How do formerly exclusive nations evolve to be more inclusive in the face of migration? Governmental officials and journalists have seen migrant integration as either a statist or social project. However, it is fundamentally a nation-building project that entails a redefinition of who “we” are. This talk presents three distinct national narratives: economic, political, and constitutive stories. A series of survey experiments with an embedded focus group analysis is used to test the three narratives’ effectiveness in promoting migrant inclusion in South Korea. Contrary to statist narratives that have focused on economic or multicultural justifications for migrant integration, the democracy narrative has the most appeal in moving native attitudes, conditional on whether the narrator is a native or migrant.

About the Speaker:

Gidong Kim joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as Korea Program Postdoctoral Fellow in the fall 2023. He holds a PhD in Political Science from University of Missouri, an MA and a BA in Political Science from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He studies comparative political behavior and economy in East Asia, with a particular focus on nationalism and identity politics, inequality and redistribution, and migration in South Korea and East Asia. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Asian Perspective, Korea Observer, and Social Science Quarterly.