Korean Visa Wage Conditions to Change… Employment Standards Become More Sophisticated with the Launch of a Foreign Workforce Wage Analysis Centre

As the introduction of foreign workers in South Korea gathers pace, a dedicated organisation has been launched to analyse their wage requirements professionally and study the economic impact. According to academic circles on the 3rd, the Wage and Economic Analysis Centre has been officially established under the Policy Research Division of the Korea Institute for Immigration Policy. This is a step to conduct empirical research into how foreign workers and immigrants affect the domestic industrial sector and regional economies, and to support discussion of immigration policy based on data.

Foreign workers’ wage requirements are a core criterion for issuing employment visas and an important safeguard that helps protect the domestic labour market. In particular, while the wage level is a key indicator that determines the scale of foreign workforce inflows, systematic wage analysis from the academic community has been lacking, making it difficult to formulate data-driven policies. Indeed, as the inflow of low-wage foreign workers—such as non-professional employment (E-9) in the shipbuilding industry in recent times—has expanded, concerns about reductions in domestic jobs and weakening industrial competitiveness have been repeatedly raised in industry.

Based on this awareness of the problem, the Korea Institute for Immigration Policy said it has set up the centre to scientifically analyse the wage requirements—an essential element of foreign-worker introduction policy—and to study the impact of immigration across the economy. The government has also moved to manage foreign workforce inflows in a systematic way. Through its recently released “Immigration Policy Future Strategy for 2030”, the Ministry of Justice emphasised the need for a scientific design of inflows, and announced its plan to quantify social costs and economic knock-on effects in order to manage the appropriate annual scale of visa issuance. In addition, the Ministry is pursuing the establishment of a foreign-worker wage advisory committee under the Minister of Justice to enable the setting of wage requirement lower bounds by industry and by type of foreign worker.

Im Dong-jin, chair of the Korea Immigration Policy Association, said the establishment of this centre will be an important opportunity for the country’s immigration policy to move away from management centred on scale alone and shift to wage- and productivity-based policy. He expects that the scientifically grounded setting of wage requirements will strike an objective balance between protecting the domestic labour market and utilising foreign workers, and will help restructure dependence on low-wage workers into one centred on skilled personnel. He further stressed the need for research into tailored immigration policy that reflects appropriate wage standards by occupation and skill level, analysis of the role of wages in students’ employment and settlement pathways, and wage disparities between regions.

Going forward, the Wage and Economic Analysis Centre plans to focus on continual analysis of wage requirements for employment visas, evaluating labour-market impacts arising from inflows of foreign workers, and analysing the appropriate level of foreign inflows and their economic knock-on effects. It also intends to provide the results of its research as background material to the Immigration Policy Committee, an advisory body under the Minister of Justice, thereby actively supporting the government in establishing immigration policies that are effective in practice.