Tied to Employers, State System or Ethnonationalism: Migrant Labour Policies in Israel and South Korea

Abstract This article examines how ethnonationalism functions as a structural condition shaping migrant labour governance in Israel and South Korea. Drawing on these two countries as comparative case studies, selected for their shared feature of ethnically defined statehood enshrined in foundational law and their parallel trajectories of state-led industrial development and dependence on migrant labour, the article traces how ethnonational logics are institutionally operationalised across three dimensions: visa and recruitment systems, family and naturalisation policies and organised labour. The analysis demonstrates that ethnonationalism operates not merely as a logic of exclusion towards ‘foreign’ workers, but as a dual logic of selective inclusion and exclusion, and that these two movements are mutually constitutive, together reproducing an aspired ethnonational state. The article further argues that this multi-layered stratification weakens the power of the entire labour force and produces systemic human rights risks that existing business and human rights (BHR) frameworks have not fully addressed. The findings challenge the BHR field to move beyond firm-level conduct and engage more with the political economy of law and policies as a generator of business-related human rights risks and propose labour citizenship and meaningful stakeholder engagement (MSE) as complementary pathways for reform.