Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies

Despite labour shortages and rapidly shrinking working-age populations, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan shared restrictive immigration policies and exclusionary practices toward immigrants until the early 2000s. While Taiwan maintained this trajectory, Japan took incremental steps to expand immigrant services at the grassroots level, and South Korea enacted sweeping immigration reforms. How did convergent policies generate these divergent patterns of immigrant incorporation? Departing from the dominant scholarship that focuses on culture, domestic political elites, and international norms, this book shows the important role of civil society actors - including immigrants themselves - in giving voice to immigrant interests, mobilizing immigrant actors, and shaping public debate and policy on immigration. Based on more than 150 in-depth interviews and focus groups with over twenty immigrant communities, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies examines how the civic legacies of past struggles for democracy shape current movements for immigrant rights and recognition.

Introduction. Is There an East Asian Model of Immigrant Incorporation?; 1. How Civic Legacies Shape Immigration Politics; 2. Constructing Developmental Citizens in East Asia; 3. Civic Legacies and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies; 4. 'I Can't Be Tanaka': Understanding Immigrant Incorporation through Migrant Voices; 5. Marriage and Migration; 6. Multiculturalism with Adjectives; Epilogue.

Erin Aeran Chung holds the Charles D. Miller Chair in East Asian Politics at Johns Hopkins University. Her research has been supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, the Japan Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She is the author of Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge, 2010).