"Defector," "Refugee," or "Migrant"? North Korean Settlers in South Korea's Changing Social Discourse

IntroductionOn February 27, 2012, following lawmaker Park Sun-young's2 eleven-day hunger strike highlighting the human rights issue relating to Korean repatriation, the South Korean Parliament passed a resolution urging China to discontinue the practice of returning Korean border crossers. This action has triggered intensified international attention toward the human rights of Koreans, with the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs subsequently approving the extension of the Korean Human Rights Act, last reauthorized in 2008, until 2017. The British deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, also applied symbolic pressure on Korea and China by meeting Korean settlers during a visit to South Korea for the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit in March. Given the climate in South Korea as it faces two major elections amidst growing uncertainty across East Asia in the wake of the emergence of the Kim Jong-un regime following the death of Kim Jong-il in December 2011, it is perhaps not surprising that the Korea issue is being revisited in 2012. In the bitter competition between the two opposite camps (conservative versus democratic) in the run-up to the two elections in the South, the renewed attention to the Korean issue has been used to reframe existing indicators that distinguished positions within the remnants of the Cold War legacy-especially those that capitalized on fostering anti-North Korean sentiments. Aligning with domestic circumstances, the United States has added its voice by pressuring Korea and China in the language of human rights, foregrounding humanitarian imperialism, the salient feature of Western discourse in international affairs and post-Cold War policy,3 as a prominent component in the geopolitical matrix of East Asia. Consequently, contrary to the dominant tendency of previous years, 2012 sees Korean border crossers and arrivals in the South reconstructed as purely victims of human rights violations and political refugees. This paper brings this changing understanding and naming of Korean arrivals within the transient social discourse of South Korea into question, and argues that specific eras separate and interpellate Korean arrivals through different names and roles depending on the particular and interests of the time. Such interpellation instrumentalizes the figure of the migrant in the process of stabilizing South Korean society.North Korean arrivals to the South have been defined and understood in various ways over time: from heroic figures to economic migrants. Given the systematic and ideological confrontation following the 1953 separation, strong Cold War ideology governed the two Koreas and produced those people that, to either side, would be labeled as defectors. The number of Korean arrivals to the South was 607 for the period between 1953 and 1989, resulting in their rarity being highly valued and fully utilized by the South Korean government in the ideological war. However, the number has dramatically increased since the mid-1990s, coinciding with the gradual replacement of the Cold War era by a post-Cold War ideology across the Korean Peninsula. From 1990 to 1993, only 34 Koreans came to the South, but the next five years (1994-1998) saw 306 new arrivals, with the figure radically increasing over the subsequent three years, reaching 1,043. From 2001 onward, more than 1,000 Koreans arrived each year, with the total number peaking at 23,000 in 2011.4 This circumstantial change has led to their redefinition from the North's soldier to a variety of different names such as defected ethnic Korean, North Korean refugee, defected Korean resident, and more recently North Korean migrant.5Following the trajectory of this name giving, this article identifies three different historical stages in the processes of situating the Korean arrivals' position in South Korean social discourse. …