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Korean Americans

Korean Americans commemorated the centennial of their immigration to the United States in 2003. The fifth-largest ethnic group within a heterogeneous Asian Pacific Islander American (AAPI) population, Korean Americans numbered over 1.2 million in the 2000 census. Despite this long history in the United States, more than three-fourths of Korean Americans are foreign-born, reflecting a historical legacy of exclusionary immigration and citizenship laws aimed at Asians and continued significance of contemporary immigration policies and social, economic, and political conditions in South Korea (a nation of 48.5 million people according to 2007 estimates) and the United States.

Popular media accounts and scholarly research have often focused on Korean Americans and their high rates of entrepreneurship. Korean Americans exhibit the highest rate of self-employment among all racial/ethnic groups in the United States. First-generation immigrants, in particular, unable to find jobs commensurate with premigration education levels and occupations, have used self-employment as a vehicle to pursue economic stability and upward mobility for themselves and their children.

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Yet, in 1992, Korean Americans realized that this pursuit of the “American Dream” cannot happen in a political vacuum; Korean Americans realized their political invisibility in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, a multiethnic disturbance with the highest death toll and financial costs in U.S. history. The psychological and economic devastation of Sa-I-Gu, or “4-2-9,” served as a catalyst for political awakening for Korean Americans in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Often portrayed as monolithic and culturally/linguistically homogeneous, Korean Americans include descendants of those who landed in Hawai'i in 1903, as well as diasporic citizens who have arrived from China, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, and South Korea in the last decade. They represent a range of socioeconomic, multiracial, and political ideology backgrounds and are a vibrant part of contemporary United States, while reworking transnational kinship, ethnic, and institutional ties in the age of globalization, as this entry shows.

U.S. Immigration

Korean immigration to the United States can be divided into three different waves. A handful of Koreans came to the United States before the turn of the 20th century as students and ginseng merchants. About 7,000 Koreans, about 90% men, migrated between 1903 and 1905 as contract laborers to work in the sugar cane fields of Hawai'i and the farmlands along the West Coast of the United States. Sugar plantation owners, working with American missionaries in Korea, recruited Koreans as strike breakers to replace Japanese workers who were demanding higher wages; the Korean government abruptly ended emigration in response to pressure from Japan, which declared Korea its protectorate in 1905.

Approximately 1,000 Korean “picture brides” arrived between 1910 and 1924 to join—or in some cases, meet for the first time—their husbands, under a provision of the Gentlemen's Agreement between Japan and the United States, which categorized Koreans as Japanese nationals. These women played a pivotal role in the early Korean communities as they raised families, contributed to household income, provided social services, and actively promoted and organized the Korean independence movement. Many first-wave immigrants were also Protestant Christians seeking to escape persecution under Japanese colonial rule; upon arrival, they organized churches to cope with harsh immigrant life as well as passionately engage in the Korean independence movement, the primary concern of most Koreans at this time.

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