Minkyung Koh and Joowon Yuk
in 경제와 사회 Economy and Society, 149, pp. 296 – 326
Abstract: This study analyzes the increasing presence of international students in South Korea not merely as a matter of educational mobility or the expansion of cultural exchange, but through the lens of the Asian ‘Education-Labor-Migration Nexus’. The number of international students in Korea has surpassed 260,000 in 2024 after a decade of rapid growth, a trend intertwined with government strategies such as the “Study Korea 300K Project.” This paper traces how international students are selectively integrated and managed within Korea’s “multi-tier migration regime”(Chung, 2022), being repositioned as ‘student-workers’ and ultimately as ‘regional resident workers.’ It explores how these students are assigned multiple roles at the intersection of declining school-age populations, regional depopulation and decline, and labor market policies. Recent policies increasingly position international students as labor forces linked to regional demographic and industrial revitalization, granting differentiated conditions of stay, labor rights, and settlement support. While such changes appear to address both student integration and national interests by increasing post-study settlement opportunities, they are also an extension of Korea’s ongoing approach to ‘outsourcing’ structural social and economic challenges to migrants and international students. Given the risks of deepening mobility inequalities and the ‘internal othering’ of international students, future policies should move beyond an outsourcing framework and focus on guaranteeing the sociocultural rights and autonomous settlement choices of international students.
About the author: Joowon Yuk is a HYI Visiting Scholar from 2025-26.