that the co-ethnic market economy plays in
shaping the material realities and experiences of student-migrant workers. This chapter pays

107
attention to ethnic English language schools, labor markets, social relations and networks that
underscore South Korean student-migrants’ experiences to better understand the implications of
the ethnic economy on their everyday lives as migrants. Because international students on F-1 or
F-2 visas are not allowed to work outside of their educational institutions, they must rely on co-
ethnic economies for their economic survival in the United States as unauthorized migrant
workers. While the cash-based co-ethnic economy of Los Angeles Koreatown can sometimes
serve as an “ethnic mobility trap” that further exacerbates migrants’ precariousness, I also show
how migrants creatively reimagine and circumnavigate the hurdles they confront during their
migration as they weigh important life decisions about economic opportunities, home-making
and settling. Enclave migration demonstrates how transnational stratified mobility operates
through the ethnic economy’s “landing zone” which serves as a support system but also an
“ethnic mobility trap” (Wiley 1967). This chapter contributes to the literature on international
migration by examining the enduring role of the “ethnic economy” and how it intersects with
other state immigration systems in shaping migrants’ everyday lives in their relationships, family
lives, and future livelihoods.

English Language School Gateways into Koreatown
I worked at an internet café, but it didn’t count towards a career. […] And it’s not like I
have a special skill that would place me in a professional job. […] So, I [started] a
business […] and it failed. I thought maybe I can go to the U.S. [and learn] English and
find a job. In the U.S. they don’t really see your age and you can do many types of jobs.
…. People kept saying that maybe I could meet someone nice in America (Guntae, 35).

Like many of the students I met in the Philippines, learning English becomes an index
and gateway to self-improvement and other prospective forms of social mobility including
finding a job and even meeting a life partner. For people like Guntae who are over thirty in

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precarious employment, age discrimination in the labor market, social pressures, and structural
constraints make it difficult to pursue different life course pathways beyond the traditional
“salaryman.” With a vague understanding of the opportunities overseas, migrants like him
envision the United States as a “chunjugook” or the land of wealth. This romanticized vision of
the United States ultimately drives their decision to leave their bleak options in South Korea
behind to search for something new.
English language schools are one of the most common non-degree exchange programs in
the United States. At its peak in 2014-2015, there were close to 95,000 international students
enrolled in non-degree programs out of the total one million international students. This annual
statistical snapshot does not include the many international students who transfer over from non-
degree programs such as English language schools to degree programs. Korean international
students constitute one of the largest groups of international students in the United States with
close to 73,000 international students.
Beyond serving as an educational pathway, non-degree programs can also be
instrumentalized as a feasible method to gain both short- and long-term legal migration access
into the United States. Christine Chin (2013), Laura Agustin (2008), and Carolyn Choi (2017)
have discussed how student visa schemes in Malaysia, United Kingdom, the United States,
among other countries have served as side door migrations for informal workers such as sex
workers. Unlike degree-granting programs which require TOEFL and other English test scores
for admission, non-degree programs, specifically English language schools, have a lower barrier
for admission and immigration entry for foreign nationals, requiring only some basic legal
documents and a minimum bank balance of $30,000. Most student migrants I spoke to admitted
that while they did not have the minimum required $30,000, they were able to borrow money

109
from friends and family (see Fong 2011) to produce bank balance statements for interviews. In
addition, non-degree programs comprise some of the least-expensive higher learning institutions
available for international students, with the most affordable schools in immigrant communities
like Koreatown starting at $250 per month. Students looking for more valued credentialing from
their non-degree overseas experiences will choose more well-known programs such as Kaplan or
those affiliated with household educational institutions such as the University of California.
Part of the reason non-degree programs have been a popular entryway for South Koreans
looking to move to the United States is because the United States does not impose a cap on
student visas. This is not the case for employment visas. For instance, the H1-B temporary
worker program imposes an annual cap of 65,000 visas to private companies sponsoring foreign
workers. Furthermore, although some student migrants become undocumented, those looking to
settle in the United States prefer to maintain their legal status because of the possibility of
transitioning into an H-1B visa, which can then serve as a pathway for permanent residency and
naturalization. Despite these relatively low barriers of entry via non-degree programs, migrants
admit it is not an easy process. Prospective migrants must pass a visa interview in South Korea
where U.S. embassy officials have the authority to determine whether an international student is
coming for “legitimate reasons” and intend to return home (see Hwang 2018). South Korean
students receive coaching from educational agencies or via online forums on how to pass these
interviews, including performing the role of the idealized “international student,” learning how to
conduct the interview in English, preparing interview questions, and wearing the right attire. In
particular, migrants in their thirties, as they are flagged as “more incentivized to overstay,” often
have to prepare more rigorous documentation and performance, with some often advised by

110
brokers to enroll in more recognized language programs (before transferring to cheaper schools)
to produce the appearance of looking “legitimate.”
While many, if not most, student-migrants explained that they would have liked to
eventually attend a degree program like community college in the United States, partly because
of the symbolic capital that it can signal to employers back in South Korea, exorbitant tuition
fees that range from $8,000 to $50,000 a year alone deter them from ever pursuing this option.
(This is in stark contrast to our image of more middle class and upper middle class educational
migrants in the United States who attend degree granting institutions like the University of
Southern California). Many of the student migrants I spoke to attended English language
schools in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, some of which were Korean-owned, because not only were
they the most affordable English language schools but they offered flexible night classes that are
specifically attractive for student-migrants who worked informal jobs during the day but attend
classes to maintain the conditions of their student visa.
This was the case for migrant worker Jeenah in her late twenties from a smaller city
called Gijang outside of Busan. Draining out her entire savings, she left South Korea with a
small amount of start-up cash and intentions to pay her way through education by working in the
informal economy. After enrolling at an English language school in Koreatown, Jeenah, who
“leveled up” at a faster pace than her peers, started thinking about attending community college
for an associate’s degree, a credential valued higher than a language school graduation
certification among would-be employers in South Korea. Despite working both daytime and
part-time evening jobs, her dual income barely covered the costs of her tuition and rent, making
it increasingly difficult to reach her goal of attending college. Jeenah explains:

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At the time English language school was $250 or $300 per month and it was just enough
for my income. But at the time, [community] college per semester was $3,000 or $4,000.
I couldn’t manage.

For many migrants, the compounding burden of maintaining a student visa and the costs
of living in Los Angeles hinders their long-term goals. This can also contribute to some of the
reasons student migrants end up “voluntarily returning” back to South Korea (see Buenavista
2018), where despite the absence of removal orders their return remains involuntary. In
international education, the recent market expansion of student migration regimes as a solution to
educational deficits has further contributed to differential educational tracking within the system
where parent-backed and well-resourced student-migrants move upwards in the educational
hierarchy, ultimately earning the valued cultural capital to facilitate their transition into their
home country (Kim 2018). For more working class student migrants, their lack of access to
financial capital (required to attend higher tiers of international higher education) tracks them
into alternative pathways that are linked to the co-ethnic labor economy, where their educational
experience remains limited to English language schools that function more as a “landing zone.”
That is, it becomes a place to maintain their visas for working student-migrants surviving in Los
Angeles on a budget.
It is true that some migrant workers with difficulties maintaining work and school lives
have been overcharged and manipulated by some schools known to operate pay-to-stay schemes
in the past (Kim & Yellow Horse 2018). A handful of the educational migrants I met had
attended Prodee University in Los Angeles Koreatown, which federal authorities cracked down
on in 2015 following the Language School Accreditation Act (introduced under Bush but passed
under the Obama administration) that banned unaccredited and other “suspicious” ESL schools.
These students, some of whom were attending classes more regularly, were not able to get a

112
refund on their tuition fees from Prodee after the language school was shut down. Others I spoke
to who could only survive in Los Angeles via pay-to-stay schemes that allowed them more time
to work confessed how some of these schools would make them pay $10,000-$20,000 for an
academic year, charging them much more than they would if they were taking classes.
However migrant workers overall do not see these institutions as oppressive in-and-of
themselves. Rather, they see them as practical and legal workarounds allowing them to navigate
restrictive conditions associated with their student visa. In other words, they can also serve a
strategic purpose as critical temporary “landing zones” where migrant workers maintain their
legal immigrant status in the country while pursuing other goals and activities. This was the case
for twenty-four-year-old Jiyeon who left Seoul on a different set of terms than Jeenah.
Completing a trade school degree in graphic design, Jiyeon struggled to pierce through
the Seoul fashion designer scene and continued to work as a retail worker at a swap-meet in
Dongdae-mun in midtown Seoul, a job she had held since her school days. After two years of
working post-college, she began to contemplate her next move. Through a friend, Jiyeon learned
about the possibility of vocational textile design training in Los Angeles. She viewed these
design programs as more affordable than graduate school in South Korea, and with the label of
being “trained-in-America,” she felt she could better advance her position in the Korean labor
market. While she admits that she would have liked to attend a more prestigious institution like
the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM), she saw FIDM and other SEVP-
approved
12
textile designs schools, which would cost her $40,000 per year in tuition alone, as far
beyond her meager budget.

12
SEVP stands for Student Exchange Visa Program (SEVP) which is a program within the US Immigration and
Customs Enforcement to manage foreign students and exchange visitors in the United States through the Student
and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). Schools affiliated with the SEVP program will provide an I-20
form of a “Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status.”

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Optimistic that she would have to find work in order to cover the costs of her tuition,
Jiyeon saw her best option as enrolling in an English language school to maintain her status as an
international student while simultaneously attending classes in a non-SEVP approved private
design academy where she could gain a completion certificate. While this practical workaround
allowed Jiyeon to only pay $600 per month in tuition ($300 for the English language school and
$300 for the design academy), she viewed this arrangement as coming at a high physical cost—
juggling at one point a total of three part-time jobs to make ends meet. For Jiyeon, English
language programs offer a “landing zone” that allows migrants an alternative pathway to pursue
education and career related aspirations in a stratified international educational structure that
feels not meant for students “like them.” Jiyeon’s experience also signals the importance of
obtaining the label of being trained in America for some migrants. Many who are aware that
educational institutions like the UC and USC would be out of their budget, seek out the United
States as a destination for the name and recognition of undergoing training in certain vocational,
technical or artisan career-related skills. Undergoing training in the United States provides
important symbolic value even if its reputation does not reflect the level of training gained by
students. For instance, Jiyeon pursued textile design in the United States even though she admits,
textile design technology in the United States might not be as advanced as South Korea, which is
known as a fashion manufacturing hub in Asia.
This was similarly the case for Chul who grew up in a newly developed suburban region
outside of Southern Seoul and came to Los Angeles just before his 26th birthday. Groomed to
play major league baseball by his single father, Chul graduated high school with plans to pursue
a professional baseball career in South Korea. However, after an injury left him temporarily
paralyzed, Chul fell into depression and had to ultimately leave it all behind: “It was darkness in

114
front of me. I don’t know where to go.” Without a college degree, Chul began working as a
server in the food services industry, where he began saving money and slowly planned his next
career move. Accumulating a large savings while living with his father, Chul decided he wanted
to use the money towards jump-starting his future in the United States while learning English.
Taking after his father, he started to explore careers in construction and after researching online
learned about an informal welding training program operating out of a Korean American church
on the weekends in the suburb of Cypress. This program helps with preparing for the American
Welding Society certificate. The goal was to come back to South Korea as a “global welder.”
If you obtain the welding license, then I can learn about construction and get paid. In
Korea earnings for welders are not bad. But in the US earnings for welding is even better.
And of course, if there was an opportunity to become employed as a welder in the U.S., I
am planning to take it. But if not, I will go back to Korea after earning my license and use
it in Korea. I’d stick out as a global welder. Here, I can even learn English. English is the
global language that you can use anywhere. If you type anything on the internet – it’s in
English. English is the basic base that you need to learn so if I can’t get a job in the US, I
am planning to get a job in Korea and prepare to do so.

However, because welding programs are non-SEVP approved schools, Chul knew that he would
have to enroll in an English language school to maintain his visa while attending welding classes
on the weekends in the suburbs, which without a car was difficult to get to. Despite the fact the
welding school was thirty miles away, Chul chose to settle in Los Angeles’ Koreatown as a
“home-base” because of its central location close to a hub of affordable co-ethnic-operated
English language schools and its proximity to the high concentration of cash serving jobs in
Koreatown—all of which was within walking distance from his apartment. He remarks, “I need
to make money to go to welding school, so I need to live close to where there is work.” Chul’s
experiences also show that tuition (in Chul and Jeenah’s case for two schools) can drive many
students into unauthorized forms of work on their student visa.

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Many South Korean international students, even those who are upwardly mobile may end
up working within the informal co-ethnic economy which can sometimes counteractively work
to deter them from their larger educational goals. This was the case for Kyung in his early
twenties from a smaller suburban city outside of Seoul called Suwon. Despite that Kyung shares
similar work experiences as Jiyeon and Jungmin, he is not a typical enclave migrant. Instead, he
reflects the experiences of Asian undocumented students who come to the United States at an
earlier age. Kyung first entered the United States on an F-2 visa
13
as a dependent of a F-1 visa
holder to his now-estranged uncle who had the same first and last name and therefore could pass
as his father on visa documents. While initially staying with his uncle, he was able to attend a
public high school and later became eligible for the California Assembly Bill AB540, which
allowed undocumented folks with California high school diplomas to pay in-state tuition fees to
attend a state public college. After two years of saving up his earnings to pay for school, he
enrolled at Cal State Northridge with plans to work throughout the rest of college. However,
after a few months of his first semester, Kyung had to make the extremely difficult decision to
drop out due his inability of juggling what he experienced as an “impossible schedule”:
I wake up at 6 am in the morning. I go to Union station and take the subway to school. I
transfer to the bus and arrive on campus at around 10 am. I go to class at 10 am. When I
go to class, my class ends at 4 pm. When it ends at 4 pm, I come back. I try to catch a
ride on my way back from a classmate. So going back was not too bad for me. I get back
to LA around 5:30 pm. Then I go to work around then. I get off work at 10 pm or 11 pm.
When I get off at 11 pm, I have to do my homework. After I finish my homework, I go to
sleep around 3 am or 4 am. Then I’ll get back up at 6 am again. After doing that for one
semester, I was dying. I know now because I was working so hard. That’s why I ended up
quitting [school].

Kyung’s vignette describes just how difficult it is for low-resourced student-migrant workers to
move up the international higher education ladder in the United States. In contrast to students on

13
An F-2 visa is a type of visa that allows dependents of F-1 student visa holders to move to the U.S. and live with
the F-1 student while they complete their degree at an approved institution.

116
F-1 visa, Kyung was considered one of the “lucky” ones among his friends because he qualified
for AB540 to attend college at a subsidized in-state tuition rate. Kyung, however, does not
qualify for DACA which offers a temporary work authorization card because he did not enter the
United States within the years designated by the law. At large, Kyung’s experiences paint a
sobering picture of the day-in-a-life of student migrants living in Los Angeles. These portraits
are a far cry from the racialized depictions of Asian “flexible citizens”
14
(Ong 1999) in the
literature. In describing their living conditions, contextualizing their academic barriers and
explaining their daily routines these students show how their need to survive dramatically shapes
their trajectories and strengthens their ties to the co-ethnic economy. Channeled into enclave
migration through their network of other limited lower-resourced migrants, they become
intimately connected to the co-ethnic economy, which can serve to both buttress and reinforce
inequalities for migrants with precarious legal status.

Co-Ethnic Economies: Comfort, Traps, and Places of Community
A handful of my interviews with workers took place after hours at the bar that I worked
in between a small window of time after closing and before heading over to the
“afterhours” karaoke for a nightcap. After the security guard Frank shut the front gate and
drive off intoxicated patrons, “our nightlife” would start. With Korean 90s ballads softly
playing in the background, the manager would sit at the counter calculating the receipts
and tips by hand for the night with his analog calculator. The serving staff who had
changed out of their faux-suits into sweatpants would be wiping down the tables while
smoking a cigarette. The kitchen staff would load the industrial dishwasher with half-
eaten plates of leftover kimchi pancake and pork cutlet, and the chef, a middle-aged
Korean woman, would be putting away the side dishes she prepared for the following
night. Amidst all the action, one of the hostesses would abruptly call out in Korean,
“Areum can’t you wrap up the interview in like 30 minutes? We are dying for a drink!”
And with that the late-night festivities would begin, reeling me into a deeper subterranean

14
Flexible citizenship is a term introduced by Aihwa Ong (1999) that describes global elites families who navigate
across borders flexibly through the accumulation of multiple visas and passports. With surplus capital, these
migrants have the ability to choose their citizenship and have often been used to describe jet-setting international
students from Asia who attend prestigious bachelor’s program in Western countries.

117
experience of Koreatown that reflected the people and lives that people who lived it
(excerpt from fieldnotes).

I share this picture of “afterhours” Koreatown to offer a glimpse into the intricate inner
world of Los Angeles Koreatown and the everyday people who call it their home. Many of the
workers in bars, cafes, restaurants, lash bars, and nail salons that the average visitor, foodie, or
tourist encounter are not just reified fixtures in the exotic urban landscape but are the backbone
an entire co-ethnic economy that constitute a significant part of the undocumented workforce in
Los Angeles. The small neighborhood of Los Angeles Koreatown has historically played a role
in Los Angeles’ history as the first-stop neighborhood for Korean newcomers. Since Los
Angeles Koreatown’s revival following the 1992 Los Angeles Uprisings facilitated a post-IMF-
bailout-induced ‘transnational South Korean gold rush,” unprecedented economic change and
redevelopment transformed this immigrant enclave into a sprawling and upscale district Edward
Park calls a “transnational bubble.” This further fueled the demand for low-wage migrant
workers, including those from South Korea where Koreatown in many ways functioned as a
protective safety net. Grocery stores, Korean pubs and restaurants, Korean-own English language
schools, informal taxis (before ride-share apps were in existence), K-beauty stores, coffee shops,
strip malls and other businesses allow them to navigate life in Los Angeles below-the-radar of
language and racial barriers operating in maintain society. In the words of one migrant, “People
don’t realize whether they are in Korea or U.S. Even though I am living in the U.S., it feels like I
am living in a community smaller than Korea.”
Despite the bubble’s vibrant economy, migrant workers continue to earn paltry wages
below the minimum wage. It was common practice for student-migrant workers to undertake
multiple jobs in the ethnic economy to cover tuition and their daily living expenses. Returning to
Jeenah’s story, despite plans to gain a teaching certificate and teach kids back home, these

118
dreams ended up taking a backseat quickly as the costs of completing it (something that would
cost her several thousand dollars) combined with the economics of survival subsumed her daily
life. While Jeenah was able to revive her two-year degree in optometric technology to gain a less
labor-intensive job as a medical assistant at a hospital in Koreatown, the hospital underpaid her,
compelling her to pick up a second shift as a hostess at a bar with flexible nighttime hours. This
job stretched her beyond her comfort zone and diverted her time and energy away from her
larger goals:
$1700-$1800 per month on my two jobs...My rent was $600 or $650 around there...I
bought a cheap car, so there was no payment...Auto insurance? That was around $100
something. Then school $250 or $300. Then utilities. If you combine all this, I spent as
much as I made. There was nothing left. I couldn’t get my life together to go back to
school.

Experiences like these are not uncommon for migrant workers who end up rotating from one
low-wage job to another in the ethnic economy. Jeenah’s experience indicates what traditional
immigrant scholars have conceptualized as an “ethnic mobility trap” (Wiley 1967), where the
ethnic economy provides migrants with limited labor market access and financial mobility in
terms of employment but also slows down the possibility for acculturation and earning higher
wages than in other markets, especially for lower resourced migrants. Yet I found that for
migrants on student visas, the trap can be aggravated by the lack of permit to work, limiting their
labor to unauthorized forms of employment and ultimately impeding their migration goals.
The ethnic mobility trap also manifests in terms of physical and spatial configurations.
The grocery stores, Korean pubs and restaurants, Korean-own English language schools, K-
beauty stores, coffee shops, strip malls and other businesses allow them to navigate Los Angeles
without difficulty of language barriers and create a sense of belonging and a second home. For
people who do not drive, they can get by through rides via the informally operated Korean

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informal taxi system. Because many South Korean migrant workers prefer to be close to their
educational institutions and workplaces, most remain within the borders of Koreatown where
they can conveniently live, work, shop and play without fears of being exposed.
Esther Cho’s (2021) work has discussed how Asian undocumented youth raised in US
soil can “pass” as legal migrants similar to their Latino peers due to their language and cultural
socialization. For Korean undocumented youth the “model minority myth,” which stereotypes
East Asian immigrants as docile, law abiding, and high achieving (Lee 2015), disaffiliates them
from dominant racialized mythologies surrounding “illegal immigrants.” Cho (2017, 2019)
argues that undocumented Asian youth can thus “doubly pass” as legal from being raised in the
U.S. and disconnected with stereotypical “illegal” identity. However, for South Korean informal
workers who do not have the benefit of being “raised on US soil,” they can “pass” as “immigrant
Americans” because their limited language and cultural socialization has instead compelled them
to self-segregate within the ethnic enclave, blending in with other Korean Americans. Because
Korean Americans can benefit from the disassociation with the “illegal immigrant threat,” this is
something that can also doubly reinforce some form of protection for Korean informal migrant
workers within the enclave.
Simultaneously, while these conveniences can serve as a safe space and haven for
workers, this comes at the cost of their spatial segregation. They, in turn, can feel suffocated and
prevented from obtaining the “American experience.” Jeenah explains:
People like me who come in the middle, people who lived in Korea but moved to the U.S.,
it is hard to see people like us have American friends. They all stick to their own. People
in Koreatown stick to themselves. That’s why people say you can get by without
speaking one word of English. It’s a big deal that the Korean community is big here but
as I mentioned earlier it’s also poison. They can only live in Koreatown...Those people
live without leaving. If I see Koreans in the US, especially the ones in Koreatown, they
are so absorbed in Korean culture. So, they themselves sometimes don’t realize whether
they are in Korea or U.S... Even though I am living in the U.S., but it feels like I am

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living in a community smaller than Korea. That’s how it appears to me. If that’s the way
things are, I’d rather live in Korea as a dignified Korean citizen.

This experience is echoed in the narratives of Younggi, now in his late thirties, who has
been in the United States for over fifteen years while retaining the status of “student.” He
describes having “tried every job once” working as an antenna installer, taxi driver, server,
salesman, and restaurant manager throughout the years to cover his expenses, including tuition as
well as the cost of taking care of his ex-partner who also entered as an international student. He
describes the ways in which the “cash economy” of Koreatown builds a co-dependency among
migrant workers that makes it extremely difficult to leave over time:
I heard that the manager at a Chinese restaurant makes $3000 something. [I started work
there, too.] But come to think of it his age was about my age now. I was 25 or 26. I was
thinking, do I have to do this for 25 years? But the cash comes in every time. On slow
days it’s $30 but when it’s busy, you can take home $200. The fact that you have money
in your pocket is a really big deal. It becomes a huge source of strength. Even though life
is hard, you have money. So, you can’t leave this place. Even if you want to start a new
job, you receive your pay after one month. That difference is huge. You have to pay rent,
it’s hard, but it’s harder to get by with one dollar. I would get paid and spend it all, divide
it up and spend it all, that was the pattern. Most Korean international students are really
absorbed in this cash economy. Because this is the only place they can find work. Hostess
club, bar, serving, etc. Even though it’s hard, you can make money. When you live like
that and turn 40 and still work as a server, do I still serve after 40? That’s not right, I
came all the way to America, I can do this in Korea, why did I come to America to do
this? This was the thought I had.

Younggi’s experiences underscore the importance of cash jobs for student-migrants who have
limited work options in Los Angeles. He describes how this is directly connected to his “source
of strength.” Because student-migrants have an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness as
individuals who are ‘breaking the law” and who are “in someone else’s country,” they lean into
income-earning to buffer against these social and legal vulnerabilities. According to some
immigration scholars, ethnic enclaves do serve as an important buffer for new immigrants
because they offer opportunities for employment (Wilson and Portes, 1980; Portes and Bach,

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1985; Portes and Manning, 1991). For new migrants, including student-migrants, obtaining work
is vital for their survival in the host society because their legal status limits opportunities for
employment in formal, mainstream labor markets. As non-citizens, many do not have access to
health insurance, and for undocumented migrants, they lack access to a bank account or until
recently a driver’s license. The cash economy as Younggi explains, is a way to remedy their
limited membership through the ability to buy services especially within Koreatown and prevent
exposure to vulnerabilities in the absence of social and legal protections. This co-dependency on
the cash economy however makes it difficult for workers to leave the enclave or even return to
South Korea, thus exacerbating student migrants’ feeling of being “trapped.”
The lack of legal protections can also aggravate the feeling of the ethnic economy trap.
This is especially true for undocumented workers who confront constant fears and anxieties of
deportation. Mid-twenties restaurant worker Yulim made the decision to “let go” of his student
visa, after attending English language school for several years, when financial constraints
became too burdensome to manage. Because he never ended up driving in Los Angeles, partly
because he has never driven in South Korea, he did not bother to get a driver’s license. When he
realized that he might need a car to get around, he felt that it was already “too late” for him to
obtain one now as an undocumented person, especially under an anti-immigration Trump
administration. This is despite the legal mandate, under AB60, that all California residents, even
those undocumented, can legally obtain a driver’s license.
On the news they said that Trump is going to oust all “illegals” and catch them and
escalate immigration control. What are we supposed to do? Also did you know I can
obtain a legal driver’s license? I went to get my license after Trump was elected but they
told me that I could get a driver’s license but later during the paperwork processing phase
you might be flagged as an “illegal” because on your driver’s license it says you are
undocumented. So if something goes wrong that I could get caught. The control has
gotten worse. I said if it’s that bad, I won’t take my license test. I’ll take it later after it
gets better. You know undocumented folks who received their licenses during Obama?

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They will get stopped and be asked to show their IDs. When the cops find out you are
undocumented, they will get caught. It’s that bad, the control. What are you going to do?
They are trying to shut down everything that Obama has done so far. They are just
locking people up left and right. People who have amnesty are okay, but it’s hard for
people with cases like me.

Yulim’s passage highlights the heightened level of fear that was created under the Trump
administration for undocumented workers. Without access to a driver’s license or bank account,
undocumented migrant workers continue to insulate themselves within the ethnic enclave as a
safe space to avoid threats to deportation. While the ethnic economy in many ways can serve as a
protective safety net for undocumented workers and allow them to find work, live, and survive,
this heavy reliance and co-dependence on the co-ethnic economy is a double-edge sword that can
come with high human costs, such as feeling trapped. In the following section, I turn to examples
of some of these other human costs—such as drug addiction and increasing distrust of not just
employers but close friends and fictive kin networks—and some of the ways in which migrants
navigate and cope with these issues in creative and strategic ways.
The Ills of Contesting “Illegality”
The ethnic mobility trap can also exacerbate the feeling of being “stuck.” Migrants who
remain often oscillate between the difficult decision to stay in the United States or return home.
Those who stay are saddled with the fear of being unable to transfer their skills back home or
“losing face” with their families and friends who may expect educational or economic “returns.”
Students who can no longer maintain their student visas will fall into undocumented status. Such
was the case for twenty-eight-year-old Sungwoo from the smaller city of Chungju. He has been
working in the Koreatown restaurant sector for several years. After pointing out that he has lived
in the United States his entire adult life, Sungwoo expressed his fears that returning home
without “anything to show” would relegate him into a low wage job there:

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I was thinking about going back to Korea, but I have no courage… […] So, I left school
and worked for money. …. In Korea you can only make […] $1500 at my age with no
college degree. But if I work at a restaurant here, I can make $3500-4500. I was thinking
I could save up money here first and maybe do something in South Korea later.

This statement illustrates Sungwoo qualms about returning to Korea. While Sungwoo maintains
a high paying job as a server at a high-end Korean barbeque restaurant in Los Angeles, in Korea,
he will have to start over—a thought that haunts him. Indeed, migrants in the higher end service
sector find it harder to leave because of the higher income from tips. Men like Sungwoo who
migrated in their earlier years must also consider the fact that they will have to complete their
delayed compulsory military service upon their return. Factors such as these extended over a
long duration of time makes the decision to return to Korea a difficult one.
Stephanie Canizales’ (2015) work on unaccompanied minors has discussed the
intersections of alcoholism, depression, and drug addiction along with the emotional and
psychological burden that stems from the precarity of undocumented migrant life. In a similar
vein, my interviewees have also touched upon the “drug problem” in Koreatown among migrant
workers working in the nightlife. The drug problems that interlocutors referred to are the heavy
use of ecstasy, cocaine, and methamphetamines, all of which are steep expenses that can lead to
addiction and long-term health issues. Migrants working in the sex entertainment sector are
especially exposed to the existing drug culture in Koreatown (often associated with afterhours
parties) that makes migrants vulnerable to situations of violence with little recourse for
protection. At the young age of twenty-eight-year-old, for instance, Sang admits he has gone to
too many funerals for his age:
There is a drug problem. Four of my friends died. Suicide, accidents. They are all young.
I met them when I was 21. They were around mid-20s. I am now 28. They would be in
their early thirties. But those people do a lot of drugs. But the problem is they work at
night. They are hosts and hostesses or work at karaoke bar. They work the night life, but
after a while they no longer want to work at night. But they can’t go back to South Korea.

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When you see their faces, you can tell that they did drugs and their bodies are falling
apart. If they go back, what are they going to say to their parents? When they ask what
you did in the US, they are going to see that you returned with your body falling apart, no
money, no job. Because they don’t want to disappoint, they don’t want to return. But you
miss home. Because they are illegal immigrants, they can go back, but they cannot come
back even though they’ve been living in the U.S. They feel that pressure so some
ultimately commit suicide.

Sang’s revelation gives us a sobering glimpse into the lives of South Korean migrant workers
with precarious legal status. While the ethnic economy provides migrants with the means for
economic survival, they can also put them in spatial limbo and leave migrants feeling trapped
and suffocated by the circumstances created by their conditional status as undocumented folks
and non-citizens. These migrants make up the underclass of South Korean youth who have not
only been neglected by the South Korean state who initially encouraged them to leave under the
guise of global citizenship projects—they are also deemed disposable and alien in the receiving
country of the United States. Although these migrants end up in a “prestigious destination”
compared to their counterparts in the Philippines or Australia, they are nevertheless segregated in
the immigrant enclave where they struggle to stay afloat.
It was not just Sang that experienced death around him, but in fact many migrants I spoke
to often had a friend that passed or had heard stories of people passing. Migrants describe these
deaths, many of them suicides, as linked to what Jungmin calls the “toxic culture” that living
under such structural circumstances can produce, as illustrated by my interview with Jungmin:
Jungmin: It was someone I worked with. This person was dating this other person. He
was a person with a family and a child and had an affair with this woman. But this other
woman was never married and had an affair because she really loved the guy. But this
guy had an affair with than another woman. The first woman he had an affair with
committed suicide. They hid this from everyone.
Carolyn: So you were one of the people around them who were deceived.
Jungmin: Yes I was one of those people. Indeed, I heard this from others. But the person
who told me lied, too. But all those people involved were people who came from Korea.
They were people who came as adults. I believe it’s really hard to settle down here. It’s a
toxic culture. Because your soul is Korean but you are trying to settle down in the US in a

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place that is not even US-like, they don’t know what is what. That’s the thing about the
US. They con each other and lie to each other. If they lie people won’t know anyway. For
example, if I say I have a big building in Korea, you really can’t check if that’s real.

During our interview Jungmin started to tear up, talking about what happened to her co-worker.
In her opinion, she felt that because people in the United States are forced to settle in a place that
is not even like “the United States” but a smaller Korea, they experience confusion,
disappointment, and failure for not achieving the “American dream.” Their dream in “America,”
in turn, can lead to a lot of deception and tragedy. Jungmin left shortly after the death of her co-
worker triggered her emotional breakdown. While she still holds a lot of reservations for her
former “LA friends” and has declined many invitations to see her, she admits that it is not
entirely on the individual. She profoundly observed towards the end of our interview, “our
anxieties get twisted over time in the U.S. and it gets expressed in people’s lives.”
Fictive Kin Relations
One of the key redeeming qualities, however, of the ethnic economy enclave is how it
serves as a starting ground for the building and formation of fictive kin and community. Scholars
have argued how relationships are central to the processes by which mobile young people
“grapple with uncertain futures” in and through their movement between different destinations.
These relationships can come in the form of employer relationships, romantic relationships,
friendships, and fictive kin relations (Ryan 2015). Many of my interviewees have described the
different ways they feel connected and indebted to their “LA family” and how these relationships
have formed the basis of their safe haven and space in a place that can at times be hostile. My
family at the hostess bar provides an example. While not all these relationships are lasting, they
are part of a larger supportive ecosystem that allows migrants to confront some of the challenges
of living as an undocumented worker in Los Angeles in solidarity.

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Sang, who was undocumented at the time of our interview and no longer attending
English language school, describes how much support he received from his hyungs or “older
male friends” in finding his footing in Los Angeles. After juggling a series of odd jobs in Los
Angeles and getting robbed by his former girlfriend in the first two years of living in Los
Angeles, Sang was between a rock and a hard place, ultimately forcing him to drop out of the
language school and overstay his student visa. Sang was introduced to a job at a cafe through
another friend, where he would meet Alex, a hyung who was also the manager at the cafe at the
time. Alex had also come to Los Angeles under a student visa and was in a different albeit
similar situation where he also had to juggle numerous responsibilities while supporting his
single mother back in South Korea. However, Alex already had six years’ experience of living in
Los Angeles, and seeing Sang as a “younger, feistier version of himself,” took him under his
wing, inviting him to live with him in the first two months of meeting him:
I just crashed at my hyung’s place. My hyung just told me to live at his place. Don’t pay
me rent, just save up money...because I met such generous and good people I was able to
move out after saving money. They never wanted anything from me. They just wanted to
see me succeed. Because all of those guys also came from South Korea and struggled so
they know what it’s like. It’s 100% pure love.

Compassionate gestures of solidarity like these enable a small cushion for migrants like Sang to
carve out a life for themselves as undocumented workers in Koreatown. Migrants have told me
that it is not uncommon to build bonds quickly among co-workers, friends, and employers.
However, as quickly as these bonds are formed, they can quickly sour and become complicated
as migrants continue to confront the daunting and punitive mechanisms of illegality as
unauthorized workers.
While Sang was lucky to have found hyungs able to help him in his first couple months
in Los Angeles, not everyone is open to meeting people easily because of past experiences with

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the Koreans in Los Angeles they meet or the stories that they have heard from other migrant
workers. Migrants sometimes have to practice careful discretion when it comes to meeting new
people or receiving help because of the fact that “you have no idea who these people are or
where they come from.” Going back to Jeenah, she talks about the importance of forming
friendships in Los Angeles but only with people worthy of building bonds. Because a lot of
people will not encounter each other once they leave Koreatown, they are often even more weary
of meeting new people who will either not keep in touch or “ghost them” when things get
difficult. In explaining this balancing act, Jeenah explains:
For me, I don’t really give my heart to people. I create strict boundaries. If I like someone,
I’ll continue to meet them but if I think this person sucks, we’ll just have a relationship
where we say “hello” and that’s it. But while living here I met around 10 friends who are
pretty decent people. I wanted to keep meeting them and I didn’t want to cut ties with
them. It was because of my friendship with these people that became a motivating factor
for me to stay.

Forming a small group of friends offers an important emotional lifeline, including providing a
level of protection against heartache and harm, for migrant workers who are struggling to keep
afloat while they prioritize the demarcation of personal boundaries with people that are new or
not in their inner circle.
While living with co-workers was not an uncommon observation among migrant workers,
I was also surprised to find out that living with employers was also something that happens
among migrant workers. This employer-employee living arrangement further complicates and
puts stress on their relationship. Take for example Sena, who arrived from the larger
metropolitan city of Busan in her early twenties. Deciding to leave for Los Angeles after her
mother remarried, Sena came to Los Angeles on her own with $1,000 in her possession
(although her mother had sold her wedding ring to lend Sena the money to produce the financial
statement for her student visa). Sena enrolled in what she referred to as “the cheapest English

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language school she could find” while she figured out her plans for the future, which included
starting an eyelash shop in Los Angeles (albeit informally). She met her employer, a younger
immigrant Korean couple, at the sandwich shop they owned. The couple themselves were on the
F-1 student visa but had opened a business with the help of a U.S. citizen friend.
After learning that Sena was on her own, her employers, whom she began referring to as
“auntie” and “uncle,” invited her to live with them at their luxury apartment in Koreatown,
where Sena had her own room, part of the time rent-free. She also carpooled with them to school
and work. However, the couple split up after two years, and Sena ended up moving in with the
male employer and another employee of the cafe to a three-bedroom house. The employer
subsidized her rent so she only had to pay $300 per month. While Sena was getting paid
regularly under these circumstances, things began to change when the 2008 Global Recession hit
and the business was impacted. Her employer began putting money into the business from his
day job to keep the business afloat. Although Sena worked close to thirty hours a week at the
cafe, her employer stopped paying her wages, claiming he would pay her back when business
picked up. While he did not charge her for rent and would give her tuition money when she
needed, she no longer held the purse strings, which ended up delaying her trip to see her mom in
South Korea.
I need to save that money but because my uncle gives me my paycheck late, it was so
backed up for 6-7 months. I started asking for money whenever I needed it. So that leaves
me with no money. Because I haven’t saved anything. It’s already been a year and I
haven’t saved anything. So I ultimately exploded on [him].”

Previous scholarship has discussed how employer-employee relations within the co-ethnic
economy can mimic the family-like dynamics especially in the context of smaller businesses and
shops (Parreñas 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Romero 2002). Compounding this is the fact that
many Korean small businesses are family-owned and have a history of under or not paying

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family members wages, especially women (Park 2018). The concept of “maternalism” has been
defined by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2007) as the unilateral positioning of the employer as a
benefactor who receives validation from the domestic worker. Maternalism operates to make the
employee feel obligated to respond with extra hours of service, personal loyalty and job
commitment and more problematically positions the employee as needy, deficient, and childlike.
In the case of Sena, despite that her bonds with her employers were strong, her employer ended
up abusing the relationship over time, withholding wages from her in an unequal and non-
consensual exchange for rent when things got tough for the business. Further worsening the
context of their unequal relationship is the precarity of these small businesses themselves, and
the ways in which global crises like the 2008 Global Recession have played out in the United
States to restructure wealth and capital along racialized lines, and in this case leading to the
decimation of many migrant and Black-owned small businesses.
Despite the countless instances of co-ethnic abuse and the vast literature that exist on this
topic, the compassion that migrants have towards each other and other people in their situation is
profound. Migrants’ capacities to acknowledge the parallels in their own experience and the
difficulties to live life without causing harm to those around them is not an easy task. Migrant
hostess Sooki turned penniless overnight when her former boyfriend of two years stole thousands
of dollars that was stashed in her apartment. Because migrant workers (with papers) often prefer
not to open local bank accounts in order to avoid potential state surveillance over their informal
sources of income in the United States, they store their life savings under beds and closets,
making them especially vulnerable to robberies and other forms of violence. While Minji did not
have any recourse to recover the money, she told me she forgave him:
I ended up forgiving him. I hated him at the time. I wanted to kill them. But thanks to
God, I can have mercy. I know why they did, what they did. They were kind of like me

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too. Nowhere to go. Like that could have been me running with the money. We aren’t
that much different. God have mercy over him.

Sooki like many others see themselves and those who may have hurt them enmeshed in
intersecting forms of violence yet hold on to mercy and solidarity.
Extending grace and compassion as they pursue pathways to permanent residency, career
advancement, or educational goals is part of the calculus of everyday experiences among South
Korean migrant workers living in Los Angeles. However, this can make many emotionally
weary in the long term. It is not surprising that educational migrants cycling through low-wage
jobs in the informal ethnic economy end up returning home. These migrants often make the
decision to return to South Korea before their student visa expires, typically within five-years
after arrival. After the five-year mark, educational migrants are no longer able to travel freely to
Korea without a renewal of the student visa from the U.S. embassy in Korea, which serves as a
risky endeavor for some who have not demonstrated “adequate progress” in their overseas
education. Those who remain beyond the five-year mark can maintain their student immigration
status as long as they enroll in a SEVP-approved institution. However, they enter into a murky
legal zone involving their “duration of status” where they experience staggering and taxing
hurdles towards legalization all the while remaining under-the-radar as informal workers. When
contextualizing this harsh reality, Sooki’s experience begins to make a lot of sense.

Mobility Pathway for Naturalization
Even though enclave migration can prolong migrants’ dependence on the ethnic economy
and defer other migration-related goals, I also found cases where migrants who did not return to
South Korea after multiple years eventually carving out careers that brought labor mobility and
economic advancement. While these jobs are still informal, they constitute professionalized

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occupations that are concentrated in large Korean immigrant-owned sectors of fashion
manufacturing, import/export, and higher-end restaurants. These are sectors known to provide
some H1-B sponsorships for student visa holders looking to settle in the United States as
permanent residents. Migrants will begin the process of pursuing long-term settlement in the
United States by seeking jobs that pay under-the-table until they find an employer willing to help
them start the H-1B process. In the event of employment sponsorship, employers observe what
they call a “probation” or “training period” of several years to see if the worker is “deserving;”
during this period, they offer lower than standard wages. Despite opportunities to build informal
careers in the ethnic economy, migrants who remain on student visas describe the increased
precariousness of securing a skilled employment visa. There are unscrupulous employers who
will agree to sponsor and underpay student migrants only to renege on their promise after years
of probation. In the precarious ethnic economy, businesses themselves may fail while some
employers sell the H-1B visa sponsorship for large sums of money. In the last decade, the
fortification of immigration policies has dramatically reduced the number of employment visas,
thus further foreclosing limited pathways to naturalization. Migrants seeking to obtain an H1-B
sponsorship but cannot continue to pay to maintain their student visa and the debt it accrues will
either return to Korea or officially begin their overstay.
Some H1-B visa hopefuls find it worthwhile to strategize within student migration
systems, even if they are structurally and financially restricting, as they seek out the more stable
H-1B pathways to legalization. For migrants who continue to face difficulty securing an
employment sponsor, they will strategically enroll in “paper universities” to maintain the status
of their student visa. It can also signal to future reviewers of their permanent residency
application that they have made “progress” in their higher education pathway, often through the

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assistance of migration brokers in Los Angeles. While enrolling in paper universities has been a
long-standing practice, it peaked after the 2010 Accreditation Act banned non-accredited English
language educational institutions as part of larger post-9/11 racialized crackdowns of language
schools. Divinity colleges, which maintained the status of a “Religious Exempt Status School”
by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE), played a more prominent
role in facilitating activities for pathways to permanent residency.
Chiman, in his late thirties, was getting his master’s degree in theology at a divinity
school near Koreatown. His story exemplifies this maneuvering towards a H-1B visa and
legalized employment. Chiman, who had first come from the provincial city of Jeonju on a
student visa nearly two decades earlier, was currently working as a manager at an import-export
Korean snack company that is a large supplier of Korean grocery markets. This is a job he says
he will continue after gaining permanent residency (see Cho 2018). However, numerous “false
leads” for a work visa left him without other options but to continue his coursework to maintain
authorized immigration status as a student. For Chiman, pursuing an advanced master’s degree in
theology at a divinity college was one of the few ways he could continue to hold onto the
possibility of legalization. Before he enrolled in the divinity college, he had attended five
different schools introduced to him by an educational broker in Los Angeles, including an
English language school, computer program school, and a TOEFL school.
If I don’t attend school, I become immediately undocumented. Then I don’t even have a
chance (of getting my green card). The only way I can get my permanent resident card is
if I marry a citizen. I first went to SoCal English School and schools like that.
Somewhere down the line you end up getting help from a broker. They introduce you to
schools and then take you out of schools…Anyways, they told me you can’t go to another
school anymore because you’ve been here too long, so you can go to a theology school,
and that’s possible. Because the United States is a Christian nation and are sympathetic to
the cause, so if you say you were studying and then God called upon you to do his work
at a seminary school. Why not? Makes sense. You can study at a Christian college for a
long time. You are saying you are studying the Lord’s message; they are not going to be

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picky about it. But more than God’s mission, I was going to maintain my student visa.
When I got there, there are different levels, if you just pay, they let you take the different
levels, and that’s how it is.

Chiman explains how he and his broker instrumentalized the student migration system in order
for him to maintain his student status long enough before his H1-B visa sponsorship is approved,
believing that doing so can lead to a permanent resident card. He jokingly remarks, “If you
decide to get married one day, I can even officiate the wedding because I will be ordained.”
Chiman’s experiences show the creative ways migrant workers can rework the very systems that
constrain them in pathways for legalization in order to gain full membership as someone who has
lived in the United States for close to two decades. Despite the negative perception of these
schools, they provide educational migrants like Chiman, who experience prolonged periods of
temporariness, with a legally “safe” landing zone, which in turn gives them the possibility of
securing an employment visa. In contrast, becoming undocumented voids this possibility.
Frustrated H-1B hopefuls do not only maximize student migration schemes to carve out
pathways towards permanent residency. Even as their chances to gain H-1B visas are already
slim and precarious, they see themselves as part of a larger marginalized community in the
United States with limited options for legal and economic security. A handful of H-1B hopefuls I
interviewed have extended the opportunity for permanent residency to close friends and distant
family members by entering “paper marriages” with them. A handful of migrant men I’ve
interviewed on their pathway towards permanent residence have extended this opportunity to
their former lovers, some of whom are now separated or even estranged. Take for example the
case of Yon in his late thirties who came to the United States in 2011 and met his ex-wife Masan,
an international student, while traversing through his many jobs in Los Angeles Koreatown –as a
mover, chef, retail sales, and car salesman. Masan and Yon were in a domestic partnership for

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several years before filing for marriage in South Korea and Masan’s home country of Japan, only
to call it quits one year later. When the following year, the opportunity arose for Yon to put in
his H-1B application as a “sushi chef” through his uncle who opened a sushi bar in the state of
Washington, he offered this opportunity to Masan:
It doesn’t help me at all, but if I do it with Masan our green cards will come out together.
I really want to do that for her. It’s been hard and I know what she has been through. So,
I put in her application. Because she doesn’t have a green card and she’s also been a
student for a long time.

Gestures of solidarity like these demonstrate the ways in which student-migrant worker
communities navigate exclusionary and closed systems of immigration by sharing resources to
navigate bureaucratic hurdles in ways that transcend any personal conflicts or histories. While
migrants like Chiman and Yon have a chance at permanent residency, their experience
nevertheless demonstrates the myriad ways in which precarity operates in the student migration
pathway. They are embedded within a system set up to keep out educational students who cannot
“pay their way” through the U.S. neoliberal higher education system, and at the same time, riddle
them with false starts that tie them to the broader precarious racialized ethnic enclave economy.
This is true not only for those in low-wage service jobs but also holders of professional-class
jobs.

Parlaying Social Mobility in and from Los Angeles
Overall, pathways to legalization are limited due to the high costs and stressors associated
with taking this difficult path. In contrast to what anti-immigration debates have suggested,
scholars like Johanna Waters (2018) have advised that most educational migrants end up
returning to their home countries. The more precarious class of returning educational migrants
however are limited from gaining recognizable global credentials from selective and high-cost

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higher learning institutions in the United States. Because these migrants are not the flexible
citizens gaining global credentials at highly ranked and more expensive universities (Ong 1999),
they end up having to advance other forms of qualifications that they gain from their experience
abroad and distinguish them from others in the local labor market of South Korea.
Pushing back on the classic youth cultural studies question of “why do working class kids
end up taking working class jobs?” scholars such as Jay McLeod (1987) and others have
discussed how some groups of working class kids who buy into the “achievement ideology” of
the American Dream are able to embrace middle class norms and carve out exit strategies from a
life of poverty in the ghetto opposite from more countercultural youth. These cultural discussions
have begun to offer a nuanced analysis of top-down assumptions about stratification in education
and youth culture. While a number of studies have started to further elaborate on the cultural
dimensions of stratification among youth (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013), these discussions
remain limited in unpacking the mechanisms that push young people to work or contest
normative goals of “achievement,” especially those giving more credit to their processes of
meaning-making. In tackling these normative constructions, my research finds that migrants
know that the boundaries of social class in South Korea are too rigid for them to make a large
social shift, responding by engaging in small-scale projects for social mobility.
Even though South Korean migrants in the United States are relatively among the most
privileged in my larger research because they have access to “U.S. cultural capital” (even the
experience of living in the United States), they know that without recognized global credentials
from the United States their experiences will be difficult to convert into professional jobs that
can help facilitate upward social mobility. Instead, these migrants choose to advance their social
mobility via the accumulation of cultural capital that will help them navigate the South Korean

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labor market. These are meant to offer small jumps in labor mobility or social status but not
much in wealth or class ascendancy. Migrants returning to South Korea do not expect to be
received with open arms, especially as travel to the United States has been liberalized for Korean
migrants. They cultivate a certain kind of small-scale distinction that will allow them to perform
a type of “boundary work” that separates them from other job applicants in South Korea who do
not have experience living in Los Angeles (see Lamont 2009).
This form of constrained cultivation (see Lareau 2011) allows migrants to find other
meaningful ways that they can parlay a patchwork of their experiences in Los Angeles as
globalized skills and capital back home. Glimpses of this appear in the beginning of the chapter
with Chul and Jiyeon’s experiences. Knowing that he is unable to go back to South Korea with a
bachelor’s degree that could land him a prestigious job in construction, Chul instead chooses to
pursue an unofficial program in welding which would still allow him to gain an advantage in the
South Korean labor market as someone who trained in America. The same goes for Jiyeon:
despite acknowledging that textile technology is more sophisticated in South Korea, the label of
being trained, even at an unaccredited academy in Los Angeles will allow her to better poise
herself for the job market in South Korea. In the absence of more prestigious educational
opportunities, the migrants I spoke to resourcefully and creatively strategized to scrap together
experiences that they could parlay to slightly more comfortable livelihoods for themselves back
home. These migrants creatively maneuver and maximize student migration regimes and schools
in the co-ethnic economy to their advantage as a tool to help them advance their migration goals,
whether it was for permanent residency or preparing for job markets back in South Korea.
Darae is one example of a savvy migrant worker who was able to capitalize on her LA
experience to forge a career in fashion design back in South Korea. Darae came to Los Angeles

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back in 2008 as a college freshman after taking a leave of absence from her fashion college in
Busan. Her sister was already studying English in Orange County at the time making it a much
easier move for her. Her parents, who owned a small business in the central regional
metropolitan city of Daegu, also said that they would help her financially for one year. She
figured that this would be a smart move given that Busan does not have much of a fashion scene,
plus having the name-recognition of the United States on her resume would give her a
competitive edge in fashion. While Darae initially planned to solely attend English language
school, she followed in the footsteps of her older sister and after three months transferred to
Orange Coast Community College where she began taking design classes. While Darae could not
afford the exorbitant tuition costs to attend a bachelor’s program for design in the U.S. like some
of her peers, she ended up staying in community college for an extra year to complete her
associate’s degree in fashion merchandising. She explains,
Originally, it was community college, so I would have liked to have gone to a university
but my major is fashion design. If I do want to work in South Korea, my age is important.
Because if I join the workplace, I will be the most junior and Koreans don’t like it when
the most junior person is older than you, it’s just uncomfortable. There’s an age issue and
I wasn’t sure if I should keep my major...I was planning to get my associate’s degree and
do an OPT
15
and reconsider if I’d go back to my university. Because I got my associate’s
degree in the US, I wouldn’t really need my Korean fashion degree because school is
important but in fashion it is more so the experience.

Migrants like Darae can carve out a future through makeshift and creative solutions that still
allow them to maximize the symbolic capital associated with “studying in the U.S” that would
otherwise not be available to them at lower levels of the global higher education hierarchy. By
doing so, migrants can facilitate pathways in the labor market and gain a second chance at
achieving slight social advancement.

15
Optional Practical Training is a period during which international students with F-1 status who have completed or
have been pursuing their degrees for one academic year are permitted to work for one year on a student visa

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A select few within this group were even able to return to South Korea with a bachelor’s
degree—albeit not “world class.” Hana and Sorah, whose father planned to attend a seminary
program in the U.S., came to the United States as high schoolers on an F-2 dependent visa under
their father’s student status. Their F-2 status allowed them to attend public high school, which,
like Kyung, later qualified them for AB-540 at in-state tuition costs. While working full-time to
provide for their family, they started taking classes at Cerritos Community College with plans to
transfer to a Cal State university. However, after several years of juggling numerous part-time
jobs and managing their class load, they both burnt-out. At one point Sorah mentioned that she
juggled four jobs at once, as a waitress, barista, tutor, and piano teacher to pay tuition fees. After
their parents left back for South Korea, they lost motivation and financial resources to pursue
their loftier goal of attending a more prestigious college. Instead, they started to look for
alternative paths. Hana explains:
I gradually lost steam. I just really wanted to go back to South Korea. That’s why, I
looked for a way to return fast. At first, I wanted to study hard in America and succeed
academically but I think I lost my drive over time. We transferred to a divinity college
because it allowed us to maintain our student visa. We could not attend class regularly. It
was mostly for accumulating academic credits or maintaining your visa, that was the
strongest vibe there. But it allowed us to gain a bachelors. Because we needed the
educational credentials. It’s not because I really wanted to go to that school or had a
particular goal. If I just go back, I’ll just be floating. That means I wouldn’t have
anything to show forth. I’ll just be a high school graduate. Even if I had six years of
experience in the US. If that’s the case anywhere you go, even if you apply to be an
English tutor, it won’t be helpful.

Hana and Sorah left the United States in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in education and business
respectively from the unaccredited Christ Life University. Fortunately, Hana said, because she
was returning to their hometown of Cheonan, not Seoul, it didn’t matter whether she had
received her bachelor’s degree from an unaccredited unknown school because people “don’t
even know what the University of Southern California is.” However, she remarked that Seoul

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would have been a different ballpark, which for Sorah, might be her next career move. Back in
Cheonan, the two sisters now work for an English tutoring agency that contracts with local
schools, which is prestigious because of its affiliation with public service. Migrants like Hana
and Sorah who have lived in the United States for several years have the opportunity to parlay
their “LA experience” into English capital that would open up new job opportunities in South
Korea, which is already known to have one of the largest global markets for English education.
Their example shows the different ways in which migrant youth can use their experiences to
secure a better future for themselves.
Others who were less interested in educational pathways were able to peddle their
experience into valuable career-related skills and experience. Going back to Sang, he told me
that he ended up working at eight different coffee shops throughout the seven years he lived in
Los Angeles’ Koreatown. While he started working there to make money, he said that his
interest in the business grew over time. He was eventually promoted to cafe manager, which then
allowed him to learn how to design menus, set up coffee equipment, and oversee barista training
sessions. He also taught himself barista techniques by watching YouTube videos. His cultivated
expertise over the years resulted in him getting approached by prospective coffee shop owners in
Los Angeles. After establishing his business portfolio, he decided to quit his day job and started
up a coffee shop consulting business. He started consulting just as “indie” coffee shops began to
be popularized. He would get paid $5000-$7000 per gig to set up coffee shops around Los
Angeles:
I first learned at Cafe Apartment. I just liked making coffee originally. I loved just
making customers smile when I gave them a cup of coffee. And that’s why I kept doing it.
After that, I was getting older, I was tired. You know what I mean right? I thought, I can
just set it up, make money, and leave. All I would do is just set it up for them.

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Although Sang points out that a lot of his success was due to luck, his experiences demonstrate
the creative ways in which migrant workers otherwise contained within the ethnic economy can
carve out meaningful pathways of social mobility for themselves in Los Angeles but also back
home in South Korea. In sum, their experiences as co-ethnic migrant workers in the ethnic
economy challenge dominant scholarly assumptions. Their experiences bring into the analyses of
immigration scholars like Alejandro Portes and Edna Bonacich (Wilson and Portes, 1980; Portes
and Bach, 1985; Portes and Manning, 1991) who credit co-ethnic employers as the ones either
providing opportunities for advancement or fueling mobility traps. Instead, I find that it is the
workers themselves who forge their own creative, strategic, and novel income-earning and career
pathways that can also lead to experiences of entrepreneurship. Focusing on the experiences of
migrant workers themselves allows us to tell a fuller story about how they navigate the
conditions of precarity in the United States. They challenge us to reimagine and rethink how we
talk about immigrant experiences in America.

Conclusion
This chapter advances current conceptualizations of educational migrants in the United
States by examining the rise of enclave migration and how migrants’ experiences are shaped by
institutions within the co-ethnic economy including international educational institutions, kinship
networks, and localized informal jobs. Enclave migration is different from other forms of student
migration because of the ways migrants’ experiences are intimately linked to the spatial and
social aspects of the ethnic enclave as both a source of strength but also a place of exploitation
and fraught relationships. These, in turn, are tied in part to the racialized economy in which these
spatial and economic formations are situated. I highlight the persistence of class inequalities in

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student migration and the ways in which class resources activate with place-based, co-ethnic
networks and institutions to shape migrant experiences and decisions about whether to return.
Enclave migration illuminates on the ways transnational stratified mobility is articulated within
established immigrant spaces like Los Angeles’ Koreatown and how migrants can carve out
opportunities in spite of limitations of citizenship.
This chapter challenges previous conceptualizations of ethnic enclaves as either
beneficial or oppressive arguing it can serve both as a protective and exploitative safety net for
newer flows of co-ethnic South Korean migrants to Los Angeles. While the ethnic economy can
provide labor opportunities and a sense of community that would otherwise be foreclosed to
newer migrant workers excluded from mainstream labor markets, they can also become an
“ethnic mobility trap” providing limited financial rewards but also a false sense of social
mobility because of the limited opportunities for labor advancement. Although there are limited
opportunities for conventional career advancement and even entrepreneurship for undocumented
migrant workers, I show how they can creatively navigate structural barriers and hurdles by
carving out alternative and meaningful pathways for themselves that can lead to more secure
futures. I also demonstrate how some migrants are able to re-work systems of student migration
at times –while also risking debt and loss—to navigate pathways to legalization and potential
professional class opportunities.
The analysis of enclave migration illustrates another dimension of transnational stratified
mobility and the ways in which class stratification extends transnationally in the co-ethnic spaces
migrants occupy overseas. This examination of Koreatown elucidates how class differences
intersect with migrants’ legal incorporation in the receiving country to shape their prospects for
return and settlement. Koreatown is a key nexus where educational and employment hierarchies

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are replicated and reinforced by the United States’ broader political-economic stratification,
including the ways in which economic restructuring tends to hit racialized small business and
professional operations hard—which in turns hurts their vulnerable migrant workforce. This
stratified economy is also affected increasingly by higher education institutions seeking to profit
at the expense of international students, as well as long histories of the U.S. immigration system
funneling migrants into low-wage sectors (Bonacich 1972; Light and Bonacich 1991; Portes and
Rumbaut 2001). While the rapid expansion and access to international education signals the
ways in which this process has become democratized, it also results in stratified educational
mobilities, contributing, in many ways, to the growing undocumented Asian population in the
United States.

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CHAPTER 5
RACIALIZED MOBILITY AND AUSTRALIA AS THE EASY DESTINATION
Introduction
In Ansan, South Korea, there are a lot of migrant workers. When I look at them, I feel
bad for them. But Korean perspective is like that. Those people came from a poorer
country, and they do work that Koreans don’t want to do. But when I came over here, I
became those migrant workers. Migrant workers in South Korea have a sad face and do
difficult work but the South Korean migrant workers in Australia are a little different.
Although South Koreans might say those people do that work, Australians don’t think
like that. They are thankful to us doing the work that is hard and that they don’t want to
do. For instance, I was a cleaner at an office. I wiped down the desks in the office and the
toilets in the bathrooms, and they always thank me for cleaning their office. When my
friends say, “who is that you are saying hi to?” I say because I clean their office, they are
really friendly to me. They don’t think we are dirty or their servants... In some ways,
maybe their approach is ‘professional’? It makes me have pride in my work.

Twenty-six-year-old Sulli and I were chatting outside of a small park in the middle of
Brisbane, scarfing down our Bánh mì sandwiches along with our boba tea drinks. Sulli, who I
met through another interviewee I encountered in the Philippines, was in-between work shifts
and needed to race over to the other side of town in less than an hour where she worked as a
waitress at a sushi restaurant. Sulli has been living in Australia for the past year as a working
holiday maker with plans to move to the country, meaning the outback, where she will do farm
work beginning next month to get her second visa. Despite that Sulli works as a cleaner, server,
and grocery bagger in Brisbane, she maintains that her position is different than the migrant
workers doing the same work in South Korea because the Australians see her as just a “laborer,”
not a “servant.” As she puts it, “they don’t think we are dirty,” and describes how because of this
it allows her to have pride in her work.
Sulli’s words suggest that she denies her experience of racialization as a South Korean in
Australia. Sulli is undeniably racialized by her downward class mobility into low-wage, low-
status jobs shunned by Australians. Her segregation in this labor market, limited opportunities to

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socialize with Australians, and the likelihood she will be the target of everyday racial violence
(such as being catcalled or egged) all indicate her racial othering as a South Korean. What does
her racialization tell us about the social meanings in South Korea’s ascension as a national
superpower in the global economy? How do we understand the racial inequality that shapes her
experiences in the context of South Korea’s economic ascension in the global age?
Despite the economic ascendance of South Korea and other advanced East Asian nations,
scholars have questioned the limits of economic ascendance and whether it can trump racial
ascendance especially for non-white Asian subjects in the context of a global hegemonic order.
Does economic ascendance open doors for racial equality? Can it lead to a reimagining of the
global racial order? Drawing again from Aiwha Ong’s (1999) work on flexible citizenship, the
author demonstrates the limits of economic power for elite overseas Chinese subjects in the
context of Western host countries. Despite that overseas Chinese in the West have successfully
acquired dominant forms of cultural capital via elite education, political donations, and real
estate investments in navigating norms in these societies, they ultimately lack the appropriate
racial and cultural origins that are stereotypical markers of racial prestige in Western, white-
settler democracies. Therefore, the valuation of their cultural accumulation strategies is limited
by their racial and social origin. Ong (1999) argues that this dissonance between racialized
migrants and cultural skills produces structural limits to the conversion of economic wealth into
social prestige.
Building on her discussion, this chapter seeks to situate the everyday experiences of
South Korean working holiday makers in Australia in the larger contextual narrative of South
Korea’s economic global ascendance. Drawing on works of race and transnationalism (Kim
2008; Waters 1999), this chapter seeks to extend theorizations on transnational racialization

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processes in the twenty first century to look at the ways Asian migrants are racialized in a white-
settler nation outside the U.S. context. While South Korea’s repositioning as a global power has
opened doors to liberalize travel and other forms of global citizenship, as Sulli’s account shows,
their experiences in these countries often tell a different story that continues to express the limits
in their national power as racialized others in a white-settler nation. This chapter challenges
existing conceptualizations of East Asian ascendance by examining migrant workers’ temporary
experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society as working holiday makers.
While South Korean migrants travel to Australia with optimistic dreams and hopes about
learning English from white native English speakers, they instead find themselves conscripted
into a migrant labor system that precariously positions them as unfamiliar outsiders. They
confront racialized labor market segmentation, limited social interactions with Australians and
isolation in rural areas where they are subject to various forces of racialized violence. I
ultimately argue that migrant workers bargain for paradoxical inclusion as they accept their
subordinate racialized positioning in Australian society to carve out cosmopolitan experiences.
This paradox illuminates how race limits the social standing of South Koreans despite their
country’s economic ascendance. It also exposes us to how transnational stratified mobility does
not only work to extend class stratification but also intersects with racialization in the white
settler host countries that can further compound experiences of inequality while also curbing
experiences of relative social, emotional, and financial gains in these places.

South Koreans and Global Travel
Sulli represents one of the 33,000 South Koreans undertaking working holiday schemes
each year in Australia (Working Holiday Info Center 2014), where young people between the

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ages of 18-30 enter the country to temporarily live, study, work and travel. Australia’s working
holiday program attracts the largest number of working holiday makers in the world, with South
Korea comprising the second largest source country of working holiday makers in the country
next to the United Kingdom. Sulli’s moves are also part of the South Korean state’s larger
project of cultivating the G-20 generation, referring to those young people growing up during the
era of South Korea’s hosting of the G-2 summit. Again, they represent the generation charged
with top-down calls to uphold South Korea’s growing global reputation. Unlike the generation
before, the G-20 generation grew up with enhanced “passport power” and liberalized access to
global travel, a shift that has paralleled the country’s emergence as a global economic power.
South Korea’s hosting of the G-20 Summit was a symbolic moment signaling to the rest of the
world the country’s new positioning from an impoverished war-torn nation to a now “vetted”
global superpower.
With more millionaires in Asia than in Europe (see in Hoang 2018; Benz and
Lassignardie 2011), globalization scholars have paid increasing attention to the rise of pan-Asian
ascendancy (Hoang 2018; Kondo 1999; Iwachabi 2002). Following the 2008 financial crisis that
rocked the U.S. and European world, scholars argue that the economic breakdown of the West
combined with the expansion of East Asian economies have forged new spaces to rethink the
multiply inflected racialized, national, and class-based hierarchies (Hoang 2018; Iwachabi 2002).
A number of works point to the collective rise of multiple countries within pan-Asia and how
this can destabilize Western hegemony for less developed countries in Asia, especially those
under U.S. imperialism (Hoang 2018; Kondo 1999; Iwachabi 2002). For instance, Kimberly
Hoang’s (2018) work highlights how inter-Asian flows of capital from more developed regions
to less developed regions in Asia challenge competing masculinities through local perceptions of

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Western decline and Asian ascendancy. She argues that the sources of foreign capital into
Vietnam from South Korea, China, and Japan shows a shift in status from the West to Asia and
that local elites in Vietnam capitalize on their financial dominance to construct a transnational
business masculinity that aspires to trump Western hegemony. As her interviewee matter-of-
factly state, “cash is king.” Her schema implies that Asian men are more desirable than White
men.
South Korea has been identified as one of these rising pan-Asian powers. The country’s
economic ascendance has in the twenty first century been further reinforced by the cultural
dominance of K-pop, which has elevated South Korea from a regional economic power into a
global celebrity nation, including in the United States where the Korean male pop group BTS
even topped the radio charts. South Korea’s repositioning as a leading Asian power represents a
larger shift in the country’s geopolitical relationships with Western nations, which have for
decades viewed it as a “aid recipient” nation. How this has most poignantly translated on the
ground for everyday South Koreans is in the form of relaxed travel policies for South Korean
passport holders. Recent moves include South Korea’s admission into the U.S. visa-waiver
program in 2004 and its incorporation into Australia’s working holiday subclass 417 in 2005-
2006. In the case of Australia, South Korea is one of three Asian nations occupying subclass 417
category. Like other geopolitically and economically vetted advanced nations, its citizens are not
subject to language proficiency, proof of undergraduate study, and a cap on the number of visas
like subclass 462. This is also evidenced through South Korea’s ranking on the world passport
index: as of 2021, South Korean citizens had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 191 countries
and territories, ranking the South Korean passport as third in the world according to the Henley
Passport Index.

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Labor Market Segmentation
Like the United States and the Philippines, Australia is a popular destination for English
language study abroad. However, Australia is not the “first choice” destination of many South
Korean migrants seeking “English speaking destinations.” Instead, Australia is often viewed as
an “easy destination” for migrants who want to easier access English speaking destinations as a
place to live, work, study, and interact with “native” English speakers. Many migrants admit that
they would rather go to Canada or New Zealand to interact with native English speakers.
However, because of the caps on the number of working holidays for South Koreans in these
destinations, it becomes difficult to get their visas approved. Higher barriers to entry facilitate
young South Koreans looking for a happy compromise – those who want to check off living in
an English-speaking country on their bucket list, but do not have the funds to strictly study
abroad in Western English-speaking countries go to Australia.
Unlike other destinations, most South Koreans do not enter Australia on the student visa
but take advantage of the extensive working holiday program. While Australia does offer student
visa schemes, students must maintain enrollment in schools to maintain their legal status, which
can be a costly endeavor. Furthermore, the working holiday allows students to study English at
an English school for up to four months. The remainder of the time on working holiday, students
are given the opportunity to work within the country. Except for the second visa (which I will
explain in the following section), working holiday makers can live and work anywhere in the
country for a full year staying with one employer for up to six months. They are allowed to apply
to the same jobs as Australian nationals in the formal labor market, which gives them a chance to
“interact” with native English speakers and accumulate cosmopolitan work experiences.
Although they have full legal access to the formal labor market, working holiday makers are

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typically concentrated in industries that rely heavily on temporary migrant labor including hotel
concierge, hotel cleaning, retail work, food service, office work, tourism-related work, and
regional work including farm work such as crop-picking. These temporary jobs are largely tied
to the low-paid flexible labor market, characterized by part-time, temporary, casualized and
contingent labor (Standing 2011).
Temporary migration is a key labor component of the Australian economy. With more
migrants arriving in Australia under temporary visas in recent decades, ten percent of the
Australian workforce has temporary migrant status (Robertson 2014). Yet implications of
temporary migration have remained under-the-radar because such schemes have been
constructed as not commonly associated with labor migration despite strong ties to the labor
market. In Australia, both working holiday makers and temporary graduate workers who are
designated as “tourists” and “students,” respectively are core components in labor migration
schemes but are not politically positioned as part of labor migration policies, making invisible
the high numbers of temporary workers (Robertson 2014). This pattern is not exclusive to
Australia. Scholars looking at international “scholarship” students in Denmark also observe how
“students” must work a set number of hours to obtain government scholarships for tuition rebates
(Luthra and Platt 2016; Valentin 2015; Munk et al 2012) while others looking at receiving
countries such as Japan recognize how some non-labor migration schemes like tourism are not
legalized and work as “side-door migrations” for labor (see Liu-Farrier 2009; Choi 2017).
The hidden dynamics of these temporary labor migration schemes offer some explanation
for why many Korean working holiday makers in Australia end up in “certain kinds” of jobs.
Migrants initially come with plans to have a well-rounded working experience in Australia with
a combination of office work, food and janitorial service, and regional work notably in farming,

150
cleaning, factory work or crop-picking. Scholars examining South Korean working holiday
makers in Canada however have previously demonstrated the lack of opportunities for South
Koreans to work in “decent jobs” that would be “more related” to return-oriented career goals of
working a professional job in South Korea (Yoon 2015). In a similar vein, South Koreans on
working holiday in Australia come with high hopes of gaining an authentic cosmopolitan
experience and learning English through working and interacting with native English speakers.
In fact, I found that one third of South Koreans I spoke with undertook multi-country work-study
programs before coming to Australia, starting out in the Philippines to learn English to prepare
for idealized authentic interactions in Australia.
However, many of these hopes do not materialize into reality. For instance, many
migrants initially desire office jobs, which they consider the most ideal job to obtain on the
working holiday. Working in a professional setting in Australia will not only allow them to gain
global credentials but also enable them to experience a professional workplace and interact with
local Australian workers. They view professional office jobs as more ideal than cash jobs or farm
or factory work, as the latter would deny them their goal of interacting with Australians and
segregate them into only interacting with other migrant workers or fellow Korean workers. One
such person who aspired to work in a professional setting was thirty-two-year-old Chang, who I
met after he returned from the working holiday in Australia. Despite his humble beginnings
living in a “one room” with five family members in a smaller town in Gyeonggi-do, Chang was
one of the more successful South Korean young people in Australia who had left for working
holiday after a three-year engineering stint in Dubai with the large South Korean corporation
Daewoo. He was one of many South Korean working holiday makers who wanted to take

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advantage of this “once in a lifetime opportunity” to live and work abroad before the window for
working holiday closes at the age of thirty.
Because Chang held a degree and had work experience in engineering, he was optimistic
about finding an office job in Australia where he could gain an English-speaking workplace
experience that could boost his already established work background. However, after several
interviews, Chang found the search for an office job to be a discouraging one:
I first went to Australia with plans to get an office job. So I brought a suit. A suit, dress
shoes, and a white dress shirt. I didn’t explore this option until the end because I thought
I thought I’d have better chances to get the job, because I worked for more than a year. I
looked at the newspaper and applied to all the office jobs I found. I thought I could use
my college degree to get nothing special but just an assistant job, so I went back to the
city. I was staying in the Gold Coast and went to Brisbane for interviews. That’s the first
time I ever wore a suit to an interview. But I ended up not getting a job. They don’t really
pick us. The European friend I went with got picked. I met that friend when I first got
there, and he also found work here and there like me. But that friend is good at English,
gentle, and funny. He was Italian and there was definitely a bias towards European. They
like them more. If there’s an Asian and European, they will for sure use European.
(Emphasis added).

Chang shares his encounters with racial discrimination in Australia for office and
administrative jobs. Even though Chang has a degree in engineering, he finds that employers
“don’t really pick us” and will lean towards choosing white European working holiday makers
instead who are better at English and have “more personality.” He concluded that white
Australian employers will not choose Asians for more prestigious office jobs (that are not even
that prestigious) because of their bias towards “white” working holidaymakers, who are seen as
presenting better under interview situations. Chang’s observations resonate with the experiences
of many other South Korean working holiday makers I spoke to in Australia. In fact, none of the
working holiday makers I interviewed held administrative or office jobs in Australia. The more
desirable jobs that South Koreans obtained were as line chefs or seafarer positions (more recently
factory work because of their higher pay), which were considered rarer for South Korean migrant

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workers and allowed a more extended opportunity to interact with local Australians or non-
Korean migrant workers.
Several South Korean reports have confirmed that the majority of South Koreans working
holiday makers held “unskilled” service jobs during their stay in Australia (Kim 2010; Yoon
2015), specifically jobs that are intensive, low-paid and largely unrelated to their career interests
(Yoon 2015). In fact, in the cities, I found that most South Koreans congregated in cash jobs,
which was also a common pattern in Los Angeles. Despite their access to the legal and formal
labor market in Australia, Korean migrant workers still find themselves depending on co-ethnic
employers to access under-the-table cash jobs. These jobs typically include service jobs in
Korean-owned immigrant businesses, such as restaurants and groceries, and are advertised in
popular Korean language community boards that are dedicated to each city, such as Everyone’s
Brisbane and The Road to Sydney. It is common for employers to pay below the legal minimum
wage (Yoon 2015) because there is always a high supply of workers in cities which are more
ideal destinations to live.
South Korean working holiday makers view jobs in co-ethnic businesses as a lifeline and
a means to an end despite their low pay. Take for instance, the case of Yuji. Originally from
northern Seoul, twenty-six-year-old Yuji explains that when she was in Brisbane, she worked
upwards of three jobs at a time but that this was partly “her fault.” Despite bringing her entire
life savings of $15,000 to Australia, she ran out of money in the first several months because she
had mis-budgeted her trip. Yuji was a heavy drinker back in South Korea and even in Australia,
where a bottle of soju typically costs four times as much, she would drink 5-6 soju bottles per
night as she normally would back home. She explains she drank a lot in the beginning in order to
make new friends and, in her words, “feel less lonely.” Another large expense she under

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budgeted was the cost of three months of English language school. When she realized that she
only had a couple thousand dollars in the bank left to get through the next several months, she
hustled to find jobs fast. She said that the easiest jobs to find were in Korean-owned businesses.
For this reason, they take them despite their low pay.
I worked from 10 am to 5 pm every day at the Korean market. After I get off at 5 pm, the
city and the “valley” isn’t far from each other by bus but because it’s rush hour, there’s a
lot of traffic. I must be in the valley by 6 pm. From 6 pm, it varied but I worked as. A
waitress and cleaner. For cleaning, I just have to do ten jobs. No matter how long, when I
finish 10 jobs, I can leave. It’s from 6 pm to 10 jobs. But serving at the Korean pub, I
have to wait until customers leave. The latest is 11-11:30 pm but as you can imagine, we
end late on the weekends. Because people stay late. I usually end 10 pm -11 pm and go
home. I work full-time all day and have no off days. When I go home, I clean my house
and I have to do laundry every day. Because Australian migrant workers wear neon or
black colors for work. I wear black so I have to wash it every day. After laundry it’s 1 am.
Then I sleep, wake up, eat, and go back to work the next day.

Experiences like these demonstrate how migrant workers tend to remain segmented in certain
labor markets that are unofficially designated for them such as underpaid service jobs in Korean-
owned businesses. Because of their limited access to more desirable jobs, many South Korean
migrant workers, at least, the ones who stick it out in the cities, tend to take cash jobs with co-
ethnic employers who have a tendency of underpaying them. For instance, Yuji’s cleaning job
was for a co-ethnic employer who did not pay her the legally mandated hourly rate but instead
paid her per job (which would be cheaper for the employer). She also confirms that she was
underpaid the minimum wage at the grocery store and the pub. These negative experiences in the
cities can sometimes facilitate migrants’ move to the countryside, where there are more
opportunities to make money.
Working under a Korean migrant employer is looked down upon – even though it is a
common experience among South Korean working holiday makers in Australia. As Chang states,
“I told myself I would not take a cash job under a Korean. It’s just not what I came here to do.”

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Another migrant Junsuk, a good friend of Chang’s, explains that this perception is not due to
what mainstream Australian society thinks of work in the co-ethnic economy but rather
perceptions that “other Koreans” have of people in these jobs. Junsuk remarks, “when you work
under a Korean getting paid below minimum wage, other Koreans think that you have a lower
status. It’s low not because you get paid less but the perception of other Koreans judging you by
thinking ‘that bastard is getting paid $10 bucks under a Korean employer.’”
What Junsuk’s comments demonstrate is not necessarily the prevalence of co-ethnic
exploitation among the South Korean migrant worker community, but the ways in which hyper-
competition and co-ethnic antagonism is produced by the larger institutional structures that
racially ghettoize South Korean migrant workers into low wage and informal services jobs in the
Australian economy (Bonacich 1988). South Korean migrant workers who want to escape these
experiences of labor segmentation and exploitation will move to “the country” where they are
told there are more opportunities to make money but where they encounter different forms of
racialized geographical mobility.

Racialized Spatial Segregation
“‘I earned $500 per day at the cherry farm.’ ‘I worked at the farm and after working
through the holidays I earned $3000.’ You hear about these jackpots. I was like ‘Should I
make a lot of money here and do something?’ They say you go on Australian working
holiday to make a lot of money. They said if you spend all your money there and come
back, you are stupid. That’s why I wanted to make a lot of money.” (Jin, 25).

Most South Korean migrant workers looking to “make a lot of money” head out to the
Australian countryside, or what Koreans call shigol. Australia shigol is also a place where
workers relocate in order to meet requirements to gain a “second visa.” Starting in 2006, holders
of the working holiday 417 visa could apply for a second 12 month visa if they spend 88

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consecutive days during their first visa doing “specified work” in regional Australia (Robertson
2014). Despite the continued official discourse of encouraging tourism, the Australian state’s
decision to include the regional work requirement for the second visa signals that the scheme is
invested in bringing certain forms of temporary labor into Australia (ibid). As Robertson (2014)
notes, this is recognized by the industrial lobbies, mostly rural employers who pushed for
liberalization of the working holiday policy to meet labor deficits in these industries. “Specified
work” currently includes work in plant and animal cultivation, fishing and pearling, or mining
and construction. Most working holiday makers seeking the one-year extension (bringing their
total time in Australia to two years) spend 88 days doing seasonal agricultural work, such as fruit
picking (Tan and Lester 2012). “Regional Australia” is constructed as the spatial location of
most “skills shortages” nationally; the policy seeks to encourage migrants’ spatial location within
regions and markets that most need their labor (Robertson 2014).
Australian shigol is largely accessed through labor brokers. While some are connected to
labor brokers through educational brokers who will prearrange working engagements, others will
look for labor brokers by searching Korean language blogs dedicated to certain types of work.
Labor brokers charge “introduction fees” for securing access to jobs that would allow one to
complete the 88 days of work. The introduction fees range from $1000 to $3000, depending on
whether a middle agency or party, such as an educational broker, gets involved. For instance,
nineteen-year-old Hyunnie, who left for Australia after her high school graduation, explains how
she used a working holiday brokerage firm in South Korea to access “secure work” in Australia.
Despite the costs, her parents encouraged her to use a broker because they were apprehensive
about sending her to a foreign country alone at a young age.
When I consulted with them in South Korea, it wasn’t bad. It seemed like it was the best
way to find a job fast. At the time it seemed like a good idea but now that I’m here, it’s

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not that great. At first, I was worried about job security. It’s better than coming here all
by myself without knowing anyone. But you have to pay the price for that convenience…
Hotel housekeeping was the most expensive. I paid $4000 USD dollar in brokerage fees.
That was supposed to be the most secure.

Hyunnie learned from other workers only after she started her housekeeping job that she paid the
premium price to get her job. Upon arrival, she also learned that the job she eventually secured
had not been guaranteed, as it required having to pass through the hurdle of several interviews.
The regional requirement for the second visa produces mini-migration industries (Hernandez-
Leon 2013) operated by former working holiday makers on more extended visas such as the
student visa. These mini-migration industries, which depend on existing networks of managers
and owners of regional businesses, capitalize on the replenishing flow of South Korean migrant
workers who land in Australia without networks or connections to find jobs required for the
condition of their immigration status. As the go-between for migrant workers, labor brokers are
best poised to maximize the spatial segregation of migrant workers in these regional sectors and
end up contributing to the racialized experiences of South Korean migrant workers in Australia.
Labor brokers not only hold the keys to labor contracts but also to migrant housing. This
is a common set up in crop-picking work. Maximizing the spatial segregation, some brokers and
related personnel have set up cottage industries for migrant housing in farming towns called
“share houses.” These share houses are often extremely dilapidated and run-down 2–3-bedroom
single family homes that have been converted into boarding houses for 10-12 migrant workers at
a time. Landlords of “share houses” are part of the network of labor brokers who rent rooms at
double or triple the cost of the homes to cover the cost of their own housing but also for profit.
In the boarding house that I stayed at in Bundaberg, one small room fit three to four people, and
when fully occupied, twelve people were set to share one bathroom and one shower. These share

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houses cost $100-$150 per week. Migrant workers I lived with would call them dakjang or
chicken dens due to the number of occupants landlords (often brokers themselves) would pack
into these share houses.
16

Because most migrant workers do not have access to cars in rural areas, which also
happens to not have reliable public transportation, Korean working holiday makers rely on
carpools from other migrant workers to drive them from their share house to their different
farming or crop-picking jobs. Next to more well-paid and “stable” jobs, like housekeeping and
factory work, farming jobs are viewed as the most lucrative because migrants are typically paid
“per piece” or per bucket, which incentivizes workers to produce higher yields. However,
making money in harvesting can sometimes not be a straightforward process, as labor brokers
seeking to maximize profit can easily manipulate the lack of information and connections of
regionally isolated migrant workers in rural areas. Migrant workers would often complain about
how they would get paid less than the full price for the total number of buckets picked, leading to
increased suspicion that labor brokers and managers were skimming buckets for profit. This was
widely talked about among the South Korean migrant worker communities.
Such suspicions were interwoven in many migrant stories about farm life. Take for
example twenty-seven-year-old Tug, a high school graduate in construction from Jeju City, the
capital of the biggest island in South Korea. He left South Korea after completing his
compulsory military service. With a disabled mother and having recently been diagnosed with
HIV, Tug was eager to leave on an Australian working holiday to “stock up on money for his

16
My observations of the exploitative situation of the boarding houses were confirmed when I
went to visit the labor broker and landlord of the boarding houses’ residence for interviews; they
lived with another couple in a new three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood with new
Korean appliances.

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mother” and as his last bucket list item before he doesn’t know “what would happen.” With a lot
of moving parts in Tug’s life, he came to Australia in a rush, landing in shigol within the first
few months of his stay for the second visa. Tug was motivated to start making “real money.”
However, his plans of spending two years in Australia ended up unrealized when he was conned
by labor brokers he found via Instagram:
After I ran out of money, I went to a cabbage farm. You have to work bending over and
it’s back breaking work. I have a herniated disc. I worked one day and then because of
my herniated disc the next day I couldn’t walk. The disc affected my nerves, and I was in
a lot of pain. So I was like “what do I do?” and started to look on Instagram. I found a
Korean brokered farm. There are Koreans, Asians, Taiwan, and Hong Kongese people
and I ended up there. It was a grape farm, so I went. But it was already winter so there
were no grapes. I thought Australia was summer all year long. But they have four
seasons. The pictures on the Instagram were deceiving. The Korean broker was a con
artist. He took all our money and didn’t even give us a second visa. You are supposed to
get paid piece price or as much as you pick. It’s not hourly. One box of grapes is three
bucks. You pick all day. But peak season had passed so there were not a lot of grapes. It
was hard to even fill one box. It’s hard to even fill ten boxes. When there are a lot of
grapes, you can fill ten boxes in no time but when there are no grapes, it’s hard to even
make 30 bucks a day. I worked six days a week and earned 180 dollars but my rent was
$110 per week. I have $70 remaining. How do I live? But we looked forward to getting
our second visa. It’s called “counting” when we count down to 88 days…But the guy was
a con artist. We applied for our second visa, but it all got cancelled and that’s when we
knew we were deceived.

Tug’s experiences illustrate the compounded vulnerabilities migrant workers in farming
communities face as they navigate their spatial isolation in regional Australia. South Korean
migrant workers are overrepresented in regional work, such as crop-picking, because of the high
demand for workers, opportunities for income-earning, and their overall labor market exclusion
from other work. Co-ethnic migrant labor brokers, who are often legally, socially, and financially
precarious themselves, often maximize opportunities for profit from incoming South Korean
migrant workers as in the case of Tug. As a product of Australian labor policies, the
ghettoization of South Korean migrant workers in rural areas (through their exclusion from other

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labor markets) reproduces a racialized hierarchy of migrant work in Australia which not only
detracts from South Korean state projects for global citizenship but also creates situations of
scarcity and desperation leading in instances of worker abuse often by other co-ethnic migrant
workers themselves.
Spatial segregation however is not just a one-way street of oppression. While extended
life in the farms is nowhere near South Koreans’ initial goal of coming to Australia to increase
their interaction with English speakers and experience an Australian professional work setting,
they do develop feelings of solidarity with other working holiday makers. Upon their arrival in
rural Australia, they find themselves working alongside other Korean migrant workers in a pod,
while also interacting with other racialized minority groups on the fields and factories including
Taiwanese, Peruvian, Nigerian, and Japanese nationals. These experiences of isolation also
become sources and moments of solidarity. Facilitating the building of community in rural
Australia are the establishment of small Koreatowns where South Korean workers can get
Korean food and products. In the isolated rural farming town of Bundaberg, there was a Korean
market that sold soju, Korean meats, Korean branded condiments, and over three dozen different
kinds of instant noodles – a staple food for migrant workers living abroad. Migrant workers
would come together for “family dinners” in their boarding houses, eating Korean food and
drinking Korean spirits that many would describe as the lifeline for getting through the 88 days
or more they would need to secure their legal residency. This is reflected in my field notes:
In the boarding house where I stayed, my share mates and I would go to the Korean
market at least two times a week, especially because we had some heavier drinkers in the
house. We would make Korean meals almost every night from kimchi soup, army soup,
to kimchi pancakes, whatever we could make from the ingredients we could gather at the
Korean market. We were luckier than people in other houses because one of our share
mates had purchased a car and didn’t have to walk two miles to the Korean market.

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Whether in urban or rural areas, South Korean working holiday makers interact less with
members of dominant society in Australia. Their social and spatial segregation points to their
racialized experiences in Australia where Western hegemonic racial hierarchies places them on
the margins of the labor landscape. Yet, low-wage labor is not just seen as a loss or a downward
step by many. The solidarity they experience with other Korean working holiday makers is that
which also defines their experiential meaning-making as global citizens. This means that they
have managed to carve systems of support from their labor market ghettoization and their
displacement into the most precarious and underpaid jobs. Their racialization does not only stem
from their labor market segregation. In the following section, I show how experiences of
racialization also manifest through embodied violence.

Racialized Violence
A large pickup truck rolled by where a crowd of us congregated after five grueling hours
of zucchini-picking. Zucchinis by far were the hardest fruit to harvest because you work most of
the time bending over in an unnatural position.
17
Most of us were ethnically Korean, although
there was also another mixed group of white European backpackers from the backpacker hostel
in a nearby town. Someone I’ve never seen before, a tall, long-faced Korean manager standing
on top of the truck without a moment’s notice started to dump buckets on buckets of zucchinis at
our feet. I barely dodged this violent mauling. He cried out in English, “What the fuck kind of
zucchinis are these? You call this a zucchini? If you don’t want to work LEAVE!” We all stood
there scared and paralyzed as his words reverberated throughout our tired bodies.

17
Such work, which is referred to as “stoop labor,” has also been documented among Filipino migrant farmworkers
picking asparagus during the early 20
th
century in the United States (Baldoz 2011).

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Violence is an everyday experience in farming communities where migrant workers are
treated as expendable and disposable. Other migrant workers later told me that such violent
performative stunts were not out-of-the-ordinary and were often done intentionally to subtract
away our pickings for the day. This is supposedly a common strategy used by brokers and
middlemen to pocket profit. However, violence extended beyond the farms themselves. In
farming communities that are predominantly white, migrant farm workers, who make up the only
minority in the area, are viewed as outsiders who are taking jobs from “native” white Australians
(see Bonacich 1972). Migrant workers easily become targets of violence in these communities,
especially as many of them do not have cars and will have to walk to the store for groceries and
other necessities.
Such experiences were common for two of my interviewees, Bina and Todo, a partnered
couple from the southern metropolitan city of Busan. Before Bina and Todo came to Australia,
Bina worked as a cook at a restaurant and later as a childcare worker for a relative’s childcare
center. Todo was an aspiring law student. Bina and Todo have been in Bundaberg for three years,
working as farm workers but also running a share house alongside a Korean labor broker, who
asked them to help in return for free rent. Throughout their three years in Bundaberg, Bina and
Todo, one can say, have seen it all. Before obtaining a car, they would walk for several
kilometers to the store for groceries. Walking on the street made them easy targets for violence
and harassment. Todo explains:
I was egged on the street on my head. I was coming back from picking up supplies at the
grocery store. They egged me and took my groceries. These kids. These high school kids.
Maybe they were older kids in their twenties. They are kids. They might be doing that to
Westerners, too. I just think to myself “they are just like that.”

Todo continues that this was one of the reasons they ended up purchasing a car, so as to protect
themselves from acts of racialized violence. (Despite this, they once found their garage egged by

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neighbors). Even after Todo and Bina purchased a used car with their hard-earned income, they
were still not safe from attacks. Bina explains:
One time I was at a roundabout, and I didn’t have the right of way. I was a little bit off
that day but I went. But the car that was passing us, looked at us and signaled “that’s
alright” and was on their way. I was so startled, but I was like “thank god.” But then they
saw who we were and then flicked us off and yelled “fuck you.” So I received a “fuck
you.”

While Todo attempts to dismiss these acts of violence as nothing more than acts committed by
kids, other migrant workers disagree and believe these acts were racialized and targeted towards
Asian migrant workers who make up a visible minority population in these areas. Another
migrant worker Jenny from Seoul, who worked in the strawberry farms of Caboolture, describes
her experience with racialized violence living in this small rural town. Similar to Bina and Todo,
she did not have a car in Caboolture. She explains that being in the country felt like “torture” due
to the continuous harassment and heckling she experienced on the streets. She describes one of
many incidents:
I’ve lived in the cities and the country but racism is more rampant in the country. Cities
are more racially diverse, so I’ve never faced racism explicitly but when I lived in
Caboolture…I was walking on the pedestrian crossing when the light was green, but
someone honked their horn at us and startled us. The people in the car started to laugh at
us and started driving off. They rolled down the windows and make “chinky eyes” and
started to curse and laugh among themselves.

Experiences of violence motivates many migrants to minimize their time in the country.
However, they can earn more in the country than in the city, which forces many to prolong their
stay. The work they do in the country is also not one they prefer, as fruit-picking is hard labor.
While city life gives them respite from the looming threat of violence that defines their everyday
life in the country, the country provides a retreat from the spending trap of expensive cities in
Australia. South Koreans as a result find themselves going back and forth between the city and

163
country during their time in Australia. This is despite their having already completed the required
88 days of farm work they need to do in order to extend their legal residency.

Downward Class Mobilities and Substantive Freedoms
The literature on working holidays has described them as a “middling experience” (Ho
2011) of temporary labor migration positioned somewhere in between elite transnational workers
and exploitable unskilled migrant workers. As “modern labor nomads” (Bauböck 1998) their
class position is described as complex due to the relatively high level of education of participants
who find themselves employed in unskilled work, often in grey labor economies. Elaine Ho
(2019, Shanthi Robertson (2014), and Michiel Baas (2017) have all used the term “deskilling” to
describe the tacit acceptance of working holiday makers to do employment below one’s skill
level and acceptance of the devaluation of their qualifications in the country of destination.
Parreñas (2001)’s work adds another dimension, describing a similar phenomenon that
happens to educated Filipina women who take jobs as domestic workers abroad. She describes
their experience as being indicative of “contradictory class mobility” which refers to the
simultaneous experience of upward and downward mobility for those who experience a decline
in occupational status but concomitant increase in financial status. Unlike the process of
deskilling which intimates a unidirectional experience of class downward mobility, contradictory
class mobility emphasizes the simultaneous process of gaining something and losing something
(Parreñas 2001). In a similar vein, South Korean youth are exposed to a contradictory change in
social status when they come to Australia. Yet these migrants might not encounter increased
financial mobility with occupational decline, instead “paying” a premium for interacting with
English speakers and access to certain kinds of freedoms.

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For instance, twenty-nine-year-old Yeerim who I met at the boarding house in Bundaberg
was one of the more well-traveled and well-off migrants, graduating with an art major and
working as a bookkeeper in Seoul. Her salary, she admits, was higher than most of her peers and
for the work she did she described being well-paid at $3000 per month. This allowed her to enjoy
a rather comfortable life as a single woman while she lived rent-free in her parent’s home.
18

Picking vegetables in rural Australia from 6 am to 3 pm for the last two months, however, was a
stark contrast to what she describes as her life back home.
I drove a foreign car in South Korea. But my life really changed. In South Korea I had a
steady income. I ate what I wanted to. I surfed and I snowboarded, and I went where I
wanted to, I ate where I wanted to, I bought and wore bags of my heart's desire. But here
I can’t do that. I have to be a lot more uncomfortable than I was living in South Korea. In
the beginning I had some doubt but now I am at ease… This is not my country and so
even if I have the same skills, I can’t expect the same treatment like the native people
here… Plus, because there aren't parents to nag me...I came to Australia thinking I am
late, I am old, and I am desperate. But if you just leave Korea, overseas, there are people
who will learn new skills at the age of 40-50 after they have kids. When I see that I’m
like “oooh, I am not late at all” and feel relieved. I feel empowered that I could maybe
learn something new.

Yeerim’s experiences can be similarly linked to processes of contradictory class mobility
where working holiday makers from professional backgrounds take manual labor jobs in
Australia. However, Yeerim’s own emphasis on how she “can’t expect the same treatment like
the native people here” adds a racial dimension to the process of downward class mobility that
migrants like her confront when in Australia. Migrants recognize that their qualifications will not
only be less valued in the Australian labor market and as foreigners they are vulnerable to
mistreatment or even violent attacks. Experiences of racial marginality means that migrants from
non-professional backgrounds likely also confront contradictory social mobility. Their economic
ascent comes at the cost of their racial descent. This encounter adds racialization to our

18
Most South Korean young adults live at home during their adult lives before partnering up.

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understandings of transnational stratified mobility and how the intersections of class, race,
citizenship, gender, and nation can compound to restrict social and financial gains especially for
young people who need this boost the most.
Unlike Yeerim, however, the majority of South Korean working holiday makers came
from South Korea’s casualized service economy. They worked as retail workers, baristas, servers,
hair styling assistants, delivery workers, and low-wage administrative assistants. These migrants
are what Korean social science scholars have called the “880,000 won generation” referring to a
generation of youth who do not receive a living wage in South Korea. This generation comprises
young people who entered the labor market during an era of economic stagnation and labor
flexibilization in an economy that never fully recovered since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
(Yoon 2015). They represent the young graduates who were forced to take any job that was
available, commonly causing a sense of job mismatch (ibid).
This was the case for twenty-four year-old Jeji, who worked as a manager at a fast food
burger chain Lotteria in Ansan, a factory hub near the outskirts of Seoul home to a large migrant
worker community. After graduating from trade school in hotel management, Jeji continued to
work at Lotteria, a job she had held since her final year of high school in order to keep a steady
income. Coming from a single mother-headed household, Jeji was able to pay her way through
school and was motivated to pay off the rest of her student loans by working in Australia, where
she heard that you can receive a big payout. For young people like Jeji, working manual, low
wage jobs in Australia feels like a natural extension of her life in South Korea. For this reason, it
did not require much adjustment.
Yet, her racialization signals her decline in social status. It is a decline magnified by its
sharp contrast to her experiences in the Philippines, where she had undertaken an English

166
language study program to prepare her for Australia. Like the flip of a switch, her life in
Australia marked a dramatic transformation from the Philippines, where she lived a rather
luxurious lifestyle of five-dollar massages and regular shopping sprees. She also brought up
memories of observing migrant workers in her hometown of Ansan, drawing parallels to how she
was racializing others and now how Australians were racializing her:
To be honest, I worked at Lotteria before I came here. If you look at it one way, what we
do here is also manual labor and service work. They are both hard jobs so I am not
worried about adjusting but I did come from the Philippines and the position in which I
was seeing Filipinos is how Australians are viewing me. It could be upsetting for some.
But this is a Western country, and it’s something that I have to learn. I am actually from
Ansan in South Korea which is a factory town with a lot of foreign migrant workers. The
migrant workers I see always have a dark and sad expression. Even on the subways or
public transportation, they never sit on the seats. I am afraid that will happen to me.
Coming to Australia after the Philippines just confirms for me how one is a developing
country and other is a developed country. For instance, you have to use drinking water to
brush your teeth in the Philippines. But other than dysentery, I am not that worried.

Jeji eloquently describes the racialized status shift she encountered from the Philippines to
Australia: “the position in which I was seeing Filipinos was how Australians were viewing me.”
She is one of many migrants who relocated to Australia from the Philippines where educational
brokers organized multi-country education and labor itineraries. Yet she was also able to relate
her experiences in Australia with migrant workers in South Korea who often have defeated
expressions. As a caveat, she explains that “I am afraid that will happen to me.” Jeji’s comments
illuminate the experiences of contradictory racialized mobility among South Koreans in
Australia. Despite South Korea’s rise as a global economic and cultural power, one reflected in
the visa-free mobility of its citizens, South Koreans such as Jeji realize that the national ascent of
South Korea is limited and that in white settler nations she will continues to be a racial
subordinate who are denied rights to inclusion in this society.

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Paradoxical Inclusions
How do migrant workers who relocate to a multicultural and white settler nation make
sense of their downward racialized status? Do they accept or resist the racial order? In my
research, I found that migrant workers make sense of their downward racialized experiences by
naturalizing the state of the Western racialized order. Going back to migrant worker Yeerim, she
explains:
This is how I think. It’s not my country. It’s unconscious. I don’t even think of it as
discrimination. I haven’t thought, “why aren’t we treated hospitably?” “why are we
suffering here? Why are we treated so poorly?” Because I just think it’s all a given. It’s
natural (to be treated poorly). Of course if we interacted with foreigners and got to know
their culture and spoke the same language, we would find things in common. Also you
tend to be pulled towards people who look like you. I just think that’s natural. You are
attracted to people like you. It’s not that Australians hate and look down on us, it’s just
because they like people who look like them. They like them [white European] more than
us. They do it more for their own people. So I don’t think it’s an injustice.

Yeerim does not think of her poor treatment in Australia as racial discrimination but rather a
natural fact for people to be “pulled towards people who look” like each other. Her
rationalization of the xenophobia and racism in Australia reflects a transnational bargain – how
despite clear experiences of racism she excuses it for the sake of temporary membership in
Australia. Her desires for belonging are related to her desperate need to fulfill cosmopolitan
projects that are brought on by a South Korean government that has made overseas experience
and English skills somewhat compulsory to middle class mobility. Her “paradoxical inclusion”
as a racialized other is one she accepts for her achievement of experiencing Australia. Once back
in South Korea, it is an experience that will potentially give (but not guarantee) cultural
legitimacy and a cosmopolitan identity, regardless of her racialized experience.
Another reason I found migrants undertake this paradoxical form of inclusion is the
trade-offs of experiencing Australia’s natural surrounding and habitat. In South Korea, nature is

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something that one does not have time to enjoy because of their fast-paced lifestyles that takes
them away from enjoying normal humanizing moments. As a destination known for nature and
adventure, Australia provides working holiday makers a conscious escape to a more natural
setting. Another migrant Junyoung who came from Seoul puts this sentiment eloquently:
What I was grateful for was actually...to be honest, in South Korea there’s really no
opportunity to see stars and at night, there’s no reason to go to the beach or the mountain.
When you go to Australia, it’s like the roads have been unraveled, all you see is
mountains and the sky. There’s no concentration of buildings, it’s purely trees next to the
beach so you only get to focus on the simple things. Your heart gets less busy and you get
to think a lot. It’s not like a premeditated plan that you are thinking about, it’s just simple
thoughts. You see the stars and “you’re like wow, that’s pretty.” The moon is also
extremely bright. When you see these things you think to yourself, “why am I just now
seeing and thinking this is beautiful? In South Korea when you see the stars you have no
reason to even think it’s beautiful.

Australia provides South Korean youth an opportunity to experience impressive natural settings
and tap into certain types of emotional and psychological freedoms that they feel are inaccessible
in South Korea. Anthropologist Vanessa Fong (2011) has discussed the notion of “substantive
freedoms” in her book on Chinese study abroad students asserting that while education abroad
grants young people in her study some freedoms, they also lose some of the privileges of social
welfare and citizenship offered by their home country of China. This leads to a certain kind of
ambivalence about returning to China. In a similar vein, South Korean youth in Australia take a
“take some and leave some” approach towards their stay in their second choice Western
destination, accepting many parts of their contradictory class and racialized experiences in order
to “see stars at night.”
Another migrant Jae, who came to Australia with his partner and spent most of his time
working at a banana farm expressed similar views about relishing his “nature walks”:
We start really early at the banana farm. We wake up at 6 am and end work at around
3:30 pm. It’s so different than South Korea. In South Korea you are always working
overtime (often without pay) from 7-9 pm. We sometimes have to go in before dawn. But

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here we end at 3:30 pm exact. They call that “smoker.” You usually call someone who
smokes cigarettes a smoker but it also means you flick your hands off work when it’s
time. Because if you work 15 more minutes, they have to pay you. Because if you don’t
give us pay then it’s illegal. After that, we go home to wash up and work out at the fitness
center. At night I’ll eat dinner with my partner and go for a nature walk. The nature walks
there are breathtaking. Afterwards, we’ll go to bed and on the weekends we will go out
for a drive. It’s like our honeymoon out here. We actually went on our honeymoon to
Australia.

Jae describes his time working at the banana farm to being akin to his honeymoon, which he had
spent in Australia a few years prior. Jae’s explanation helps us understand that young people’s
mobility projects in places like Australia are not a zero-sum game in which they either “fail” or
“succeed.” Instead, migrants show that despite the discrimination and hard labor they encounter,
they manage to find a way to carve out something for themselves that goes beyond instrumental
calculations and labor market mobility.

Conclusion
This chapter examined the experiences of South Korean migrant workers on working
holiday programs in Australia, which is seen as an affordable opportunity to learn English and
interact with “native” English speakers. Despite that South Koreans are going to Australia to
gain cosmopolitan experiences that would buttress their projects for middle class worldliness, in
Australia, they find themselves experiencing downward mobility of class, race, or both. South
Korean migrant workers’ positionality in Australia is tied to the conditionality of their visa,
which segregates them into certain types of labor that are viewed as less desirable. These
experiences challenge the picture of South Korea’s ascension as a nation. While South Korea
occupies a high rank in the global economic hierarchy, this is not necessarily true when it comes
to race. The experiences of working holiday makers in Australia indicate that economic power
does not trump racial inequality in a global age. Such experiences of racialized mobility

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illuminate on an important dimension of transnational stratified mobility in Australia and how
forces such as race, nation, gender, and class always intersect in shaping experiences of gains
and losses within the global terrain.

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CHAPTER 6: UNLEARNING GLOBAL ENGLISH
Introduction
Dominant narratives of East Asian international students project them as newly rich,
wealthy and class privileged flexible citizens who can purchase their membership in nations
across the Western world. First introduced by Aiwha Ong (1999), the concept of flexible citizens
describes passport carrying and jet-setting East Asian international students who fluidly and
flexibly cross borders for travel, study, leisure, and work. Flexible citizens include well-off
“geese children” (Abelmann et al 2014; Koo and Lee 2006; Lee 2010) or “parachute children”
(Zhou 1999; Sun 2014) who are sent abroad by “Asia’s new rich” to earn Western credentials
that would help reproduce their class status in advanced Asian countries (Brooks and Waters
2011; Waters 2006). In the United States, the image of the Asian “flexible citizen” is often used
as a stylized contrast against “undocumented immigrants,” who are viewed as disadvantaged,
working class, and clandestine border-crossers. Dominant discourses of the “model minority
myth” which casts East Asian immigrants as docile, law abiding, and high achieving (Lee 2015)
converges with existing tropes to disassociate this group from harmful tropes of “illegal
immigrants” that further drive a racial wedge within already polarized immigration debates.
However, such discussions are not just characteristic of xenophobic and exclusionary contexts of
reception in white settler societies. South Korean discourses of global economic ascendance have
contributed to the image of South Koreans as flexible global citizens. Yet, the experiences of a
sizable contingent of transnational student migrants are far from fitting the trope of flexibility,
but instead are characterized by marginality. This is due to the laws of cumulative causation and
how migration diversifies over time. Narratives of flexible citizenship alienate the experiences of
marginalization faced by the educational migrants whose paths I followed abroad for this study.

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South Korea’s global ascendance in the twenty-first century represents its geopolitical
transformation from being an impoverished agrarian nation to an economically vetted global
superpower. With South Korea’s hosting of the G-20 Summit signaling this shift, the South
Korean state bestowed the duties of maintaining this strength and keeping the nation’s economy
globally competitive to the “G-20 generation,” representing individuals growing up during a time
of South Korean economic prosperity. Central to the charge on the G-20 generation has been the
state biopolitical project of global education, entailing moves to double down on English
education and proficiency as the language of the global future. This has been rolled out through
state liberalization of opportunities for educational migration and the expansion of working
holiday programs to “English speaking countries.” With such state pressures to become filial
global foot soldiers, it is no surprise that English language education has become one of the
major drivers for studying and working abroad among South Korean youth, who take a leap of
faith in undertaking creative and alternative global pathways abroad.
Who ends up constituting this South Korean global army of foot soldiers? While more
well-to-do and affluent South Korean families have the ability to send their children abroad to
more prestigious countries, this is only specific to those with access to multiple passports, visas,
destinations, or world-class educational institutions. The majority of young people, however,
reflect the growing precarious under/unemployed population of South Korea getting by as
servers, baristas, convenience store clerks, contingent workers, and sex workers who are still
only one generation away from poverty an increasingly class polarized society (Koo 2007). This
up-coming generation, many of whom are not from metropolitan areas, look outside the
imagined borders of the nation (Anderson 2006) in search of temporary respite and solutions to
the cycles of domestic inequality.

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In demystifying the bubble of K-pop and Asian ascendance, this dissertation examines
the rise of varied educational and labor migration pathways among today’s South Korean youth.
It becomes as a window into understanding how South Korea’s “global generation” bears the
weight of the country’s emerging aspirations to become a world-class economy. Following the
experiences of young South Koreans in three of the most prominent English educational
destinations, the Philippines, the United States, and Australia, each chapter demonstrates the
institutional migration processes that reinforce domestic inequalities confronted by the migrants
themselves in the labor and educational systems of receiving destinations. At the same time, as
these institutional processes retrench existing inequalities, the mobilities that these moves create
and the pathways that they forge leads to meaningful moments and small jumps in social, class,
or economic status that provide some grounds for reimagining the precarity of their
conditionality in their home country and abroad. This simultaneous experience of transnational
stratification and transnational mobility is what I describe as transnational stratified mobility,
which contextualizes the larger spectrum of South Korean youth on the move.
Each chapter illustrates the experience of transnational stratified mobilities in dynamic
ways. In the Philippines, South Korean youth who cannot afford to go to other more prestigious
destinations use the Philippines as a “training ground” to learn English and experience temporary
boosts in social status through transient colonial practices reinforced by unequal relations and
exchanges between South Korea and the Philippines. In the United States, which represents the
most established educational destination, we observe how young South Korean migrants in Los
Angeles are facilitated by enclave migration processes that serves as a protective safety net
against their undocumented employment, but can also serve as a mobility trap that can
significantly deter their social mobility projects and decisions for return to South Korea. In the

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United States, the lack of varied legalized pathways to citizenship ends up contributing to
migrants’ overstaying over time. Finally, in the case of Australia, while migrants are legally
allowed to access the formal labor market, the conditions of their visa and racialized labor
market segmentation end up spatially segregating them in rural work or manual labor fields that
impede their goals of gaining cosmopolitan experiences. Their paradoxical inclusion in
Australian society is a compromise that they half-heartedly accept as they realize that the
national power and mobility of South Korean citizenship does not translate into overcoming
racial and class inequities. Such empirical snapshots of South Korean youth on the move exposes
the inherent contradictions within the South Korean state’s project for global citizenship.

Unlearning English
English study abroad projects are often constructed as a “win-win” situation by the South
Korean government in search of temporary solutions to unemployment and receiving
governments seeking to profit from educational export schemes. This dissertation finds that
many do not end up learning English or interacting with foreign cultures. For instance, migrants
who undertake English language study in the most desirable destination of the United States end
up working in a self-segregated ethnic economy, where they are able to get by without speaking
English. While migrants desire to leave the ethnic economy, their legal exclusion from the
mainstream labor market combined with their economic dependence on the ethnic economy
prevents them from pursuing initial goals of learning English and interacting with mainstream
society. Australia echoes a similar scenario where migrants desire to interact with “native”
English speakers through maximizing working holiday programs that grant them access to the
mainstream Australian labor market. Despite their legal inclusion in the Australian labor market,

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regional work requirements segregates them in rural communities, where they become targets of
racial violence. In their isolation, their compounding exclusion hinders many of them from even
interacting with native speakers. They instead live and work among other co-ethnic or migrant
workers. Despite the fact that student-migrants spend the least amount of time in the Philippines,
I find that migrants there meet their small-scale goals of increasing their TOEFL scores or
advancing their speaking abilities. However, goals of learning English are compromised in this
country, because it is not seen as an authentic “English speaking” destination.

Migrant Categorizations
This dissertation challenges existing migrant categorizations. The categorization of
migrants as “tourists,” “workers,” or “students” have resulted in politically hidden experiences
that often do not recognize the labor of the latter, continuing to divide and isolate them from
accessing advocacy groups that work towards the recognition of their rights. In Australia,
working holiday makers and temporary graduate workers who are designated as “tourists” and
“students,” respectively are core constituents in labor migration schemes but are not politically
positioned as part of labor migration policies (Robertson 2014). Shanthi Robertson and
colleagues (2018) critiqued the ways in which migration studies have often taken wholesale
categorizations of migrants to advance bounded typologies based on a fixed sense of their
motivations. She argues that this has resulted in a limited conceptual capacity to capture the
complexity and connections in the various and often overlapping forms of young people’s
transnational mobility or to adequately account for those who do not fit or remain in these
categories.

176
In recent times, there has been an increasing number of works looking at the intersection
of labor and student migration that have begun to challenge these bounded migration typologies.
As mentioned earlier, scholars looking at international “scholarship” students in Denmark
observe how “students” must work a set number of hours to obtain government scholarships for
tuition rebates (Luthra and Platt 2016; Valentin 2015; Munk et al 2012). Others looking at source
receiving countries of international students, such as Japan or the United States, recognize how
some non-labor migration schemes like tourism or student migration are not legalized and work
as “side-door migrations” for labor (see Liu-Farrier 2009; Choi 2017; Hwang 2018). In
examining the intersections between student and labor migration, this dissertation seeks to
contribute and add to the existing challenges of these bounded categorizations that essentialize
(Faist et al 2013) migrant experiences. Instead, it recognizes heterogeneities within migrant
groups along the lines of class status, gender, education attainment or occupation but also
migrant motivations and aspirations.

Gender
Gender dimensions are present within student and labor migration schemes and must
continue to be explored in future research. Beginning in the 1980s, increasing numbers of
unmarried middle-class women in their twenties and thirties have been leaving their homes to
work, study, and live in Western countries (Kim 2011). These numbers have established that
educational migration is a female enterprise for East Asian sending countries. Growing
discontent with their subordinate gender status in their home country, young upwardly mobile
migrant women seek out advanced degrees and language study overseas, not only to escape
gendered expectations as daughters at home and as women in their society, but also to overcome

177
barriers of the glass ceiling in the workplace (Kelsky 2001). Despite that many return to their
home country with higher levels of education, many women find that their improved educational
status is still not recognized at home. Instead, female returnees face prospects of downward
career mobility because they are often viewed as having “aged out” of the professional labor
market, meaning that they are viewed as “too old,” but also overqualified, to fill clerical “office
lady” positions typically designed for women (Kelsky 2001; Ono and Piper 2004).
However, such conventional gendered narratives have been challenged by my research.
Studying abroad is no longer viewed as a female enterprise or even a middle-class project. Both
findings contradict earlier assumptions about the West as the savior country for Asian women. In
fact, because of the high numbers of South Korean women who have gone abroad to Western
countries, there have been increasingly sensationalized media reports about South Korean
women engaging in sex work, being more sexually active and co-habiting with partners. In fact,
many of the women migrants I interviewed who ended up going to New Zealand do so because
family members were sensitive to the news reports about South Korean women becoming sex
trafficked in Australia. The same goes for the United States. Women returnees who undertake
English language programs in Los Angeles are viewed with suspicion and pegged as “unmodel”
international students entering the United States for reasons other than learning English. These
damaging narratives contest existing conceptualizations of student migration as a middle-class
enterprise, as they complicate our discussions of gender.
In addition, past research has never discussed the ways in which masculinities are shaped
by gendered processes of student migration. We see in the case of the Philippines how
heterosexual South Korean male migrants use their South Korean masculinity as a form of racial,
economic and social power to engage in unequal exchanges with Filipina women. Similar to the

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case of Western male sex tourists in advancing economies (Rivers-Moore 2016), South Korean
men with low social status or minimal sexual experiences will exploit their racial and economic
capital as a way to remedy their bruised masculinity from their rejection as a low status man in
South Korea. These kinds of unequal exchanges that are more traditionally linked with tourist
activity add more complexity to our understandings of labor and student mobility as they
challenge how we view and essentialize migrant experiences in discussions of international
migration. Future research will need to investigate how gender constitutes student and labor
migration processes in a dynamic way that does not take destinations at face value but rather
considers how sexualities and gender identity can shift throughout this “life changing” and
“transitional” experience of migration.

Globalization and the Ghost of the Cold War
Dominant work on contemporary social change in East Asia tends to focus on South
Korea’s rapid industrialization within the framework of “economic development.” Emphasizing
a replicable model of economic development, many studies abide by narratives of modernity that
center the West and situate South Korea as a latecomer within this American-centric narrative of
modernization and globalization. As a result of this history, Korean studies has long been
entrenched in certain types of discourses about the nation. Most of these studies have focused on
the impact of economic transformation to the country. Who gets left out of this narrative?
This dissertation highlights the experiences of those displaced, excluded and
marginalized by the narratives of economic development and globalization in South Korea. Yet
the “students” who I have studied, a constituency who find themselves economically displaced
before and after migration, are but just one group of those whose stories remain illegible in South

179
Korea’s narrative of global ascension. I accordingly situate their stories along with other
marginalized groups. These groups include Korean adoptees, who arguably represent the largest
export of the country after the Korean War. To this day, South Korean historiographies still erase
this narrative of the past. Indeed, the “Forgotten War” (Cumings 2010) is often missing from
discussions on industrialization and the decolonization of South Korea since the Cold War. The
significance of the Cold War in the project of modernity is important because the notion of
economic development as the dominant path to advancement in the postwar era was born from
the perception that poverty was the hotbed of communism. The idea of economic development,
as Seungsook Moon (2005) states, is linked to the strategic and political interests of the capitalist
West in the Cold War rivalry.
After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the Cold War rivalry has been replaced by
globalization. Contemporary discussions of South Korean globalization are embedded within this
particular narrative. Critical Korean feminist works have begun to contest these master narratives
of Korean post-war nationalism (Baik 2019; Kim 2010). For instance, work on adoptees and
camptown women have shown the contradictions and destruction of the Korean War (Moon
1997; E. Kim 2010). These works examine the livelihoods of people who contradict mainstream
understandings of Korean identity through the lens of “non-normative subjectivities and spaces
deemed expendable to the U.S. and South Korean national agendas.” (see Baik 2019).
This dissertation builds on critical feminist work on Korean studies in its examination of
what we could categorize as a group of expendable non-normative subjects. They are but just one
group of those who, along with the poor and elderly, are left out of South Korea’ mass economic
growth (Koo 2006; Song 2009; Yang 2018). The “students” who are the focus of this dissertation
are some of the most precarious in South Korean society, a far cry from their depiction as able-

180
bodied citizens and the G-20 generation who is supposed to maintain and continue South Korea’s
global ascendance, symbolized through their acquisition of the English language. This
acquisition is supposed to reward them with upwardly mobile employment. Yet this is far from
the truth.

Other National Cases
South Korea is not the only country invested in the global English language project.
Many countries who have also felt the pressures of economic globalization have also begun to
implement English and global language policies in educational systems across Japan, China,
Vietnam, Egypt, Colombia, Indonesia among others (Kobayashi 2007; Nguyen 2013; Latif 2017;
Chang 2006; González 2010; Lauder 2008). These have facilitated the promotion of educational
and labor migration abroad for English. Scholars have noted the global development of a private
educational migration industry and the ways these structures are linked with state neoliberal
projects for human capital development (Collins 2012). Across the three destinations, I found
that beyond South Koreans, there was a large and growing number of Japanese, Taiwanese,
Vietnam, Colombian, and Thai youth participating in overseas investments for English language
education. For instance, in a similar vein, Japanese youth also undertook working holidays in
Australia due to their dissatisfaction with their status as entry level or low wage workers in Japan
combined with anxieties about Japan’s economic bubble (Kawashima 2010). In the Philippines,
not only were Korean-owned schools like Oceanside catering to Japanese students but there were
also a sizeable number of Japanese-owned schools in the Philippines (Nobutaka 2019) catering
to a group of people who were taking short term and often sponsored leave of absences from
their workplace. Interviews with English school owners have also reported that Vietnamese

181
students are a growing target demographic. In the United States, I have seen the targeting of
Latin American populations particularly Colombians studying English abroad. For instance, at
Cali English language school, there were Colombian agents who were dedicated to the
recruitment of Colombian students and facilitated their continued flows. Many of these students
came from middle class backgrounds though it is suspected like the case of South Koreans via
cumulative causation, this may diversify over time. In many ways, the South Korean case is not
an exception to the rule but a window into understanding the growing overseas investments in
the global language of English as a modern-day consequence of U.S. imperial legacies.

Where does China fit?
While South Korea’s English fever has long been the center of public and scholarly
attention, in recent years, the popularity of Mandarin Chinese has become apparent with the
concomitant the rise of China in the global economy. A number of scholars have begun to
document increased educational investments in Mandarin Chinese (Curran 2020; Kang 2017).
For instance, educational migration scholars have previously observed increased flows for study
abroad to countries like Singapore to learn both English and Chinese but also Singulish (Kang
2012; Bae and Park 2016). With China’s geopolitical position expected to accelerate in the near
future, it is important to consider how the rise of Mandarin Chinese as a global language will
shape existing English language educational and labor migration flows.
Indeed, while the enduring history of U.S. and British colonial conquest has produced
multiple destinations to learn English from advanced white settler nations to postcolonial low-
cost nations, destinations to learn Chinese are limited to select countries in the historical Chinese
diaspora such as Singapore, China, and Taiwan. In my research, there were a number of

182
interviewees in the Philippines learning English who had previously studied abroad in China as
part of their academic major or as a separate move to learn the language for job market
participation. While these migrants believed that Chinese will be important in the twenty first
century and studied abroad in China as a result, they made the point that this moment has not
arrived yet and that the South Korean job market continues to privilege English language skills
in the workplace. It is not one or the other but that they have to learn both. These observations
seem to support the theory that neoliberal human development projects are a part of a forward-
moving project of increasing the stock value of one’s “embodied human capital” (Anagnost
2013) and require constant adaptation and transformation of individuals in order to keep up with
the fast-changing, global times.

Epilogue
Let me end with the story of Mansu, whose story of persistent precarity before and after
migration embodies the experience of the G-20 generation and how their experiences are marked
by transnational stratified mobility. It’s 2018. Mansu invited me out on his brother-in-law’s
fishing boat in the East Sea several hundred kilometers from the coast of Gangleung. They were
looking to get lucky on this season’s squid. Dried squid is a delicacy in South Korea that is often
eaten with Korean spirits like soju and beer. Because of the sea warming and regional
overfishing within South Korean waters, squid shortages have made it difficult for Mansu and
his brother-in-law to make money on this season’s wholesale market. Before 2018, Mansu had
never been on a boat or even thought to make a living off of it. However, returning from
Australia after three years (two years on working holiday and one year on a student visa), where

183
he ran an informal massage shop, he had run out of options. Mansu is now 33 years old. On the
boat, he continued with his story:
I am older, and I am trying to get job at an average company and my age is 35. I have to
go in as the most junior person. This is a disadvantage. You can’t even get a job. The
company won’t even give you a chance. If you go in as a junior over 30, your co-workers
are uncomfortable. The Korean mindset is “wow, that person’s 35, what did they do until
now?” This is the worst kind of judgement. If I tell them, “hey, I accomplished something.
I ran a business.” They are like “Oh really? Can you speak English well? “No, I can’t.”
They think, “he just went and played?” Whatever experience or life I had, I just became
this person who played. I just learned life lessons for myself. If you have money, you can
come back to South Korea right away and even open up a café. You have money at home
so you want to come back, start a business and live. You don’t have a lot of those kids in
Australia. So a lot of us don’t go back.

The reason Mansu had come back to South Korea was because of a bad break-up. After a
few failed business projects including selling dog harnesses and used golf clubs, Mansu began
working with his brother-in-law who had the advantage of using his father’s boat. Despite never
having done this line of work before, Mansu says, “if there’s one thing Australia taught me is
that every job is worth trying. I am not afraid of doing this or that because I’ve already been
through it all.” Indeed, Mansu had tried a lot of different jobs including farming, providing
massages, serving food, cooking, and cleaning. I end with Mansu’s story because his experiences
of return and the many others introduced throughout these pages disrupt standard and
conventional narratives about Asian economic ascension. What this dissertation shows is that to
capture such stories requires the adoption of “bottom up” approaches to Korean studies. Only in
this way can we investigate the politically hidden dimensions of Korean social life and their
intersections with transnational spaces and the diaspora abroad.

184
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Creator Choi, Carolyn Areum (author)

Core Title Making global citizens: South Korean student and labor mobilities in the Global Age

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 08/07/2023

Defense Date 06/16/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag class,English language education,Globalization,International Education,international migration,Labor,mobility,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcoloniality,South Korea,stratification,student mobility,working holiday,youth

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Advisor Parreñas, Rhacel (committee chair), Chung, Angie (committee member), Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee member), Kang, David (committee member)

Creator Email carolysc@usc.edu

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