Korean immigrants

SIGNIFICANCE: Until the late twentieth century, Korean immigration to the United States was relatively small. However, the Korean War of 1950-1953 prompted a major wave of immigration from South Korea, and the liberalization of American immigration laws during the 1960s brought an even larger wave of immigrants. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Koreans were one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States. By the 2019 census, about 1.9 million people of Korean descent were residing in the country, and Koreans constituted the fifth-largest Asian group in the United States, after Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese.

In 2003, Korean American communities throughout the United States celebrated the centennial anniversary of Korean immigration. However, the history of Korean immigrants in America actually started during the late nineteenth century. In 1882, Korea and the United States signed a treaty of amity and commerce that permitted Koreans to immigrate to the United States. Afterward, close political, military, and economic relations between the two countries helped shape Korean immigration to the United States. After the 1882 treaty, Korean diplomats, political exiles, students, and merchants began visiting, but they did not settle in the country. The first significant wave of Korean immigrants came to the American territory of Hawaii as sugarcane plantation workers in 1903.

Korean Immigration to Hawaii

During the late nineteenth century, famine and poverty drove many rural Koreans to urban centers, where they were exposed to Christianity and Western cultural influences. During that period, Korea was feeling the pressure of Chinese and Japanese efforts to dominate its government, and many Koreans were becoming more sympathetic to the idea of emigrating. Meanwhile, friendly political and economic relations between Korea and the United States were opening the possibility of having Korean workers go to the U.S. territory of Hawaii. This idea was facilitated by both Hawaiian planters and American missionaries in Korea. The Chinese Exclusion Act had contributed to a labor shortage in Hawaii. American sugarcane planters relied mostly on Japanese laborers. However, as labor unrest among the Japanese increased in Hawaii, the planters contemplated the possibility of bringing in laborers from other Asian countries and invited Koreans to come to Hawaii as strikebreakers.

Horace Allen, an American medical missionary working in Korea, played a significant role in initiating Korean immigration to Hawaii. During a visit to the United States in 1902, he met with Hawaiian planters and afterward used his political influence as a missionary to send Koreans to Hawaii. Few Koreans were initially willing to go to Hawaii, so missionaries in Korea personally recruited workers from among their own Christian congregations. In contrast to the Japanese and Chinese workers who had come from confined geographical areas in their home countries, early Korean immigrants had diverse geographical backgrounds, and nearly half of them were Christian converts. In December 1902, 56 men, 21 women, and 25 children left Korea on the SS Gaelic. They arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii, on January 13, 1903. Over the next two years, nearly 7,500 Koreans went to Hawaii to work on sugarcane plantations.

Korean Immigration, 1905-1945

That first wave of Korean immigration came to an abrupt end in 1905 when the Korean government received reports of mistreatment of Korean laborers in Mexico and stopped permitting its people to go to either Mexico or the United States. Japan’s government also pressured the Korean government to close its emigration bureau because it was concerned with the condition of its own citizens who were working in Hawaii. In 1907, the United States and Japan signed a Gentlemen’s Agreement that stopped immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States. By that time, Korea was effectively ruled by Japan, so Korean workers were also banned from emigrating. After Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan in 1910, Korean immigration to the United States virtually halted.

Most of the early Korean immigrants were engaged in agricultural labor in Hawaii on three-year contracts. After their contracts expired, many Koreans went from Hawaii to the mainland United States or returned to Korea. Some of those who made their way to the United States found success in the West Coast states, where they bought farms and started agricultural enterprises. However, California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 prevented all Asian immigrants, including Koreans, from owning land and limited their leases in California. Some of the Koreans who left Hawaii worked on railroads on the West Coast, and some of these people were recruited to work as farm laborers.

Between 1907 and 1924, a small number of picture brides, students, and political exiles from Korea were admitted to the United States. Approximately 1,100 picture brides joined their prospective husbands between 1910 and 1924, when the new U.S. Immigration Act instituted discriminatory quotas based on national origins. This new law greatly reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe and virtually ended it from Asia. Even after 1924, however, small groups of Korean political exiles and students continued to arrive in the United States, fleeing from the Japanese colonial rule in their homeland.

The U.S. government was sympathetic toward Korean political refugees from Japanese rule and admitted them to the United States as non-quota immigrants. Between 1925 and 1940, about 300 Korean students entered the United States on Japanese-issued passports. Most of them remained in America after completing their studies because they feared persecution by the Japanese government if they returned to Korea. Many of them participated in organizations and demonstrations for Korean independence. Female immigrants, though small in number, also took part in the efforts. As many of the early Korean immigrants were Christians, churches became important gathering places for them and helped fulfill not only their religious but also political and social needs.

Korean Immigration, 1945-1965

After World War II ended in 1945, the Japanese were ousted from Korea, which was effectively partitioned between the Soviet Union and the United States. The United States occupied the southern part of the Korean Peninsula until 1948 when the Republic of Korea was established under President Syngman Rhee. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union helped set up a communist government in the north.

As the Korean War broke out in 1950, the United States supplied military and economic assistance to South Korea and eventually negotiated a peace settlement with the Soviet Union. After an armistice was declared in 1953, Korea remained divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. The United States continued to provide military and economic aid to South Korea with the goal of containing the spread of communism in Asia. South Korea also depended heavily on U.S. aid to finance its postwar reconstruction.

The Korean War was both directly and indirectly responsible for the immigration of Koreans to the United States. Many people, traumatized by the war experience and looking for political and economic stability, left the war-ravaged country. Because of its close ties to Korea, the United States became the primary destination of many emigrants. The most visible groups of Korean immigrants to the United States after the war were wives of American servicemen, war orphans, and professional workers and students. These people differed from earlier Korean immigrants in many ways, especially in the proportion of women immigrants. The earlier wave of Korean immigration had a ratio of about ten men to every woman. After the arrival of “picture brides” during the 1910s and 1920s, the Korean immigrant population became 66 percent male during the 1930s. During the second wave of Korean immigration, however, women accounted for more than 70 percent of all Korean immigrants to the United States.

The War Brides Act of 1945 allowed wives of American soldiers to enter the United States as non-quota immigrants. Korean war brides began to arrive in the United States during the Korean War and continued to come afterward as non-quota immigrants. Every year from 1953 until the end of the decade, about 500 Korean war brides were admitted to the United States. Passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 repealed racial exclusion and relaxed the national quota criteria. Although the law was not fully liberalized, it opened a window of opportunity for many Koreans to come to the United States. Along with the wives of American servicemen, babies of servicemen and war orphans entered the United States as non-quota immigrants. Direct products of the Korean War, these typically forlorn-looking people dominated popular images of Korea in the United States during the 1950s. In 1955, Harry and Bertha Holt, American evangelists from Oregon, popularized the adoption of Korean orphans and the abandoned babies of American servicemen. Between 1955 and 1977, American families adopted about 13,000 Korean orphans. Every year during the 1980s, Americans adopted 7,000 to 8,000 Korean children. In contrast to popular images of Korean war orphans, many of the adoptees were not true orphans at all but were children who had been given up for adoption because of Korean racial prejudice against mixed-race babies or because their unwed or impoverished mothers could not afford to raise them.

Along with the military brides and adoptees who came to the United States from Korea were students and professional workers. Between 1945 and 1965, about 6,000 Korean students came to the United States to seek higher education at colleges and universities. After completing their studies some returned to South Korea to work as academicians and professionals, but many became permanent residents in the United States. This period of Korean immigration provided a stepping stone for the third wave of Korean immigrants. Many of the Koreans who immigrated to the United States before 1965 were naturalized as American citizens and were thus able to sponsor relatives who followed them under the family reunification preferences of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Immigration after 1965

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act) eliminated national origins quotas and gave priority to immigrants with skills. In addition, the law allowed the spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens to enter as non-quota immigrants. With the passage of the 1965 law, the third and largest wave of Korean immigration began. While early immigrants were mostly farmers, most post-1965 immigrants have come from urban, middle-class backgrounds and have exhibited considerable diversity in their occupations and social classes.

After 1965, South Korea’s own government began actively encouraging emigration as a means to reduce the pressures of its growing population and to reap economic benefits from emigrants earning money abroad. Industrialization and modernization in Korea motivated its people to move to cities and to other countries, such as the United States and Germany, to find better opportunities and higher-paying jobs. Moreover, remittances from the immigrants have played a significant role in the growing Korean economy. The close military, political, and economic ties between the United States and South Korea have favored America as the primary destination for many Koreans.

The Korean immigrants who arrived before 1965 were not a highly visible group because of their small numbers and sparse distribution across the United States. However, with the rise of immigration after 1965, Korean immigrants have become one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States. Between 1970 and 1990, the Korean population in the country rose from 70,000 residents to almost 800,000. By the year 2000, that number had grown to 1.1 million, and in 2019, it reached 1.9 million.

Korean Business Ventures in the United States

During the 1960s, South Korea rose from the ravages of the war and gained economic strength and stability, aided by U.S. economic support and export-oriented economic policies. The living standards of South Koreans improved, and higher education expanded rapidly. During the early 1960s, only about 6 percent of Korean Americans were classified as professionals and managers. The immigrants who have come to the United States since 1965 have been more highly educated and have more professional job skills than their predecessors. However, despite their educational attainments and technical skills, many new immigrants found themselves confined to the lower rungs of the occupational ladders in their fields and prevented from practicing their professional skills due to language barriers and their unfamiliarity with American customs. In response, many of them turned to self-employment, running liquor stores, greengroceries, and other small shops in urban centers throughout the United States. Unfamiliar with the American banking system, many Koreans joined Korean-run rotating credit associations.

Korean immigrants have done well as small merchants throughout the United States. During the 1980s, they began winning praise as a hard-working, law-abiding “model minority.” However, their economic success and educational attainments did not always reflect the reality of their lives and tended to conceal mounting troubles within their Korean American communities. During the 1980s and 1990s, tensions between Korean merchants and the largely black and Hispanic clientele of their inner-city stores began rising. In New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Chicago, African Americans launched protest demonstrations and boycotts against Korean businesses, which they believed were exploiting their communities. These tensions reached an exploding point in Los Angeles in April 1992, when much of the city erupted into rioting after the white police officers who had savagely beaten the black motorist Rodney King were acquitted of wrongdoing. The devastating riots exposed racial and economic hostilities between African Americans and Korean immigrants. During three days of violent rioting, fifty-eight people were killed and more than one billion dollars in property damage was done. A disproportionately large number of Korean stores were destroyed during the rioting, and the media brought to the fore tension and conflicts between Korean immigrants and African Americans.

The Los Angeles riots revealed deeply ingrained racism and economic disparities in American society and Korean ethnic communities. However, in the aftermath of the riots, Koreans made efforts to resolve the conflicts and form alliances with other minority groups. Meanwhile, Korean immigrants discovered greater solidarity within their own community. Like members of other Asian communities, Koreans have been noted for shunning involvement in political organizations and activities. However, after the riots, they became more outgoing, and national organizations began playing more important roles in Korean immigrant communities.

2020s: The Korean Community in the United States

By the early 2020s, the majority of Korean immigrants in the U.S. were naturalized citizens. They had higher levels of education and higher income compared to other immigrant populations, though English proficiency was reported at 49 percent. Over half of these individuals resided in California, New York and New Jersey, with around 11 percent living in poverty.

The 2020s were marked by population decline among the foreign-born Korean community in the United States. The number of those born on the Korean Peninsula but living in America fell from 1.1 million to 1.04 million from 2010–2020. In contrast, the immigrant population in the US grew 12 percent in the same period. Korean immigrants were typically older than other immigrant groups. The median age for this community was 49 in 2019 compared with 46 for the overall immigrant population. Foreign-born Koreans were more likely to be employed in managerial or technical professions than manual labor, a more common employment for many other immigrant groups.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center noted the following attributes among foreign-born Koreans and Korean Americans:

• In 2022, the number of Korean Americans was 1.8 million.
• The median income was $90,000 compared with $100,000 for all Asian Americans.
• Korean Americans were more likely to self-describe using their racial group than other Asian Americans.
• Eighty-six percent had a positive view of South Korea and South Koreans.
• About two-thirds identified with the Democratic Party.
• Almost 60 percent of Korean Americans self-identified as Christians. Other Asian Americans categorized themselves in this manner at 34 percent.

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