Gendered Nationalism in Practice: An Intersectional Analysis of Migrant Integration Policy in South Korea

The Korean Family and Marriage Migration

South Korea has witnessed an increase in women’s education and employment in the last decades, along with delayed and decreased numbers of marriages (H. Park and Woo 2020). This has resulted in the country having the lowest total fertility rate among postindustrial nations (OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] 2018). However, traditional family institutions have persisted in Korea, including the strong link between marriage and childbearing, and unequal gender relations within marriage (Raymo et al. 2015). This resilience of the traditional structures is often seen to represent the continuing influence of Confucianism. Inherited from Chinese culture, the Confucian value system has been foundational to institution of the Korean family, with its emphasis on filial piety, patrilineality, and hierarchies of gender and generation (I. H. Park and Cho 1995). Within the hierarchical structure, a certain amount of authority is ceded to senior women within Korean families (especially the son’s mother) following Confucian gerontocratic ideals (Lee and H. G. Park 2001). For example, in standard traditional family practice, the wife of the eldest son is expected to follow her mother-in-law in carrying out domestic and ceremonial responsibilities. Although women today increasingly reject these cultural imperatives, the idea that reproductive labor and especially child rearing are the core functions of the Confucian family and women’s responsibility, persists even among the younger Koreans (Yang and Rosenblatt 2008).

Women in Korea, suffering the highest gender pay gap and among the longest working hours in the OECD, often withdraw from paid work when they have children (OECD 2017, 2020). Korean wives are often challenged by their husbands’ tendency to view housework and caring as women’s responsibilities (Oshio, Nozaki, and Kobayashi 2013; Qian and Sayer 2016). In parallel, hiring foreign domestic workers is illegal, and roughly half of dual-earning families with children rely on grandparents for infant care work (Ministry of Health and Welfare 2015). Yet even in asking grandparents for help, Korean mothers across all educational backgrounds often feel the need to “prove” why they deserve child care support (Oh 2018). Because of such a persistent gendered division of labor, Korean women find marriage increasingly unattractive (Raymo et al. 2015). This trend is reflected in the figures, such as the percentage of single women ages 35–44 years ballooning from 3.5% in 1990 to 18.6% in 2010, and women’s attitude to marriage as something necessary or desirable dropping from 73.5% in 1998 to 48% in 2018 (KOSIS [Korean Statistical Information Service] 1998, 2010, 2018).

As many Korean women have removed themselves from the marriage market, the phenomenon of Korean men marrying women from economically less-developed countries emerged. This has also been influenced by the unbalanced sex ratio from the previous preference for sons and women’s tendency to “marry up” (H. Lee 2012). Although marriage between Korean men and foreign wives has been promoted within the Unification Church since the 1980s, the significant wave of recent marriage migrants started in the 1990s, with rural-based Korean grooms marrying Chinese brides of Korean ethnic background through state-funded matchmaking programs and private brokering agencies (Freeman 2011). This practice expanded into urban areas and started to include brides from countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Thailand (H. Lee 2012; Seol 2006). Since 2003, around 10% of marriages in Korea have been categorized as “cross-border,” with the majority formed through marriage migration and concentrated in low-income households (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family 2016). Today, the image of “mail-order-brides” and wives being commercially bought continues, despite evidence demonstrating the predominant use of social networks over commercial brokering services (Yu and Chen 2018) and the erroneous conception of marriage migrants as lacking agency (Constable 2005).

Korea’s Multicultural Policy as a Nationalist Project

South Korea is framed by the internal presumption that its population is mono-ethnic, aligning ideas of single blood ancestry with governmentally produced ethnic nationalism (Pai 2000; Shin 2006; Tikhonov 2010). This conception has been challenged by the influx of migrants in recent decades. The creation of multicultural-family policy indicates how the state is anxiously dealing with changing demographics and unsettled notions of Korea as an ethnically homogenous society. Within the national crisis of Korea’s low birth rate and aging population, this policy enabled the state to engage with its multicultural families as a way to boost the country’s population (H. M. Kim 2012). The state discourse is also echoed in the frequent media portrayals of migrants and their children as emerging multicultural citizens and members of the changing nation (K. Park 2014). In accepting the need for this nationally transformative process, Korean women volunteering at an NGO (nongovernmental organization) program for marriage migrants consider their unpaid labor as representative of their patriotic participation within the wider project of Korean nation building (Choo 2017). This contemporary situation is a drastic change from the late 1990s, when children born between a Korean mother and a foreign father were not even eligible for Korean citizenship based on patrilineal jus sanguinis. However, the current focus on multicultural families remains driven by a biological conception of identity (extended to the migrants as potential mothers) and reflects a notion of the genealogically defined “national family” (Collins 1998) acceptable to both the state and public. Despite the positive official discourse, however, the mixed-race “Korean” children, regardless of their parents’ ethnicity or whichever of their father or mother is Korean, regularly confront discrimination stemming from the particular degree that they fail to embody the “blood purity” of the Korean nation (C. S. Lee 2017; M. Lee 2008).

Korea’s multicultural policy has been critiqued for its patriarchal, ethnocentric approach. For H. S. Kim (2008), national patrilineal family centeredness—the fact that these migrants are married to Korean men (the familial head in the patrilineal Confucian model)—is responsible for the state focus on marriage migrants. Scholars have also critiqued the policy as an “ethno-centric governance model” (H. M. Kim 2012, 205), and a form of “ethnicized maternal citizenship” (M. Kim 2013), qualifying migrants’ status through their being mothers within Korean families. And in her ethnography examining Filipina marriage migrants in rural Korea, M. Kim (2018) suggests that this patriarchally framed ethnocentric discourse of multiculturalism directly informed these migrants’ elusive quest for belonging in Korea.

Although the studies mentioned here all reflect the influence of nationalism within multicultural policy as an ethnocentric approach to citizenship, their concern is not to unpack the intersectional dynamics of gendered nationalism and the implications of such. In building on these works, I therefore introduce the quotidian role of gendered nationalism in the country’s immigrant politics and nation making, and demonstrate how fluidly it intersects with the ideas of ethnicity and patriarchy highlighted by previous authors. My analysis discloses that contemporary Korean nationalism is not built exclusively on the notion of pure ethnicity, but is constructed malleably between ideas of ethnic nationalism (“Koreanness” as solely “authentic”) and multicultural nationalism (accepting other ethnicities within the nation) through entirely gendered dimensions. By attending to the varied positions and agencies active within the ground-level workings of the policy, I also analyze the complexities of the singular conception of state power and intent dominant in the literature.

Migrants’ Reproductive Role for the Nation

The Korean staff interviewed all expressed a desire to help marriage migrants and sympathetically acknowledged their need for social support. The “feelings of sympathy,” “feeling sorry for,” “desire to help,” and “their difficult situations” were all phrases that Korean staff commonly used in explaining their decision to work at the Centers, and some even argued that their empathy for the migrants’ plight was the primary reason.

Yet behind this common sentiment of compassion, a sense of nationalism rationalized the staff’s emotions. Most of their comments on state policy and migrants were related to ideas of society and the nation, and specifically how migrants affected Korea. Even in describing their personal feelings about migrants, the Koreans attributed these to national contexts, more than their individual perspectives. For instance, when I asked Misuk—in her 50s, and had worked at the Center since its inception—how she felt about her work:

I feel that they [marriage migrants] are very patriotic [to Korea]. Because they came all the way here to get married, into a family with very difficult situations. . . . To be frank, they [these Korean men] would not be able to get married otherwise. . . . The important thing is that they have a baby. One, two, three [babies]. I think they are really patriotic, and I think it is a great thing.

The populist discourse that the low birth rate is a national problem informed Misuk’s answer. According to her, Korea desperately needs babies, and marriage migrants are foreign gendered bodies that helpfully arrived to meet the national demand. For her, it was not the personal well-being of the migrants that had provoked her sympathy, but that they had left their own nations to marry otherwise unmarriageable Korean men and have babies with them. Misuk was not shy in saying that “a migrant having a baby” was “a great thing.” She praised the migrants as “patriotic” but omitted the migrants’ viewpoint, as she perceived the migrants as the only type of women that lower-class Korean men could marry. Misuk viewed the marriage migrants, as foreign women, as subsumable to the needs of their Korean husbands and the nation.

Although Misuk considered that low-status bachelors were not desirable grooms, she still saw them as useful fertile members of the nation. For her, it was most “important” that these migrants arrived to “have babies” with such men, whose only national worth resided in their ability to father Korean children. Relative to the idea of a current “national emergency,” where Korean women would not produce enough babies, Misuk appreciated that marriage migrants had come to create offspring with Korean lineage and believed that they deserved priority over other migrants for alleviating this national problem. She took for granted that this expansion of the citizenry had to be through intermarriage, presumably the only way “outsiders [could] conceivably join the national collectivity” (Yuval-Davis 1997, 27).

Suyeon, a middle-manager in her mid-30s, had worked for the Center for three years. Enthusiastic about her work, she complained about the low budget allocated to the Centers and how this hindered their ability to support the migrants. In conversation, I mentioned that this engaged policy approach was rare elsewhere. Surprised, she asked: “Where do migrants get help then [in other countries]?” Suyeon regarded helping marriage migrants as naturally the state’s responsibility, because their presence directly connected to the nation’s well-being. She stated:

If they [migrants] get well-adjusted and settle . . . society will be calm. Otherwise, if they just run away, divorce, or have difficulties, this becomes a social problem. These days, people don’t get married [or] have babies. The state needs to support the marriage migrants as part of the immigration policy, to prevent social issues.

Like Misuk, Suyeon explained multicultural policy and migrants as tied to the issue of marriage and birth rate. Again, she understood the aim of policy as being to maintain the health of the nation relative to the well-being of the migrants. Suyeon viewed unhappy migrants as a threat to social stability, so the state effort to control their “running away” or “divorce,” prior to any resulting “social problems,” was necessary. She never questioned the existence of the Centers, assuming other societies would approach their migrant issues similarly. However, her linking of migration to the national low birth and marriage rates directly limited her discussion, as she ignored other types of migrants in Korea. Suyeon, single herself, believed that the marriage migrants’ expected duties as child-bearers and wives justified the state support and national inclusion.

Migrants Taking Over Familial Responsibilities

The Korean staff also perceived migrants as undertaking the necessary gendered caretaking roles to maintain traditional Korean familial institutions—responsibilities framed as their dutiful contribution to the nation. This was apparent when I asked about Korean anti-multiculturalism. I observed that the staff always defended migrants but consistently used the example of migrants’ undertaking of traditional gendered duties as a defense against anti-multiculturalism. Heejeong, in her 40s, recounted the following example to underline why she refuted any negative stereotypes about marriage migrants.

I know a migrant woman who maintains her role by cooking every meal for her mother-in-law and father-in-law just as if they are her own parents. We are living at a time when even the eldest [Korean] daughter-in-laws do not take care of their parents-in-law and keep their distance from them.

Another employee, Kyunghee, in her 40s used a similar example to explain why she endorsed marriage migrants and multicultural policy.

I know a case. During the national holidays, a marriage migrant came to her mother-in-law’s house and prepared all the food, while the Korean daughter-in-law just turned up with some fruits from a shop. The migrant woman laughed and said: “I am really good at even making tuiguim (a typical holiday food).” It is the [Korean] eldest daughter-in-law’s role of course. I feel like she should have done this work. As this case proves, they [migrants] are better than us.

Misuk, who emphasized the migrants’ importance as mothers to Korean children, added another of their assumed gendered responsibilities, caring for elderly parents-in-law, to positively describe their efforts:

Better-positioned sons move out [from the parents] after getting married. A bit less able sons continue to live with their parents and get married to multicultural migrants. These migrants then take care of the parents-in-law, even though they are [married to] the youngest son.

In these anecdotes, the staff used examples of migrants who took care of their parents-in-law and cooked for the family. From their perspective, these gendered duties, traditionally considered in Korea as a married women’s responsibility, were here sustained thanks to migrants. While they vehemently disagreed with the anti-multicultural perspective that marriage migrants did not deserve state support and national inclusion, they used an equally nationalist rationale in opposition, highlighting how the migrants productively undertook traditional women’s work.

It is interesting that Korean staff thought that marriage migrants were generally happy to take over these duties, rather than seeing them as involuntarily or unfairly burdened by them. The woman in Kyunghee’s account was even portrayed as being proud of her fulfillment of these family obligations, boasting about the cooking skills she acquired. As Heejeong acknowledged, this was framed in contrast to young Korean women who avoided such responsibilities and intentionally kept “their distance from” parents-in-law. As Misuk stated, migrants, despite being married to the “less able” or “youngest” sons (whose wives could be excused from family obligations following age-based Confucian tradition), dutifully took on these responsibilities. Grasping the Korean tradition of gendered familial work as inescapable, the Korean staff seemed relieved that migrants would willingly take on such duties. They appreciated and even glorified the migrants’ labor within the family, because they helped to maintain the traditional family roles that defined the nation, roles increasingly rejected by younger Korean women.

For the staff, marriage migrants and their Korean peers were separate social groups, with different gendered familial expectations. Whereas they perceived migrants positively compared with Korean women, these assessments were grounded in rhetoric of how migrants helped to preserve endangered institutions of familial labor, and stabilize a shrinking, aging Korean society. Despite this positive appraisal of the migrants’ contribution to the nation and their intent to include them as fellow citizens, the staff applied a double standard of gendered expectations to Koreans and migrants to naturalize the hierarchical positions between the groups.

This process is echoed in Taiwan, where the employers of domestic workers reproduce “a relationship of domination and exploitation over other women” by transferring the burden of domestic work and the attached social responsibility and expectations of womanhood to the migrants (Lan 2006, 124). Although the Korean staff comprehended that they were also subject to a national framework of gender inequality, they flexibly utilized this as a rationale to maintain their ethnic privilege over migrants. By uniformly celebrating the work undertaken by marriage migrants in upholding traditional family labor roles which justified their national inclusion, the staff helped to safeguard the transfer of this gendered responsibility and the status of migrants as below “Koreans.” This dynamic demonstrates how the staff’s gendered nationalism allows both the conditional incorporation of migrants as part of the nation through their gendered labor and notions of ethnic privilege to exclude migrant others from joining their Korean equals.

The staff repeatedly brought up “the problem of divorce within the multicultural family,” further exemplifying how gender, nationalism, and ethnicity were interwoven in their accounts. Although divorce is generally a taboo subject among older generations, divorce in Korea has increased rapidly since 1990s and has reached a higher level than that of many Western countries (H. Park and Raymo 2013). However, the staff particularly disdained divorce within a multicultural family as evidence of the migrants’ “real” intention to come to Korea for their “selfish” benefit, and not to support their husbands and family, and by extension the nation. Just as the staff perceived marriage migrants as the new custodians of Korea’s tradition of gendered family obligations, they applied to migrants a conservative perspective in which divorce was not tolerated. Just as state support for migrants was conditional on their fulfillment of nationally important gendered responsibilities, conversely, the Korean staff universally considered the “high” chance of divorce within multicultural families as socially important because of its potentially detrimental effect on the nation.

As Suyeon’s comment that many of “these women . . . just get divorced and run away” indicates, the responsibility for divorce fell upon migrants by default. Here the staff ignored the wider issue of unequal gender relations that resulted from such marriages. Instead, they noted that multicultural marriages involving honest participants should never end in divorce, and that the high divorce rate would have a negative effect on Korea. This perception of divorce as a national concern and the migrants’ responsibility further helped buttress hierarchical relations between migrants and Koreans, while simultaneously maintaining women’s subordinated position within the national patriarchy.

Overlooking Migrants’ Experience of Patriarchy

Only one staff member argued against the dominant viewpoint regarding migrants and the state policy. Unlike others who viewed Korea’s low birth rate as a pressing national problem, Jungyun, a middle manager in her 40s, offered that multicultural policy was the government’s patriarchal response. When I asked why the government was running the Centers, she said: “It’s for Korean men. That’s for sure. The reason is to save Korean men who cannot get married. [Saying that] the policy is for migrants is just their pretty excuse.”

Jungyun said it constantly upset her to hear Korean people saying that the high divorce rate among multicultural families was the migrants’ fault. She listed the problematic behavior of Korean husbands in cases she had experienced, including domestic violence and sexual abuse. Jungyun saw these gendered problems of abuse as the major cause of divorce, not the attitude of the migrants. Jungyun also mockingly spoke about the patriarchal Korean families that marriage migrants had to deal with. Contradicting the other Korean staff who considered migrants as welcoming (or at least accepting) of traditional familial duties, she saw the imposition of these gendered family roles as unjust.

However, despite her skepticism, Jungyun viewed the privilege afforded to Korean women to opt out of such responsibilities as representative of their native rights. Repeating “it is all about money” when discussing “the problem of the multicultural family,” she cynically reduced migrants’ motivation down to financial desire, implicitly framing them as less socially developed and more suited to traditional roles. Although Jungyun perceived the migrants’ experience of Korean patriarchy sympathetically, in her account their woes stemmed from wider global inequality, a purview that reinforced her nationally grounded perspective.

The commonality across all staff’s accounts, even those of Jungyun, was an acceptance that migrants were fulfilling nationally important gendered expectations that their Korean contemporaries did not and would not do. Migrants were naturally subject to carry out traditional gendered familial relations (regardless of whether this was viewed as good or bad), whereas nonmigrant native Korean women could hope to live within a more egalitarian framework of gender relations. This perspective does not reflect the reality of the national labor market, as more marriage-migrant women (59.5%) are nationally engaged in employment than their Korean counterparts (49.9%), notwithstanding that the jobs they maintain are disproportionately low-paying and precarious (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family 2016). Despite that Koreans were not exempt from national patriarchy and that migrants were more engaged in wage-earning, the staff consistently viewed the migrants as fixed in their gendered caretaking roles while Koreans were allotted a more egalitarian social status. These false assumptions exemplify how controlling images often supersede reality to justify the oppression of a minority, normalizing their subordinate status (Collins 2000). Through these discourses on egalitarianism, Koreans and migrants are naturalized as “competitive entities” with “no commonality” (Bannerji 2000, 7), reflecting the opposed positions of “legitimate and full citizens” (6), and “peripheral” or “traditional” ones (166).

The nationalist perspectives espoused by the staff either largely ignored or considered unavoidable (as economically determined) the gender inequality suffered by migrants, who were constantly viewed as separate from Koreans, and without agency. The staff rationalized that the migrants accepted gendered familial responsibilities, because of the same factors of unequal economic and social development that motivated their migration. Here, the Korean staff did not recognize that most Korean women were similarly burdened with gendered caring duties. They also seemed unaware that they were engaged in gendered work in service to the nation at the Centers by supporting these migrants in their reproductive and caring labors and educating them about traditional women’s duties from cooking to children’s education. The staff’s separation of Koreans and migrants relative to their presumed tolerance for gender inequality and caring responsibilities obscured the shared positioning with the national patriarchy. The underlying issues of gender inequality in Korea were allowed to continue unchallenged, arguably substantiated by the staff’s gendered nationalist perspectives. The difference from the previous national conception of gendered labor and inequality was that migrants were now subordinated below Koreans.

Questioning Inequality Within the Korean Family

The migrants I interviewed shared numerous common ideas about the institution of the Korean family and their presumed roles within it. Unlike the staff, who considered that migrants willingly followed the national hierarchical gender traditions within the family, many migrants stated this was a primary source of problems. In particular, they identified how negotiating the paternalism of their mother-in-law (whose domestic status is a by-product of the gerontocratic patriarchy that defines Korean Confucianism) was the hardest challenge.

Daria, an Uzbekistani woman in her 30s, described her parents-in-law as the main “negative aspect of living in Korea” given their constant complaints about her inability to cook Korean food. Rachany, originally from Cambodia, told me how happy she was with her five years of married life, but she picked out her mother-in-law as an exception: “What [Korean] mother-in-laws say, hearing from my friends, is all the same. They don’t like that we are from a poor country and we can’t prepare Korean food.” Hyesoo, a Vietnamese woman who lived in Korea for seven years, felt that she was a rare “success case” for not having to live with her mother-in-law. While joking that the men “here” do very little cooking and “act like a king,” she considered the unequal gender relations in Korea as “just too much” and as “the origin of the struggles” among many multicultural families that she knew. The burden of having to cook Korean food, perceived as essential element of Korean family life, was therefore a source of stress for many foreign wives with different backgrounds of culinary culture, combined with their authoritarian parents-in-law and husbands.

The migrants did not believe that Korean women enjoyed substantive gender egalitarianism in society, such as the Korean staff might have assumed as their native prerogative. In relation to gendered duties such as cooking and caring, migrants viewed Korean women within their families—typically sisters-in-law—as subject to a comparable level of inequality as them, although they understood that their migrant status and perceived “alien” culture complicated their lives in comparison to their Korean peers. Hoang, originally from Vietnam, said, “Before coming to Korea, I thought that Korean women were like those in the West, you know, with jobs and power. But I now realize that this is not true.” However, the migrants comprehended that Korean women did have relatively greater professional opportunities and were far more likely to obtain relatively comfortable “office jobs” (such as the staff at the Centers) compared to the migrants’ implicit confinement within lower-paying employment. As such, the migrants acutely grasped the extent of national gender inequality and the systematic disadvantages caused by their outsider status.

The complaints made by marriage migrants about Korean family patriarchy and gendered expectations for wives came not only from women who were “bought” in exchange for money—a conception many Korean staff had about the migrants who arrived through commercial brokering services and thus tacitly accepting of such domestic duties. For instance, Zhang, a middle-class Chinese woman in her 30s, negatively contrasted the Korean patriarchy with her experience in China. For her, gender inequality was “the most challenging side” of Korean life, because “men are not supposed to help with household chores, and national holidays have to be dutifully celebrated with the husband’s family.” Unlike the staff’s tendency to separate Koreans from migrants as distinctive groups with different attitudes toward gender inequality, the migrants shared a comparable, if not more critical, conception of gender hierarchy and the division of domestic labor in Korea. For migrants in unsatisfactory marriages, patriarchal family life was even more problematic. For instance, Nhung, a Vietnamese woman in her 20s, said the reason she attended the Center so sporadically was because “my mother-in-law and husband get suspicious if I say I will go to the Center or go shopping. It’s hard to get out.” Nhung’s experience was echoed in many anecdotes that migrants shared with me about their friends’ experiences. The idealized migrant woman who spends her time caring for her parents-in-law, cooking, and doing domestic chores, so complimented by nationalist Korean staff as deserving of state support, in reality would not even have the time or freedom to attend the Centers.

In relation to the dominant discourse of gendered nationalism, marriage migrants across class and national backgrounds pragmatically considered that the programs at the Centers that trained them to fulfill gendered expectations in Korea were helpful. The program on cooking Korean food was especially valued in this respect. Most migrants understood how important it was to cook Korean food, and some even said cooking a “survival strategy” to navigate family relationships. The enthusiastic attitude toward cooking that the staff detected was, therefore, not evidence of the migrants enjoying gendered labor, but reflected their strategic desire to make their domestic lives easier.

Asserting Rights through “Maternal Citizenship”

The migrants were well aware of the public conception of their gendered contribution to the nation. Sofia from the Philippines had lived in Korea for 17 years, and she described the changing attitude toward multicultural families in Korea through a recent experience.

People still don’t look at you as being part of this community. But things have changed. For example, Korea experiences a low birth rate. People ask how many children I have, and I say four, and they say “Wow you must be very nationalist, patriotic (laugh).” Last year I won an essay-writing contest about life in Korea and I was asked to do a speech at our district office. I said I was a mom with four children and the Korean audience clapped. [After] the program, in the elevator, [they said] “wow you are a mother of four children” and gave me what they had, “this is for your children” (laugh). I find it funny and interesting that people are amazed to see people who have the guts to have four children in this kind of economic situation. The low birth rate is one factor that puts me into the position of being accepted (laugh). “We will treat you well because you are helping our nation.”

For Sofia, her direct encounter with the Korean preoccupation with the low birth rates suggested the positive changing attitude of Koreans toward migrants. The gendered form of nationalism this represented was epitomized by her comment that Koreans “will treat you well because you are helping our nation,” which encouraged her to feel more included as a citizen. Being a mother of four, Sofia was valorized as someone who deserved recognition and support. She experienced that the ability to bear children bestowed marriage migrants with a distinct value. Thus, it is not only in relation to state policy that a migrant’s role as mother is a determinant of citizenship (S. Cheng 2011), but the popular nationalist sentiment exercised by Koreans also serves to remind migrant mothers of their relative worth.

Other migrants I interviewed also realized the limits of their status as “non-Koreans” and employed the same logic as Sofia, asserting their rights as child-bearing residents of the nation. For example, many argued that the fact that they had (Korean) babies differentiated them from other labor migrants and justified their unique governmental support. Nam from Thailand said, “We help Korea by giving birth to babies and having families, so it only makes sense that we get more benefits than labor migrants who just earn money.” As Choo (2016, 168) argues, through the divergent paths to citizenship granted to Filipina marriage migrants and bar hostesses, migrant wives can more easily claim to be “moral” equals to Korean women, compared with entertainment workers such as hostesses. For marriage migrants with children in particular, this claim to “maternal citizenship” (M. Kim 2013) facilitates their path to national inclusion within the ethno-patriarchy, in a way that cannot be asserted by labor migrants. Amid the ongoing media focus on the low birth rate, the Korean public’s appreciation for this reproductive contribution to the nation further assures migrants’ claim of inclusion.

Marriage migrants therefore easily comprehended the importance of bearing children relative to both the nationalist discourses of governance and populist sentiment. They appreciated the Centers’ free programs and took advantage of them for their own purposes such as finding employment and navigating Korean society, but they viewed that the state’s motivation behind these services was not their individual well-being. When I asked Rachany why she thought that the Centers offered free services to migrants, she stated: “Because we give birth to a baby or two. Without them [the Centers], these babies might not speak Korean [fluently], so it is good for Korea.” Mayumi, a Japanese woman, similarly argued that the Centers existed to ameliorate the “problems related to children’s education” and “the consequences for the nation.” As Zhang from China said: “If the [marriage] migrants can’t speak Korean, what’s going to happen to their babies? [Koreans are] worried about the future.” Migrants understood the Korean language classes offered as the Centers’ major program were to alleviate any problems caused by their being mothers to Korean children and potentially not being able to speak Korean. They were therefore conscious that these classes were staged by the state not for their individual well-being but to facilitate their national gendered responsibilities and their children’s successful social development as Koreans (in the crucial arena of linguistic ability).

This concern with language, common within migrant mothers’ accounts, reflected the preoccupation with language acquisition in Korean society, in which the ability to speak Korean properly, without a trace of foreign inflection, is considered an essential requirement to be a “real” Korean. The further gendered implication here was that migrants were solely responsible for their offspring’s ability to speak Korean, even though Korean fathers were also there to teach them. The Korean staff’s perception of this maternal duty of education was common, even though most migrants openly maintained jobs to support their families, with some even being primary breadwinners. The gendered nationalist assumptions displayed by the staff therefore continued to locate marriage migrants as primarily childbearing citizens of the nation, a perspective that reinforced the flawed comparative notion of their own egalitarian status as free from such responsibilities.

The particular notion of gendered nationalism, emphasized within the Centers’ orientation and the staff’s personal perspectives, framed the migrant mothers as solely charged with their children’s education and language acquisition. This was informed by a patriarchal conception of men’s responsibility within the nationalist discourse as being only to engage in labor outside the home (McClintock 1993). Numerous programs at the Centers focused on the language problems of multicultural families, targeting migrants and multicultural children. Language development specialists were employed at each Center to handle multicultural children’s presumed linguistic learning deficiency, with “language” meaning only Korean. Most staff assumed the migrant mothers’ inability to speak Korean perfectly as the cause of the children’s “language problem.” As Misuk said, “I worry about multicultural children. Their mothers are not good at Korean and their pronunciation not perfect,” adding that this was “a serious problem requiring urgent action.”

Zhang, whose son was receiving language development treatment at the Center, explained her decision to join the program.

I just have a feeling that my kid is behind on his Korean. If his language development gets delayed, I worry that it would be my fault. . . . This program teaches babies Korean, twice a week for six months. It’s great that it is free!

According to many interviewees, their children spoke only Korean at home and were not encouraged to be bilingual, like Zhang’s four-year-old. Confirming this pattern, recent data show that more multicultural children are monolingual (58.4%) than bilingual (41.6%) (Korean Institute for Healthy Family 2017). Because so many children did not speak their mothers’ language, marriage migrants, as non-native speakers, had difficulties accurately grasping their children’s Korean linguistic acquisition. Given the dominant discourse of gendered nationalism where perfect Korean is emphasized as a fundamental prerequisite for every citizen and solely the mothers’ responsibility, it is unsurprising that migrants were apprehensive about their children’s linguistic ability, and unconcerned to teach them their own native language. Consequently, they welcomed the Centers’ programs to improve their own and their children’s Korean, and fully engaged with their gendered role for the nation (being responsible for children’s learning as mothers), despite the overtly discriminating effects of this provision for them as ethnic and cultural non-Koreans. Instead of contesting the pervasive conditions within the mono-ethnic reality of the nation, the migrants I interviewed thus embraced the gendered expectations made of them to achieve inclusion within the national social imaginary for themselves and their children.