Content
As of 2019, 2.5 million foreigners were residing in Korea. Compared to 49,500 in 1990, their populations have increased by more than 50 times in 30 years. It has brought Korean nationals to face new environments that they have not experienced in politics, economy, society, and culture.To cope with such a rapid increase of migrants and a change in the migration environment at home and abroad, the Korean government has issued various policies to help migrants integrate into Korean society and improve migration-related laws and systems. While the institutions such as OECD, IOM, ILO, and World Bank have partially released the status of migrants and migration policies in Korea, there have been no comprehensive reports covering migration status and policy trends since the MRTC published “Korea Migration Policy Profile” back in 2011. Accordingly, the need to update the recent
data and detailed trends of migration status and policies in Korea has been raised. Therefore the research aims to provide a comprehensive report on migration and publish it as a series on Migration Trends in Korea.
This profile consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 describes core information about the Republic of Korea; Chapter 2 covers the current status of the migration policies and implementation systems; Chapter 3 deals with the trends and status of migrants by visa using the last ten-year data (2010-2019); Chapter 4 Chapter presents the economic activities status of migrants using the survey data from 2017 to 2020; Chapter 5 deals with the outbound and inbound trends for Koreans and domestic migration using the last ten-year data (2010-2019); and Chapter 6 concludes by presenting forward migration policy measures.