The Birth of a Recruited Community: Former Soviet Ethnic Koreans in Jecheon, South Korea

This study investigates a former Soviet ethnic Korean community in Jecheon city, Republic of Korea (South Korea). As of September 2024, more than 110,000 ethnic Koreans from former Soviet countries (commonly known as koryo-saram or koryo-in) reside in South Korea for work and education. Under the new mayor Kim Chang-gyu’s leadership, Jecheon, a city in the central region (Chungbuk province) of South Korea, launched a recruitment program of ethnic Koreans to mitigate the city’s population decline and reinvigorate its waning economy. Using field interviews, official documents, and press releases, this study analyzes this “recruited” community in the following two ways. First, this study portrays the formation and operation of the community - focusing on the businesses and works of the “recruited” ethnic Koreans, their motivation to move to the city with no established co-ethnic community, and so on. Second, this study identifies the potential advantages and limitations of the community in a comparative perspective. By comparing Jecheon with Ansan and Gwangju, two South Korean cities with established ethnic Korean communities, this study argues that the “recruited” community demonstrates the least internal cohesion and limited degree of local integration due to its institutional and financial dependence on the local government. Still, this study finds it crucial to observe and analyze Jecheon’s local government-led ethnic Korean community in terms of local government’s proactive accommodation of immigrants.