South Korea Needs a Lot More Low-Skill Migrants

Status diffusion as a check on elite competition

Migrant workers protest in South Korea.

Recently, I watched a bunch of South Korean movies from the past three decades. If you haven’t seen film like Oldboy, Peppermint Candy, and Memories of a Murder, you should check them out. Even if you’re a total philistine suffering from Tik-Tok induced ADHD, Korean cinema is, if nothing else, watchable. Suicide, murder, sex, violence—all abound, often in a disorienting short order.

That said, if I have learned one thing from these movies, it is that South Korea is quite a homogenized place. No profound insight, I know! But as an American a bit of diversity is baked into my conception of nation. Across Korean movies, though, characters tend to engage in the same behaviors, go to the same places, talk about the same problems, etc. South Korea is of course a culturally rich place, and cinema does not hold a perfect mirror to cultural nuance, but with little immigration and half the population living around a single city, it is easy to understand some degree of homogenization. So let’s assume for the sake of this article that South Korea is indeed quite homogenized.

Homogenization in South Korea manifests in many different ways. One of the most striking is simply notions of success. In South Korea, the overwhelming majority of people believe that to be successful is to go to a prestigious college and get a prestigious white-collar job afterwards. There’s nothing wrong with this desire, but a fundamental fact about prestigious universities and jobs is that they are scarce. If they weren’t, well, they wouldn’t be so prestigious.

So what happens when everybody wants these scarce, prestigious opportunities? Naturally, people have to spend a lot more time and energy competing for such outcomes. South Korea shows that this can get pretty ugly fast. Today, South Koreans have kids at the lowest rate in the world, try to send what kids they do have to Hagwons until midnight, and kill themselves at a rate worse than that of third-world countries and dictatorships. (You know how Japan has a reputation for suicide? South Korea’s suicide rate is almost twice Japan’s.)

The point about fertility shows this is quite urgent: South Koreans are perhaps so harried about living in Gangam they’re facing long-run extinction. Being an incubator for a universalized, zero-sum status competition is simply not sustainable if you’re interested in contributing to the gene pool in the distant future.

What is to be done? Given this social malaise is downstream of homogenization, I think the natural solution for a country obsessed with education and white-collar jobs is lots of low-skill immigration—a kind of cultural shock therapy. Most people know South Korea needs immigrants just to stave off economic decline, but I would argue that low-skill immigration offers a distinct hope for shoring up fertility rates among locals in addition to plugging holes in the broader economy.

How? By introducing lower-skill immigrants, South Korea can reduce the extreme status competition among its native citizens. These migrants will work the low-status jobs South Koreans dread, while simultaneously generating more prestigious service jobs for natives by growing the economy. This would free up positions for the many over-educated South Koreans, giving them more time to relax and form families instead of maxing out their TOEFL scores. The fertility rate would rise on two fronts, both from migrants and South Koreans. This seems like a win-win.

If you are concerned that this would look something Europe’s disastrous reception of African migrants, South Korea’s neighbors offer other options. Many Chinese and South Asians would like to migrate to nation as developed and democratic as South Korea. But be warned: groups that assimilate too readily would just compete with natives for the most desirable jobs, only intensifying South Korea’s existing status competition. The low-skill part of the equation is actually vitally important: South Korea needs people who aren’t interested in pursuing the same rat race as natives.

Status Diffusion in the US

How crazy is this? I think the US already avoids the pitfalls of some hyper-neurotic countries because status is diffused across communities, allowing people to succeed in a variety of ways. While status competition is high in many communities, there is no singular, all-consuming status competition due to the US’s enormous geographic, cultural, ethnic, and political diversity. Let’s consider how each component helps.

Geographically, the US is huge, and a significant share of Americans grow up in communities almost fully insulated from the desires of coastal elites. I myself am from Memphis, TN, and most of the highest status people I knew growing up were local entrepreneurs. Some of these people made small-to-large fortunes in thoroughly unglamorous businesses: owning a bunch of fast food restaurants, running an oxygen supply company, or founding a national chain of auto-repair stores. This is probably a very different experience than that of someone at a prep school in New York, where the wealthiest parents might be hedge fund managers or law partners.

Since most people never leave their hometown, this status diffusion is enduring. Most Middle Americans, wealthy or not, are not itching to move to New York, which is too foreign and expensive. They thus spend most of their lives oblivious to the travails of financiers and law partners and measure themselves against those in their local communities, helping to alleviate status competition on the coasts.

Culturally, America is obviously a nation of immigrants, and millions who move here from poorer countries and are happy to accept their lot as a landscaper or a janitor. As mentioned, the benefits here are twofold. Low-skill immigration slots people into jobs that many ambitious natives would regard as “beneath” them, but it further grows the economy to create more prestigious service jobs for natives. All those landscapers need to buy stuff and put their money somewhere!

More than this, America’s cultural diversity has helped foster a spirit of individualism. It’s hard to create a singular, mimetic vision of success when people share little in common culturally. As a result, people are more willing to buck social norms and do what is in their immediate economic interests, such as starting businesses.

Ethnically, America’s extreme diversity leads to a kind of localized segregation, heightening cultural differences even within small communities. We typically think of this as bad, but one silver lining is that status competition, even within metro areas, is quite fractured. Consider how much the “status games” of a white person from Evanston, Illinois contrast with those of a black person from South Side, Chicago. They might have very different understandings of what constitutes high status—sometimes even intra-income bracket—and yet they are both part of the greater Chicago community.

Politically, federalism helps the US diversify its understanding of status further still. Allowing states to write their own laws enables local populations to distinguish themselves culturally from other states. Many Texans, for instance, take pride in a conservative local governance that contrasts itself with that of states like New York and California. This heightened political tension among states in turn sows cultural discord across state borders. As a result, many Texans don’t worry so much about impressing their Yankee compatriots, instead celebrating their otherness.

Compared with South Korea, then, division of labor in the US is something of a value, not just an economic principle. Regions and even local communities can specialize in certain trades and professions while maintaining internal status structures that allow people to succeed without moving to New York or going to an Ivy League school. This takes pressure off everyone.

One need not look far to see America’s diffused understanding of status at work. Politicians and country music singers insist that it is farmers and plumbers who constitute the real America, not lawyers and bankers. Liberal journalists make a show of hanging their heads for losing touch with what Joe Sixpack at the roadside diner thinks about trade policy. Conservative journalists devote their careers to covering the excesses of coastal elites, casting aspersions on the kinds of careers and locales that are for some aspirational. US culture more broadly is nothing more than a paean to the wants of people outside the coastal bubble: fast food, violent sports, big trucks, and even bigger tits.

Now, let’s imagine if the US were like South Korea, where half of people people live around Seoul, and 96% of people are native Koreans. Such geographic, cultural, and ethnic concentration would surely lead to a more universalized status game, increasing stress among everyone. Would the descendants of WASPs be as content with mowing lawns as someone from a gang-ravaged country? Would Oklahomans have the same conceptions of success if the most successful people in their communities were Goldman Sachs bankers instead of oil tycoons? What would competition at Ivy League schools look like if the US performed the same on PISA exams as South Korea?

America avoids the all-consuming rat race of a nation like South Korea thanks to its heterogeneity. Even though status competition can be high in certain communities, in aggregate more Americans than South Koreans self-select into less “prestigious” careers, reducing competition for everyone. Hispanic migrants can find solace working as janitors, rust belt welders can take pride in doing a real man’s work, and people like my dad can start small businesses. As a result, even Koreans seem better off in the US: their suicide rate here is less than half than in South Korea, and their fertility rate is higher as well. The US allows them to slot into the niches that are overcrowded in Korea.

Conclusion

For South Korea, I think low-skill immigration offers a plausible way of countering the self-destructive culture brewing around cities like Seoul. Ideally, new immigrants would also help build up other regions to further reduce South Korea’s geographic and cultural concentration.

Few like the idea of bringing in less skilled people into their country, but South Korea seems to me a case study in what goes wrong when too many people are capable of competing along the same dimensions. You can make lots of arguments about the cultural sanctity of South Korea and nations more generally, but I would just say that, at this rate, there’s not going to be any South Korea in the long run. Perhaps South Korea should put its Christian sentiments to use and learn to love its neighbors. Only then can it learn to love itself.