Conditional Belonging in South Korea’s Care Migration Experiment: Filipino Caregivers, Media Narratives, and the Politics of Integration

This article examines how media discourse in South Korea constructed Filipino caregivers as a legitimate yet conditional solution to the country’s care crisis. Moving beyond approaches that treat media coverage as a neutral reflection of policy debate, it analyzes news discourse as part of the broader politics of immigrant integration, showing how narratives of care, foreignness, affordability, and utility helped define the terms under which migrant caregivers could be welcomed. Drawing on a qualitative discourse analysis of English- and Korean-language newspaper coverage, the article traces how Filipino caregivers were alternately represented as desirable care providers, disciplined service workers, classed household resources, and ultimately precarious migrants whose social legitimacy remained revocable. The findings show that media and policy languages worked together to normalize a form of conditional belonging in which migrant caregivers were incorporated as useful labor but not recognized as fully deserving social subjects. Across the coverage, affordability emerged as a key discursive filter through which rights, value, and inclusion were negotiated, while competing narratives pushed the care regime toward more selective, informalized, and stratified forms. The article argues that secondary citizenship in this case was not only a legal or labor-market condition but also a discursive accomplishment produced through the intertwined narration of care needs, migrant labor, and unequal integration.