Korean Immigrants in the United States

     I am a Korean living in the United States. Nearly two years ago, I came here to study abroad. Studying here in itself is intercultural communication for me. Even though I’ve visited a total of about 30 countries, I have realized that there is a big difference between visiting a country and living in a country when it comes to understanding another culture.  As I was an international student as well as one of the people living in the U.S., I could meet many immigrants from Korea and understand the Korean community of Indianapolis deeply.

 

Korean immigrant Wonsoo Lee works in a pineapple field in 1959 

Source: Koreans in Hawai 100 years of dreams [Click]

The History of Korean Immigrants in the United States

       The history of Korean migration to the United States began in the early 20th century. The first migration from Korea to the United States occurred in 1903, when about 7,000 Korean laborers were officially employed on sugar plantations in Hawaii. After 1951, many Koreans including orphans, refugees, professionals and students began to immigrant to the U.S. because of the Korean War and the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. After 1965, a lot of Koreans had emigrated from their country in order to obtain jobs and to avoid political issues under militant dictatorship. As of 2013, approximately 1.1 million Korean immigrants (overwhelmingly from South Korea) reside in the United States.

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau 2006, 2010, and 2013 American Community Surveys (ACS), and Campbell J. Gibson and Kay Jung, "Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850-2000" (Working Paper no. 81, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, February 2006 [Click] 

The features of Korean immigrants

According to Zong and Batalova (2014), “most Korean immigrants who obtain lawful permanent residence in the United States qualify through employment sponsorship or as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. Korean immigrants were more likely to be college graduates, have higher incomes, and experience a lower poverty rate compared to the total foreign-born population.”

 

Income and Poverty

Korean immigrants had higher incomes than the overall foreign and native-born populations. In 2013, the median household income among Korean immigrants was $55,800, compared to $48,100 and $53,000 for the immigrant and native-born populations, respectively. [Click]

 

International students from Korea

Since 2005, South Korea has sent the third highest amount of international students to the United States. China and India have sent the first and second highest number of international students to the U.S. since 2009. During the 2014-15 school year, more than 63,710 South Koreans studied in the United States. Recently, the number of Korean international students in the United States has declined because Korea’s economy is in recession, and opportunities to study abroad have been declining.