Korean Diaspora - Return Migration

Return Migration

Koreans born or settled overseas have been migrating back to both North and South Korea ever since the restoration of Korean independence; perhaps the most famous example is Kim Jong-Il, born in Vyatskoye, Khabarovsk Krai, where his father Kim Il-sung had been serving in the Red Army. Postwar migrations of Koreans from throughout the Japanese Empire back to the Korean peninsula were characterised both bureaucratically and popularly as "repatriation", a restoration of the congruence between the Korean population and its territory. The pre-colonial Korean state had not clearly laid out the boundaries of who was a citizen; however, the Japanese colonial government had registered all Koreans in a separate family registry, a separation which continued even if an individual Korean migrated to Manchuria or Japan; thus North and South Korea had a clear legal definition of who was a repatriating Korean, and did not have to create any special legal categories of national membership for them, the way Germany had done for post-World War II German expellees.

The largest-scale repatriation activities took place in Japan, where Chongryon sponsored the return of Zainichi Korean residents to North Korea; beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with a trickle of repatriates continuing until as late as 1984, nearly 90,000 Zainichi Koreans resettled in the reclusive communist state, though their ancestral homes were in the South. However, word of the difficult economic and political conditions filtered back to Japan, decreasing the popularity of this option. Around one hundred such repatriates are believed to have later escaped from North Korea; the most famous is Kang Chol-Hwan, who published a book about his experience, The Aquariums of Pyongyang. South Korea, however, was a popular destination for Koreans who had settled in Manchukuo during the colonial period; returnees from Manchukuo such as Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan had a large influence on the process of nation-building in South Korea.

Until the 1980s, Soviet Koreans did not repatriate in any large numbers and played little role in defining the boundaries of membership in the Korean nation. However, roughly 1,000 Sakhalin Koreans are also estimated to have independently repatriated to the North in the decades after the end of World War II, when returning to their ancestral homes in the South was not an option due to the lack of Soviet relations with the South and Japan's refusal to grant them transit rights. In 1985, Japan began to fund the return of Sakhalin Koreans to South Korea; however, only an additional 1,500 took this offer, with the vast majority of the population remaining on Sakhalin or moving to the Russian Far East instead.

With the rise of the South Korean economy in the 1980s, economic motivations became increasingly prevalent in overseas Koreans' decisions of whether to repatriate and in which part of the peninsula to settle. 356,790 Chinese citizens have migrated to South Korea since the reform and opening up of China; almost two-thirds are estimated to be Chaoxianzu. Similarly, some Koryo-saram from Central Asia have also moved to South Korea as guest workers, to take advantage of the high wages offered by the growing economy; remittances from South Korea to Uzbekistan, for example, were estimated to exceed USD100 million in 2005. Return migration through arranged marriage is another option, portrayed in the 2005 South Korean film Wedding Campaign, directed by Hwang Byung-kook. However, the Koryo-saram often face the most difficulty integrating into Korean society due to their poor command of the Korean language and the fact that their dialect, Koryo-mar, differs significantly from the Seoul dialect considered standard in the South.

Return migration from the United States has been much less common than that from Japan or the former Soviet Union, as the economic push factor was far less than in 1960s Japan or post-Soviet collapse Central Asia. However, an increasing number of aspiring Korean American singers and actors, finding their career progress in Hollywood blocked, choose to go to South Korea through talent and modelling agencies; prominent examples include singer Brian Joo (of R&B duo Fly to the Sky) and actor Daniel Henney (who initially spoke no Korean).