The Korean Community in the United States: Changes in the Twenty-First Century*
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The Korean Community in the United States: Changes in the Twenty-First Century* Pyong Gap Min Queens College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York *This paper was presented at the International Conference on Korean Diaspora Studies, held at Korea University on September 28, 2013. Central Hub Project Group for Korean Diaspora Studies at Korea University organized the conference. Global Korean Community Research Center at Korea University, the Research Center for Korean Community at Queens College, and the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at UC Riverside hosted the conference. 1 Introduction The formal immigration of Koreans to the United States started in 1903, when about 7,200 Korean workers arrived in Hawaii to work on sugar plantations. This year, Korean community leaders celebrated the 110th anniversary of Korean immigration to the United States. Despite this long history of Korean immigration, Koreans were almost invisible in American cities outside of the West Coast until the early 1970s. It was the 1965 liberalized immigration law that led to the flux of Korean immigrants to various American metropolitan areas. As a result of the massive 50-year immigration of Koreans to the United States in the post-1965 immigration period, the Korean- American population increased from about 69,000 in 1970 to approximately 1.7 million in 2010. Large Korean communities have been established in Los Angeles, New York, and several other metropolitan areas, with Korean enclaves established in both central cities and suburban areas. Korean Americans comprise the fifth largest Asian group among the six major Asian groups in population size. However, they have attracted a great deal of both media and scholarly attention, probably more attention than any other Asian group, partly because of their frequent business-related inter-group conflicts and partly because of their highly congregationally-oriented Christian religious practices. This paper intends to provide an overview of Korean-American experiences based on public documents, a review of the relevant literature, Korean daily newspaper articles, and the author’s insider’s knowledge obtained through his personal observations in the New York-New Jersey area. Since 1.5-generation and U.S.-born adult Koreans (second and higher generation) still compose a small proportion of Korean Americans, this paper will focus on Korean immigrants’ experiences, although it will cover younger-generation Korean experiences in the sections on socioeconomic attainments and community organizations. The Korean community in the United States has gone through many changes over the past 45 years. 2 This paper will try to capture major changes in Korean-American experiences and community organizations, made especially in the twenty-first century. The History and Contemporary Trends of Immigration For the convenience of analysis, we can divide the history of Korean immigration to the United States into three periods: the old immigration period (1903-1949), the interim period (1950-1964), and the contemporary immigration period (post-1965). Small numbers of Koreans immigrated to the United States in the first two periods, with the vast majority of Korean Americans consisting of post-1965 immigrants and their descendants. Thus, I devote only a few pages to discussing the immigration of Koreans in the first two immigration periods. I examine post-1965 contemporary immigration trends in detail. The Pioneer Immigration Period (1903-1949) After diplomatic relations between the United States and Korea were established in 1884, a small number of Koreans, mostly students and politicians, came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the first substantial wave of Korean immigrants consisted of approximately 7,200 labor migrants, who were brought in to work on sugar plantations in Hawaii between January 1903 and July 1905. In 2003, Korean communities throughout the United States organized a number of events to celebrate the centennial of Korean immigration. The major push factor for the 1903 pioneer immigration was widespread famines in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century, while the predominant pull factor was the demand for cheap labor in Hawaii. Regarding the demand for cheap labor in Hawaii, bringing Chinese laborers to Hawaii was out of the question, because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act completely barred any Chinese 3 immigration. Japanese laborers composed the dominant workforce on Hawaiian sugar plantations in the beginning of the twentieth century, and sugar plantation owners preferred to bring Korean workers to counteract frequent strikes organized by Japanese workers (Patterson 1988). Finally, the intermediary role that Horace Allen, a medical Presbyterian missionary sent to Korea, played between the Korean government and plantation owners was central to the movement of pioneer Korean immigrants to Hawaii. Beginning in 1884, American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries were active in converting Koreans to Christianity. About 40% of pioneer Korean immigrants were converts to Christianity, and they chose to come to Hawaii for religious freedom, as well as for a better economic life (Choy 1979). The majority of pioneer Korean immigrants were non-farming workers who came from cities, such as Seoul, Incheon, Suwon, and Wonsan (Patterson 1992:103). This provided a stark contrast with the earlier Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the nineteenth century, the predominant majority of whom were farmers. Most of the Korean labor migrants were single young men between the ages of twenty and thirty (Patterson 1992: 105). Plantation owners in Hawaii needed far more Korean workers, especially to counteract frequent strikes organized by Japanese laborers. However, the Korean government was pressured to stop sending more workers to Hawaii by the Japanese government, which tried to protect Japanese workers in the Hawaiian Islands. After its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan made Korea its protectorate, gaining a free hand in influencing the Korean government. In February 1906, the Japanese government advised that all Koreans abroad be placed under the jurisdiction of Japanese consulates. Koreans in Hawaii and other U.S. cities organized a protest rally, passing a resolution condemning Japan’s aggressive policy in Korea (Choy 1979: 143). 4 Thus, Korean immigrants in the United States started the anti-Japanese movement even before the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. Between 1905 and 1924, approximately 2,000 additional Koreans came to Hawaii and California. The majority of them were “picture brides” of the 1903-1905 bachelor immigrants. Another 600 of them were political refugees and students who were involved in the anti-Japanese independence movement. The Immigration Act of 1924, which completely barred the immigration of Asians to the United States, nearly ended the immigration of Koreans to American shores. Most of the Korean political refugees and students studied at universities in New York and other East Coast cities, such as Columbia, Princeton, and New York University. A small number of these students composed the core of the old Korean community in New York. By contrast, the pioneer labor migrants, their picture brides, and their children made up the majority of the Korean population in Hawaii. Most of the students and political refugees who settled on the East Coast returned to Korea after Korea won its independence from Japan in 1945, playing leading roles in the new Korean government and Korean universities. The Interim Period (1950 and 1964) Immediately after Korea gained independence from Japan in 1945, Korea suffered from internal political struggles and U.S.-Soviet struggles for hegemony over it. In 1948, Korea was divided into two political entities, a rightist government in South Korea supported by the United States, and a communist government supported by the Soviet Union. The two Koreas went through the first major ideological conflict in the cold war period, known as the Korean War, between 1950 and 1953. To this day, relations between the two Koreas remain hostile. The United States sent more than half a million soldiers to Korea during the Korean War, and it still maintains a significant military presence there. 5 The strong military, political, and economic linkages between the United States and South Korea contributed to a steady increase in the annual number of Korean immigrants beginning in 1950. As shown in Table 1, between 1950 and 1964, approximately 15,000 Koreans immigrated to the United States. The McCarran and Walter Act of 1952 abolished the ban on Asian immigration, giving Asian-Pacific countries a small immigration quota (100 a year for each country) and making Asian immigrants eligible for citizenship. Table 1: Number of annual Korean Immigrants to the US, 1946-1964 Number of of Number of Year Year Immigrants Immigrants 1946-1950 107 1960 1,507 1951-1955 581 1961 1,534 1956 703 1962 1,538 1957 648 1963 2,580 1958 1,604 1964 2,362 1959 1,720 Total 14,884 Source: Herbert Baringer, Robert W. Gardener, Michael J. Levin, 1995, PP.24-25. An overwhelming majority of Korean immigrants admitted during the interim period were either Korean women married to U.S. servicemen in South Korea or Korean orphans adopted by American citizens. The War Bride Act of 1946 helped American servicemen to bring their Korean wives and children to the United States. While the pioneer Korean immigrants were predominantly men, these two groups of Korean immigrants admitted during the interim period were predominantly women (Jo 1999: 9). These two groups of Korean immigrants continued to increase until the early 1980s. Also, many Korean international students, predominantly men, entered the United States for graduate education during the interim period. Warren Kim (Kim 1971: 26) estimated that approximately 6,000 Korean students entered the United States between 1950 and 1964. The vast 6 majority of them found professional occupations, especially as professors, in the United States after completing their graduate educations.