Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

South Korea has recently implemented a temporary migrant worker program, called the Employment Permit System (EPS), to meet the needs of domestic businesses for low-skilled workers. Much discussion has focused on whether this and other East Asian migration programs would fail like European and American guest worker programs did decades earlier. By examining the ways in which the strong South Korean state has gained and maintained control over not only migrant workers but also employers and labor-sending governments, this research argues that the EPS quota management and classification systems are essential to the effective, but exploitative, enforcement of temporary migrant rules. The government’s heavy-handed intervention in labor migration has also produced an extreme ethnic and gender imbalance in the composition of the migrant workforce and a geographical clustering of “non-Korean” male migrant workers in traditional industrial cities in outer parts of Seoul. This research extends our understanding of temporary migrant worker programs by looking beyond the success/failure dichotomy and the Asian model of migration to address how specific programs are actually administered and what are the intended and unintended outcomes of such tight control.