Abstract

South Korea and Japan have among the lowest levels of international migration among all rich democracies. While both countries enacted far-reaching democratic reforms in their recent histories, their immigration policies remained relatively stagnant. This article examines how South Korea and Japan’s de jure and de facto migration policies have enabled both states to maintain low levels of immigration while meeting labour demands through the proliferation of visa categories. Because each visa category comes with its own set of rights, migrant claims have centred on the circumscribed rights of their individual visa statuses that have, in turn, institutionalised noncitizen hierarchies within each country. Migration governance in South Korea and Japan thus reflects not liberal convergence but, rather, multi-tier migration regimes that extend generous institutionalised rights to some categories of migrants and exclude others from permanent settlement. Rather than assume that the liberalisation of immigration policies is an inevitable outcome of political liberalisation, or view specific immigration policy reforms as indicators of broad liberalisation, the two cases caution us to recognise that liberal migration regimes are far from becoming the universal model among democratic countries.

摘要

在所有富裕民主国家中，韩国和日本的国际移民水平最低。虽然两国在最近的历史中都实施了影响深远的民主改革，但他们的移民政策仍然相对停滞不前。本文考察了韩国和日本在法律上和事实上移民政策使这两个州能够保持低移民水平，同时通过签证类别的增加来满足劳动力需求。由于每个签证类别都有自己的一套权利，因此移民要求集中在其个人签证身份的限制权利上，而这些权利反过来又使每个国家/地区的非公民等级制度化。因此，韩国和日本的移民治理反映的不是自由主义趋同，而是多层次的移民制度，将慷慨的制度化权利扩展到某些类别的移民，并将其他人排除在永久定居之外。与其假设移民政策的自由化是政治自由化的必然结果，或者将具体的移民政策改革视为广泛自由化的指标，