How do local natives react to a sudden influx of asylum seekers? Scholarship has consistently found that respondents exposed to a refugee crisis tend to exhibit an increase in anti-immigrant attitudes. However, because most such studies have been conducted in a Western setting, we have surprisingly little understanding of how natives would react in a different political setting, especially in an East Asian context. I use difference-in-differences analysis to examine how local natives reacted after the 2018 Jeju refugee crisis. Two independent studies show little evidence of increased hostility. Local residents who were equally or more anti-immigrant (on multiple dimensions) before exposure became less anti-immigrant after exposure than mainland residents. This finding contrasts with previous studies but also provides grounds for understanding the conditions under which an influx of asylum seekers can induce relatively positive reactions among local natives.
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Research Article|
January 02 2025
Local Exposure Effect of the 2018 South Korea Refugee Crisis
Yoonseok Lee
Yoonseok Lee is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, USA. His research interests include international political economy, immigration politics, and East Asian politics. He thanks the anonymous reviewers, the editor-in-chief, Steven Liao, Diogo Ferrari, participants in the Immigration and IPE panels at MPSA 2024, and members of the UCR Quantitative Methods Group in Political Science for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.
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Asian Survey 1–35.
Citation
Yoonseok Lee; Local Exposure Effect of the 2018 South Korea Refugee Crisis. Asian Survey 2025; doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/as.2024.2428427
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