Migrant Workers Amidst the Waves of Volunteers: Participation and Empowerment in South Korean Migrant Advocacy

In this article, I explore the ways in which the conjunction between the liberal demand for autonomous subjects and neoliberal social responsibility has played out in South Korean migrant advocacy. By focusing on discourses of the “volunteer activist” and migrant empowerment that emerged among “migrant centers,” grassroots advocates, and service providers for migrants, I show that the demands for interdependent society mobilize individual Koreans to give and share on behalf of migrants and mobilize individual migrants to give back by organizing on their own. If lay volunteers are required to see themselves as no different from full-time staff, offering their free labor lavishly, migrant workers, too, are asked to see themselves not as mere recipients of benevolence, but as “leaders” of their own lives and communities. I argue that this is when the ambition, as well as the limit, of the South Korean moral community is rendered visible. This community seeks to convert the have-nots and the socially excluded into subjects of responsibility and reciprocity by enrolling them in a symbolic struggle for recognition and by refusing the idea of charity. It does so, however, by not giving equal attention to the problem of inequality in rights. What remains ever more salient is the inherent inability of this kind of community to solve inequality through the demand of inclusion via responsibilization.