[4][5] By the beginning of the 1990s, the rising economy of South Korea made the country a very attractive destination for Filipino workers looking for overseas labor opportunities.

[9] Along with migrant laborers seeking job opportunities in a richer country, socio-cultural contexts prompted international marriage migration from the Philippines to South Korea.

These trends led to low birth rates (the lowest in the world at 1.15) and increased life expectancy (79.6), creating an ‘aging society’.

[11] “The massive exodus of young rural people to the cities and industrial zones” resulted in a critical shortage of marriageable women in farming and fishing villages.

[12] At the same time, deeply rooted traditions of agrarian and Confucian Korean society forced the eldest sons to stay in the countryside to take care of their elderly parents.

To compensate for the paucity of female partners in rural areas, the Korean government spearheaded campaigns to recruit foreign brides, “relying heavily on international marriage brokers.”[13] The governmental intervention of promoting international marriage to solve the demographic problem started with the 1970s ‘New Village Movement.’[13] In the 1980s, the Korean government implemented a ‘rural bachelors get married’ movement to lure foreign brides into South Korea,[11] and the campaign was continued in the 1990s under the active supervision of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

[14] Due to the traditions of agrarian and Confucian social norms, eldest sons were pressured to stay in rural areas to take care of their elderly parents, while urbanization led young people to move to the cities for jobs.

[13] The exodus had “led to an imbalance of the sexes in the farming population,” necessitating the need of foreign brides from other, less developed, countries who were willing to marry these men.

The conference held a seminar to help “Filipino spouses, mostly women, from 18-25 years old, married to Korean men, mostly 35 and up” successfully establish new roles as wives, in-laws, mothers and migrants in a new country.

It emphasizes and justifies the need to give the most decision-making authority to male elders and grant the least power to young female family members.

The wife’s long hours of paid work and her great contribution to the family economy increase the likelihood of marital conflict without the division of housework.

As competing notions of gender roles increase rates of domestic violence, marriage migrants’ satisfaction with life in South Korea is greatly impacted.

[18] In other words, objective indicators of the quality of life of these women definitely show improvement and advancement with higher satisfaction rates.

Work places were where female immigrants felt most discriminated against, followed by restaurants, banks, streets, neighborhoods, public institutions, and schools.

Throughout Korean history, the degree of exclusionism against other ethnicities was summarized in the maxim “one blood, one nation.” ”The notion of an ethnically homogeneous and a racially distinctive unitary nation was developed and purposefully spread as Korea faced imperialist encroachments, in particular, in the early 20th century by the Japanese empire.” [19] Even after the colonization, the notion was used politically by Korean President Park Chung-Hee to provoke and enable rapid economic development through strong social cohesion among people.

Such exclusionism is “often experienced by foreign-born Koreans, who report that they are mistreated or undertreated because of their accent or lack of Korean language proficiency.”[20] Sung argues that previous research has been biased in that it has been interested in and focused on studying difficulties in adjustment within a narrow scope, and with an increase of language proficiency and longer years of living in Korea, “migrant wives realize the gap between these expectations and their actual living conditions,” further leading to their disappointment and lowered expectations of life.

While government support centers offer language classes for female immigrants, assist them with domestic violence, and fund them financially to improve the quality of lives, the larger Korean society remains unchanged in their perception of these women.