Vietnamese People in Korea - South Korea

South Korea

Vietnamese migration to South Korea began later, but quickly grew to a much larger scale; their population consists mainly of migrant workers and women introduced to local husbands through marriage agencies. In 1994, 20,493 labour migrants went from Vietnam to South Korea on traineeship visas; by 1997, this had risen by about 10% to 22,325. Migrants were mostly male and unskilled; they were employed in small and medium-sized companies in labour-intensive industries such as fishing and manufacturing. Spousal migration has a somewhat longer history; during the Vietnam War, some of the more than 300,000 South Korean soldiers and civilian support staff stationed in Vietnam married Vietnamese women and brought them back to Korea; however, many of these marriages ended in divorce. Spousal migration would not become a large-scale phenomenon until the 1990s, when South Korean men, unable to attract wives locally, began to turn to marriage agencies to seek brides in overseas countries, including Vietnam. As of 2006, 5,000 Vietnamese brides immigrate to South Korea every year. Korean men married to Vietnamese women typically meet on marriage tours, which are sometimes subsidized by rural governments keen on increasing birthrates in the Korean countryside.