Korean Visas Wage Requirements Will Change… Employment Standards Get More Sophisticated With the Launch of a Foreign Workforce Wage and Economic Analysis Center

Amid growing momentum to introduce foreign workers domestically, a dedicated institution has launched to professionally analyze their wage requirements and study the economic impact. According to the academic community on the 3rd, the Wage and Economic Analysis Center was officially established under the Policy Research Office of the Korea Immigration Policy Institute. The move is intended to empirically study how foreign workers and immigrants affect domestic industries and regional economies, and to discuss data-driven immigration policies.

Foreign workers’ wage requirements serve as a core criterion for issuing employment visas and as an important safety mechanism that protects the domestic labor market. In particular, while wage levels are a key indicator that determines the scale of foreign workforce inflows, there has been a shortage of systematic wage analysis at the academic level, making it difficult to formulate data-based policies. In fact, as low-wage foreign worker inflows—such as non-professional employment (E-9)—have recently increased, especially in the shipbuilding industry, concerns about declining jobs for domestic workers and weakening industrial competitiveness have been continuously raised in the field.

Based on this awareness of the issues, the Korea Immigration Policy Institute explained that it has set up the center to scientifically analyze wage requirements, which are at the heart of foreign worker introduction policies, and to study the impact that immigration has on the overall economy. The government, too, has stepped up to manage foreign workforce inflows in a structured way. Through its recently released “2030 Immigration Policy Future Strategy,” the Ministry of Justice emphasized the need for a scientific design of foreign inflows and announced its plan to quantify social costs and economic spillover effects in order to manage the appropriate number of visas to be issued each year. In addition, it is also pursuing the establishment of a foreign worker wage advisory committee under the Minister of Justice so that wage requirement minimum thresholds can be set by industry and by type of foreign worker.

Im Dong-jin, chair of the Korea Association for Immigration Policy Studies, said that the launch of this center will be an important opportunity for Korea’s immigration policy to shift away from conventional size-based management toward a wage- and productivity-based policy approach. He said that scientifically setting wage requirements will help strike an objective balance between protecting the domestic labor market and utilizing foreign workers, and will contribute to restructuring a low-wage workforce-dependent model around skilled workers. He further emphasized the need for research on appropriate wage standards by occupation and skill level, analyzing the role of wages along the employment and settlement paths of international students, and conducting tailored immigration policy research that reflects wage gaps between regions.

Going forward, the Wage and Economic Analysis Center plans to focus on constant analysis of wage requirements for employment visas, evaluating labor-market impacts resulting from foreign workforce inflows, and analyzing the appropriate level of inflow and its economic spillover effects. In addition, it will proactively support the government in formulating effective immigration policies by providing research findings as baseline materials to the Immigration Policy Committee, an advisory body under the Minister of Justice.