September 16 | 5-5:30 p.m. | Online - Zoom Webinar 
Speaker: Keiko Yamanaka, Continuing Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Institute for South Asia Studies, Center for Korean Studies (CKS)
Japan and South Korea hold the same goal of preventing unskilled foreigners from settling down while implementing different immigration policies. This paper documents the migration experiences of Nepali workers in the two countries from the early 2000s to the late 2010s to explain the divergent paths and contrasting effects of the converging immigration policies adopted by the two states. In Japan, Nepali migrants relied on existing social and business networks to cross borders and work as skilled cooks and Japanese language students. With a growing contingent of dependents, the Nepali population there is halfway through building a semi-permanent resident community. In South Korea, predominantly unaccompanied Nepali males arrive as sojourning laborers under the state-run Employment Permit System, which guarantees transparency, fairness, and equality in migration and employment. However, in reality it functions as a global labor rotation scheme for small employers at the lowest tier of the segregated labor market. In contrast to the host country’s goals, Nepali migrants persevere in a lonely life, dreaming of the day they return to the homeland with a large sum of money. The paper ends with a discussion of possible solutions to the contrasting effects of the divergent paths taken by each county.