From Human Rights to Citizens’ Rights? Democratic Framing Contests and Refugee Politics in South Korea

In 2018, the South Korean government denied refugee status to all but two of the almost 500 Yemenis who, fleeing civil war in their home country, had arrived earlier in the year on the resort island of Jeju. This decision was made in the context of a short-lived but intense public backlash, even though the overall number of refugees has remained consistently low. Three years later, nearly 400 Afghans were evacuated to South Korea with government support and little controversy. What explains these different patterns of refugee politicization in South Korea? I argue that the 2018 episode of anti-refugee activism in South Korea does not follow the typical script in immigration politics which pits “natives” against “outsiders”; rather, it is a reflection of internal political divisions. In this article, I focus on political framing contests involving governmental and non-governmental actors that draw upon prior rhetorical frames of political mobilization which had developed in a broader context of state-building, development, and democratization. The 2018 Jeju “crisis” was partially a reaction against state-led multiculturalism (damunhwa), which had gained momentum since the 2000s. It also signalled a political backlash against previous decades of social and political movements that framed labour rights, migrant workers’ rights, and other minority rights as a necessary expansion of human rights befitting a responsible “advanced nation.” At the same time, the varied responses to the arrival of Yemenis in 2018 and Afghans in 2021 show that the coherence and resonance of competing political frames during key moments can help explain the type and degree of political mobilization on refugee policy. Furthermore, these comparative case studies show that South Korean attitudes toward refugees have not settled into stable political-economic coalitions and remain contested and in flux.