Computational Analysis of Congressional Speeches on Immigration in South Korea

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Immigration Opinion

Abstract

How have discourses about immigration changed over time in South Korea, a country facing the imperative of bolstering its population due to a low birth rate and a rapidly aging demographic? Despite the pressing need for more newcomers to address demographic challenges, the issue of immigration remains somewhat peripheral in South Korean politics, marked by sustained restrictive policies compared to traditional destination countries like Western Europe and North America. This discrepancy raises a question as to whether anti-immigration rhetoric has consistently been popular among South Korean politicians. In this paper, we turn to the South Korean Assembly’s meeting minutes to systematically investigate the language used in congressional speeches about immigration over the past two decades. Using automated text classification, guided by human annotations, we identify speeches related to immigration along with a corresponding tone (pro-immigration, anti-immigration, or neutral) and show the changes in average sentiment toward immigration among South Korean elites. We theorize that the inclination of political elites to employ positive or negative frames in their speeches varies in relation to the urban-rural divide within congressional districts and the nationalities of immigrants discussed. By providing the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of how immigrants are spoken of in South Korean Congress, this paper emphasizes the importance of more comprehensively considering diverse regional contexts beyond Western countries when examining the role of political rhetoric in immigration attitudes.

Authors

• Boyoon Lee, Vanderbilt University

• Taegyoon Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

• Seungwoo Han