The side doors of immigration: multi-tier migration regimes in Japan and South Korea

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.