Strategic Occidentalism: Navigating Global Racial Hierarchies through Education and Mobility among South Korean Migrants

Abstract

This article introduces strategic Occidentalism as the labor of pursuing, translating, and calibrating Western-coded forms of value under contexts where their recognition is uneven and contingent. Drawing on longitudinal multi-sited ethnographic research, it examines how lower-resourced South Korean youth engage in English study and/or work abroad as a pathway to acquire such markers, including standardized test scores, accents, and credentials. The analysis situates these practices within South Korea’s legacies of U.S. military occupation, developmental state-building, and state-led globalization, which together institutionalize Westernness as a structural benchmark. As overseas study expands to lower-cost hubs such as the Philippines, these youth access more attainable routes while confronting uncertainty over how their experiences will be read upon return. By bringing together postcolonial theory and critical race scholarship, this article offers a window into how migrants on the global margins labor within systems of recognition whose standards are defined elsewhere and whose returns were never guaranteed, a condition that extends beyond South Korea where postcolonial hierarchies and neoliberal restructuring converge.

Keywords

race migration South Korea strategic Occidentalism empire

Across non-Anglophone, non-Western countries today, English language education has become an integral strategy for economic development and a pathway to upward mobility in the global economy. This is especially visible in nation-states like Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea where English was introduced through legacies of war, military occupation, and Cold War “alliances” rooted in U.S. imperial expansion, but where it did not become the dominant language (Diệu and Hamid 2021; Kobayashi 2013; J. Park 2011; Phan 2021). While these ties helped to establish English as an institutional asset in the region, its contemporary dominance is sustained through neoliberal infrastructures that link economic value to racialized hierarchies that privilege proximity to the West across education, labor markets, and cultural exchange (Tupas and Rubdy 2015). In the post-Cold War era, many states emerged as U.S.-aligned client-states, strategic partners or “ally states,” integrating English language into modernization initiatives through direct U.S.-influenced educational reforms and the uptake of “international” standards. In the twenty-first century, English language proficiency has served as an index of national development and geopolitical legitimacy, tied to aspirations for inclusion in elite multilateral institutions such as the OECD, WTO, and the Group of Twenty (G-20),¹ forums of the world’s largest economies dominated by Western states.

Contemporary South Korean educational and labor migration provides a sharp site for examining the entanglements of English education, military empire, and neoliberal globalization. Shaped by Japanese colonial rule, U.S. military occupation following liberation, and later state-led development and export-oriented industrialization, postwar South Korea has cultivated a self-narrative as a model of rapid development, often described as the “Miracle on the Han River,” while downplaying its ongoing dependencies on U.S. military, political economic, and cultural power (Kang 2012; J. Kim 2022). During South Korea’s global turn in the 1990s, English became a cornerstone of economic and social advancement, driving initiatives like Global Villages, Teach and Learn in Korea, and English Program in Korea (J. Jeon, Lee, and Lee 2015; M. Jeon 2009; Lee 2011). These arrangements were deepened in the aftermath of the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis when International Monetary Fund (IMF)-mandated economic restructuring accelerated labor flexibilization, privatized educational risk, and ultimately reframed English acquisition as a strategy for improved employability.

These efforts became politically consequential when South Korea formally joined the G-20 and later hosted the G-20 Summit in 2010, an event broadly framed as evidence of the nation’s arrival as a global economic power. Under the conservative administration of President Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), the “G-20 generation” policy package sought to cultivate youth as globally competitive subjects through expanded work and study-abroad options, particularly targeting lower-resourced South Koreans (S. Kim 2018). Emerging in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, this moment consolidated a turn whereby the state sought to manage economic precarity by recasting transnational mobility as individualized self-development. These outward-facing initiatives widened pathways beyond the established Anglophone West, including lower-cost regional sites like the Philippines and India that would come to structure uneven circuits of English mobility (Choi 2021; Lipura 2021).

This article explores how lower-resourced South Koreans navigate expanding pathways of English study abroad while anticipating how their experiences will be evaluated upon return. As study-abroad alternatives stretch beyond Western destinations, migrants accumulate credentials and experiences whose meanings do not carry consistently across sites. Instead, they are interpreted unevenly and often must be actively recast to fit dominant expectations in the South Korean labor market. Whereas scholarship on overseas education has often focused on access and mobility, I examine the labor of translating and calibrating these experiences across sites and upon return. Migrants actively rework how their overseas experiences are presented, playing up certain elements while minimizing others in order to meet the evaluative expectations of South Korean employers and gatekeepers. These efforts unfold across a mobility landscape shaped by imperial legacies (S. Kim 2022), privatized education markets, and postcolonial state formations, where experiences from different destinations are evaluated differently.

Based on multi-sited ethnography of 137 lower-resourced South Koreans pursuing English study abroad in the Philippines, Australia, and the United States, I broach the concept of strategic Occidentalism to examine how migrants selectively acquire, retool, and stage Western-coded skills and experience for recognition within the South Korean labor market. This includes leveraging place-based credentials, concealing the origins of training, and embellishing overseas experiences. The concept shows how the value of these experiences is shaped by comparison across destinations, as the same efforts can carry different weight depending on where it was obtained and how it is read upon return. By foregrounding this relational and interpretive labor, the concept shows how mobility is navigated under conditions where recognition remains uncertain and uneven, ranging from partial recognition, limited uptake to no recognition at all.

Toward Strategic Occidentalism: Theorizing Recognition and Value

This article theorizes how recognition is secured through labor within racialized systems of evaluation operating under neoliberal postcolonial conditions. As recurring economic and political crises shift the burden of employability onto individuals, subjects must actively work to produce their own recognition across contexts where standards are unstable and often defined elsewhere. The central problem, then, is how racialized subjects navigate the ongoing demand to make themselves legible when recognition is inconsistently granted and unevenly distributed. Drawing on the Black radical tradition, critical race scholarship, and postcolonial theory, this section develops a framework for understanding how such labor emerges and situates the concept of strategic Occidentalism within these debates.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s (2008 [1903]) theory of double consciousness provides an early account of recognition as labor under racial domination. Writing about Black life in post-Reconstruction United States, Du Bois shows how racialized subjects are compelled to see themselves through a distorting external gaze that denies them full humanity while demanding continual self-accounting. This doubling entails sustained psychic and epistemic labor as subjects internalize external standards of worth, anticipate judgment, and regulate themselves accordingly. In this sense, recognition requires interpretive work to make oneself legible against oppressive, externally imposed standards. Scholars of racial capitalism situate this condition within a broader global political economic order by arguing capitalism is constitutively racial (Robinson 2020), organizing populations within hierarchies of value. This structuring order producing group-differentiated vulnerability (i.e. racism) determines whose labor, presence, and capacities are recognized, invested in, or exposed to harm across contexts (Gilmore 2007). Altogether, these works show how recognition-as-labor (the work of producing one’s own legibility), particularly among racialized subjects, is both individually enacted and structurally organized.

Taking this as a starting point, scholarship in critical race theory and racialized cultural capital shifts attention to how subjugated individuals operate within institutions that do not fully recognize them. Challenging race-evasive, canonical accounts of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986; Lareau 2003), this body of work shows how standards of merit are not neutral measures of achievement but are historically produced through structures of whiteness (Cartwright 2022; Richards et al. 2023; Wallace 2018). Against deficit models, especially in education (Richards et al. 2023), these studies reconceptualize “underrecognized” capacities, such as linguistic dexterity, pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal 2001), and critical structural awareness, as communally cultivated repertoires that hold value on their own terms and can be strategically mobilized within dominant frameworks of evaluation (Carter 2005; Yosso 2005). At the same time, such practices operate within systems that continue to privilege dominant standards, creating pressure to engage with those categories directly.

Postcolonial theory extends this insight by clarifying the terms of representation under which such claims can be made legible. Representational categories circulate within dominant discourse, setting the conditions for what counts as recognizable. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (with Grosz 1985) conceptualization of strategic essentialism, marginalized subjects may tactically inhabit reductive and essentialized forms to render collective and political claims legible. The point is not that these forms adequately express who the subjects are but that they are already established within prevailing systems. Spivak cautions, though, that such strategies are temporary and fraught and can risk reinforcing the very categories and hierarchies they seek to undermine. This underscores how subjects may be compelled to work through externally imposed representations even when those forms are inaccurate and oppressive.

Recent scholarship shows how racialized subjects take up elements of dominant culture to secure standing within hierarchies they did not design. In conventional accounts that frame such practices primarily through assimilation, alignment with dominant norms is often treated as identity and status transformation. In contrast, Wendy Cheng’s (2013) study of a majority-nonwhite suburb of Los Angeles situates them within regional racial formations ² that shape local hierarchies of belonging and legitimacy. She shows how Asian American and Mexican American residents’ selective uptake of norms tied to homeownership and suburban belonging, what she terms strategic uses of whiteness, emerges as a response to historically sedimented conditions of exclusion, even as it coexists with enduring nonwhite identification. Here, whiteness operates as a structuring set of criteria through which legitimacy is assessed, producing recognition that is conditional and context-dependent. While Cheng’s analysis is rooted in the local, it surfaces a wider evaluative logic, whereby historically produced standards of dominance organize the ways belonging and worth are distributed across hierarchies of value.

In Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) traces this to its imperial roots, showing how Western imperial power produces the “East” as an object of knowledge within unequal relations of colonial rule, while positioning the “West” or what Said calls the Occident as the authoritative site from which that knowledge is generated. In this formulation, the “West” comes to function as a historically produced standard by which difference is ordered and evaluated beyond formal rule. Scholars like Meltem Ahıska (2010) extend this argument to show how “the West” operates within non-Western formations as a fantasy that organizes practices, desires, and subjectivities through an anticipated Western gaze that subjects neither fully attain nor fully refuse. Under neoliberal globalization, this horizon can become institutionalized through U.S.-led and Eurocentric systems of standardized evaluation—from university rankings to international accreditation—that are dispersed across hierarchically arranged sites. These systems rank places and people against Western benchmarks, making Westernness a comparative metric that shapes educational selection, labor market entry, and migration outcomes across uneven global scales.

Applying this strategic logic to Said’s theorizing on the Occident in the contemporary neoliberal context, I introduce the concept of strategic Occidentalism to describe the navigational labor through which racialized subjects selectively take up Western-coded forms of value as provisional alignments within transnational hierarchies of evaluation. This labor involves interpretive and positional work, translating underrecognized credentials, reframing trajectories, and managing the visibility of non-Western origins in anticipation of gatekeepers and evaluators who will apply these standards unevenly on return. In South Korea, where U.S. military legacies and state-led development have produced recurring cycles of economic crisis and restructuring, credentials, mobility, and comportment associated with the West have been installed as key signifiers of distinction, making such labor at once structurally compelled and privately shouldered. Across English study migration sites spanning the Philippines, Australia, and the United States, such work takes place within a landscape where the same efforts carry different weight depending on where they are accumulated. The concept thus captures not just what migrants do but the structuring conditions under which such work becomes necessary and its outcomes remain uncertain.

From Occupation to Globalization: Imperial Pedagogies and the English Imperative

Militarized Development and Scarcity

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), existing Korean political and educational institutions were reorganized under the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) to advance American strategic interests in the region. This restructuring introduced U.S.-style governance structures, credentialing systems, and educational standards that established English as a marker of advancement and national modernity (Seth 2002). English testing became a gatekeeping mechanism for university admission and class mobility, embedding American norms of “progress” within the Korean schooling system (E. G. Kim 2011). These reforms drew on earlier U.S. imperial pedagogical experiments, most notably the Philippine Thomasite system, where English served as a tool of governance and social discipline (Hsu 2015). In the period following the Korean War (1950–1953), this infrastructure was reinforced by the expanding presence of U.S. military bases and camptowns in South Korea, which facilitated the circulation of Western goods, media, and everyday forms of American influence (Doolan 2021). As U.S. military-political power permeated into everyday life, English became embedded in the institutional architecture through which the state would come to define modernity.

Under Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship (1961–1979), South Korea pursued rapid industrialization through a U.S.-dependent, export-oriented model that consolidated a chaebol³-centered economy while projecting an image of a growing middle class (Yang 2018). Park’s vision of militarized modernity emphasized discipline, productivity, and educational attainment as pillars of national development, fostering narratives of social cohesion even as class inequalities widened (Moon 2005). Import embargoes and overseas travel restrictions concentrated access to Western goods, overseas education, and English within elite credentialing pathways, amplifying their value through scarcity and signaling alignment with state-defined ideals of modernity (Nelson 2000). South Korea’s ascent was thus enabled by U.S.-led imperial structures, even as the state increasingly redeployed that infrastructure in service of its own nationalist project.

South Korea’s rise was articulated not only in relation to the U.S. metropole but also through contrast with proximate Asian neighbors within U.S. imperial circuits, among whom the Philippines occupied a salient place in South Korea’s aspirational imaginary. The Philippines was one of the first Asian nations to recognize South Korea as a sovereign state, supported postwar reconstruction through sending engineers, and served as a regional reference point for U.S.-influenced governance. Long framed as a model of American-style democracy in the Far East (Guevarra 2010), the Philippines was poised for continued upward development in the post-independence period, buoyed by preferential access to U.S. markets and integration into a U.S.-centered economic order. Over time, however, trade arrangements preserving U.S. parity rights, weak industrial protection, and an export-oriented agricultural sector undermined domestic growth; debt crises and structural adjustment policies further entrenched labor export as a development strategy (Guevarra 2010).

By the late twentieth century, as South Korea outpaced many of its neighbors under a protected, state-led industrial model, the Philippines became associated with economic stagnation, outmigration, and political volatility. This divergence is not merely an indicator of uneven growth but of differentiated roles within a U.S.-led imperial order, in which South Korea developed through protected industrialization while the Philippines was steered toward labor export and outward-oriented trade. Within this arrangement, national trajectories acquire meaning through comparison, as countries are positioned relative to one another. Under racial capitalist frameworks, human value is unevenly produced across space, attaching long-term investment and institutional development to some locations while directing others toward labor extraction and expendability (Gilmore 2007). States are positioned within a relational racialized order that shapes how places and people are rendered usable and disposable.

Seen through this lens, this article unsettles the narrative of South Korea as a “model” minority nation (see Fujitani 2011) as an intrinsic achievement. Instead, it situates its ascent within a genealogy of a U.S.-led imperial racial-capitalist order that rewards discipline, efficiency, and export-oriented growth synchronized with American interests while positioning other countries into subjugated roles as outsourced sites of service work, resource extraction, and intimate economies (Guevarra 2010; Padios 2018; Parreñas 2015; Reyes 2019). Movement within this hierarchy ultimately does not shake its underlying structure but redistributes advantage and disposability across it. South Korea’s ascent is best understood as what Stuart Hall (2019) calls a (re)articulation, in which imperial circuits are reproduced through new arrangements (Lowe 2015), with South Korea accruing material advantage and geopolitical recognition as a subimperial partner in the post-Cold War order (Lee 2010).

Crisis and the Regionalization of Aspiration

In the 1990s, the South Korean state fully embraced globalization under President Kim-Young-sam (1993–1998) segyehwa policies, which sought to integrate the country into the global economy. Central to this project was the elevation of English, deemed the lingua franca of global business, into a key medium through which national global competitiveness became tied to individual advancement (S. J. Park and Abelmann 2004). The state’s institutionalization of English education at the primary school level accelerated the growth of private language education markets and deepened what came to be known as “English fever.” Alongside the liberalization of overseas travel policies (Lim 2004), these developments widened access to overseas education, gradually transforming what had once functioned as a sign of elite distinction into a more accessible, though still unequal strategy of social mobility.

The 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis marked a decisive restructuring of South Korea’s labor market as IMF-mandated reforms legalized mass layoffs, expanded non-regular, flexible employment, and eroded expectations of stable, long-term work. In the following years, the responsibility for securing employment and managing economic uncertainty was increasingly shifted from firms and the state onto individuals and their families (Chun 2009). These shifts came to a head in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, when youth underemployment rose sharply (Song 2009), with severe effects among youth from provincial regions who faced more limited labor market opportunities than their urban counterparts (Hyundai Research Institute 2018). State policy under President Lee Myung-bak, a pro-business-executive-turned-politician, hastened this turn toward outward mobility as a strategy for securing stable employment at home. Framed via the discourse of the “G-20 generation,” a term popularized around the 2010 Seoul G-20 Summit, that cast youth as bearers of national economic competitiveness, the state expanded study and work abroad programs (e.g., Global Internship Program), deregulated private education markets (Yoon 2015), and reinforced English as a driver of national growth.

Under these conditions, private educational mobility infrastructures expanded as brokers promoted sites across Western-aligned English-speaking Asia and Oceania, including the Philippines, India, Fiji, and Malaysia, as cost-effective pathways for acquiring English and approximating Western credentials. The United States remained the premier destination, associated with the highest symbolic and material returns (Chun and Han 2015), yet access to U.S.-based education and employment became increasingly constrained by rising costs, restrictive visa regimes, and concerns of gun violence. As entry narrowed, mobility was rerouted through alternative pathways, producing a stratified and sometimes sequenced system of destinations. The Philippines, undergirded by U.S. colonial legacies, an English-speaking labor force (Padios 2018), and a service economy expanded by Korean investment (Choi 2021; D. Kim 2016), emerged as the most accessible site for English study. Australia occupied a distinct position, as the mid-2000s expansion of the Working Holiday Visa program enabled South Koreans aged 18 to 30 to combine language acquisition with labor migration, including work in labor-deficit areas. These pathways altogether linked language education, labor, and credential-building across unevenly valued sites while remaining oriented toward Western benchmarks.

Methods

This study employs multi-sited longitudinal ethnographic and interview methods to examine how South Korean youth in motion (ages 18–31) anticipate and navigate the uneven evaluation of their educational and labor efforts across destinations and after returning. Primary ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between 2015 and 2019 across four sites: South Korea, the United States, the Philippines, and Australia. These sites were selected to follow participants across key stages of mobility, including primary destinations, secondary destinations, and post-return transitions.

The project draws on 137 in-depth semi-structured interviews and approximately twenty-two non-consecutive months of participant observation. Interviews traced migrants’ educational decisions, labor and study pathways, class background, and shifting expectations of migration over the course of their time abroad. To capture how strategies evolved over time, I also conducted follow-up interviews in South Korea from 2017 to 2020 during extended stays.

The first phase focused on English study abroad as a common entry point into overseas mobility. Between 2015 and 2019, I conducted ethnographic research across major English study hubs in the United States and Philippines: Los Angeles, Bacolod, and Iloilo. I volunteered as a tutor and teaching assistant at private English language schools (ELS), participating in classroom instruction, dormitory life, and school-organized activities. This role enabled close observation of speaking and test preparation, classroom interactions, and life beyond campus. Shorter visits to additional sites like Baguio and Cebu provided comparative context. I also worked as a server in Los Angeles alongside Korean migrants, extending observation to largely off-the-books workplace dynamics beyond educational settings.

The second phase tracked labor mobility through Australia’s working-holiday visa regime. In 2018, I conducted immersive fieldwork in Queensland, Australia, living and working alongside South Korean migrants on farms and in boardinghouses, where agricultural labor was exchanged for visa extensions. Additional field visits to regional worksites in Cairns and Caboolture situated these dynamics within a broader working-holiday labor regime. This phase captured how earlier educational aspirations were reworked under extractive labor conditions.

The final phase focused on reentry in South Korea between 2017 and 2020. During extended stays, I conducted follow-up interviews and participant observation as participants attempted to convert overseas experience into employment, credentials, or alternative futures. By following participants across stages, this study adopts a global longitudinal ethnographic approach that foregrounds both spatial and temporal dimensions of migration (Paul and Yeoh 2020). This design traces how migrants revise their strategies across sites and over time as they confront uncertainty about how their experiences will be recognized upon return to South Korea.

Throughout the research, I attended closely to power relations and my own positionality. As a U.S.-based, Western-educated femme-presenting researcher of Korean heritage, my linguistic fluency, slightly older age, and shared cultural background positioned me as a nuna and unni (older sister) to many participants, enabling candid discussions of sensitive experiences—even as my institutional privilege set me apart. My immersive participation as a tutor, server, student, and farm worker further grounded the research in everyday practice, allowing sustained observation of how structural inequalities were lived and negotiated across sites.

Hierarchies of English Study Abroad Destinations

The perception of Anglophone destinations among South Korean youth reflects a global racialized hierarchy structured through colonial histories and ongoing inequalities in recognition. Western nations like the United States, England, and Canada carry high symbolic and institutional value. As Youna Kim (2011) notes, “what drives . . . migratory aspiration is . . . long-term consumption of the symbolic West, proliferating media texts, images, new concepts and alternative lifestyles . . . transcending national borders and entering everyday consciousness” (73). By contrast, postcolonial educational hubs like India or the Philippines are seen as accessible, cost-effective alternatives even though credentials and experiences are more readily discounted. For my participants, this distinction emerges within a shared U.S.-centered geopolitical order that differentially assigns value across destinations. As a result, similar forms of training, including English acquisition and overseas exposure, do not carry equivalent weight but are evaluated through the positioning of the sites in which they are obtained.

Dahae,⁴ a mid-twenties student I met at an ELS in Bacolod, captured this hierarchy clearly. Ranking English-speaking destinations one by one, she explained,

It goes like this: the United States, Canada, then New Zealand and Australia. After that is Singapore. Then the Philippines and India . . . Where you come from [talking about the interviewer’s origin country] is top because it’s the land of Harvard and Hollywood . . . It’s where they filmed How I Met your Mother. It’s always been my romang [fantasy].

Never mind that Dahae was studying in the Philippines herself, her trajectory reflects a selection shaped more by constraint than preference, where costs and access redirect mobility into sites that remain lower in the hierarchy she maps. Others I encountered voiced similar calculations, describing the United States or Canada as more desirable destinations, even as concerns such as gun violence in the former gave some pause.

This hierarchy of destinations is rooted in South Korea’s deep historical and geopolitical entanglement with the United States, a relationship that predates the Korean War (Choi and Kim 2025) and whose influence on mobility aspirations has only deepened since. The United States exerts cultural, racial, and economic influence, accentuated through media, pop culture, and a militarized presence in South Korea. The Philippines, by contrast, is often framed as a “steppingstone” among South Korean migrants and brokers, a lower-cost training ground for acquiring English skills before returning to South Korea or a preparatory stage before transitioning to more prestigious Western locations. This positioning reflects not only differences in cost but also a broader system of destination-based valuation in which similar forms of effort carry unequal value depending on where they are accumulated. As a result, migrants pursuing comparable goals of English exposure across sites must anticipate how those efforts will be differentially read and translated upon return.

This was especially evident for South Koreans on yonge yonsu programs, broker-coordinated work-study pathways that combine English study in lower-cost destinations with labor or educational mobility in more desirable ones. Many participants headed to Western working holiday destinations like Australia or New Zealand, using sites like the Philippines as preparatory stages.⁵ The Philippines became a broker-recommended alternative to other non-Western hubs like Fiji or India not only because of its affordability and established English school infrastructure but also because it offered a more familiar and accommodating educational and service environment within the region. Within this setting, South Koreans could practice speaking English while occupying a position of relative racial and social advantage unavailable to them in the same form back home. For Chan, a yonge yonsu participant from Seoul, the Philippines served as a training ground for his “ultimate experience” in Australia. He explained:

For Australia . . .even if I want to go study English, it’s not like the Australians are going to be teaching you English . . . Have to just get your hands dirty and bump into it but that’s just not that easy. If I . . . go to Australia without any plan, it’s not like I will naturally learn English . . . That’s why there are a lot of people who fail in Australia . . . [We] . . . go to the Philippines to learn the basics . . . because I wanted to become familiar with English.

The Philippines served as an affordable training ground for Chan while Australia was imagined as the site where English could be secured in its most authoritative form, tied to “native” speech and racialized as white and Western. In this way, the same practice of learning English is unevenly valued across sites with the Philippines cast as basic and Australia as authentic. This reflects how Anglophone legitimacy is aligned with whiteness, treating white settler Australians as the reference point for linguistic authority in Australia while Indigenous presence are made invisible. Within this hierarchy, Filipino English is devalued as “service English,” its status shaped by colonial subordination and its association with service roles in the global economy. Beatriz Lorente’s (2017) notion of scripts of servitude, developed in her study of Filipino domestic workers, illuminates how Filipino English more broadly circulates as a language of provision, valued for utility but denied recognition as fully legitimate. While Chan appreciated the accessibility of English schools in the Philippines, his description of teachers as service providers, and of these schools as places to “learn the basics,” reflects this instrumental framing. His account underscores how such hierarchies position non-Western hubs like the Philippines as preliminary rather than authoritative sites of linguistic attainment.

The exclusivity of certain Western destinations further reinforces these hierarchies. For South Koreans, entry into these countries is structured through immigration policies and geopolitical relations that differentiate how easily they can move across sites. Destinations like New Zealand and Canada, which during the time of fieldwork limited South Korean working holiday visas through annual quotas, were viewed as more prestigious in part because of their restricted entry. Poram, a yonge yonsu-goer in her mid-twenties from Pyeongtaek, deliberately chose New Zealand over Australia, describing Australia as the “easy destination” where “even dogs and cows can go.” Her use of the Korean idiom underscores how destinations are ranked, with more selective and resource-demanding locations, such as the United States and Canada, understood as more desirable. Poram explained,

It’s where even dogs and cows can go . . . Even if you go to Australia, you’re just going to work in the fields, you can’t even speak English. Why would you go abroad . . . [You hear] the Korean women who come back from Australia don’t have a good image . . . [My father said] they go into sex work as the other option. That’s why the image is bad in South Korea.

Poram dismissed the Australian working holiday as a lower-barrier form of manual labor, even though her experience in a New Zealand processing factory involved similar forms of labor. This contrast between Australia’s accessibility and New Zealand’s perceived exclusivity reveals how restricted entry itself became a marker of status, elevating certain destinations despite comparable labor conditions. Her framing reflects a broader evaluative logic, whereby even Western destinations are ranked not only by the nature of the work or experience they offer but also by the conditions of entry that structure them. Her father’s warnings, drawn from media narratives about Korean migrant women in Australia and sex work, shaped this perception, layering moral, gendered, and sexualized anxieties onto these destination rankings. Further amplified by life in their hometown of Pyeongtaek, a U.S. military hub long shaped by the regulation and stigmatization of sex work, these concerns steered Poram toward New Zealand, where restricted entry promised a form of distinction that Australia’s accessibility could not.

The way South Koreans rank English-speaking destinations reveals how colonial legacies and global racial hierarchies are continually reproduced and reworked through decisions about where to study, work, and move. Western countries are positioned as sites where linguistic and cultural authority can be secured while postcolonial educational hubs are treated as provisional spaces for acquiring preliminary skills. Comparable investments in English study and overseas experience carry different value depending on where they are undertaken with access, selectivity, and racialized perceptions shaping how destinations are evaluated. The use of non-Western sites as steppingstones signals a strategic engagement with these hierarchies, as migrants sequence their movement across locations to extract value under unequal conditions, and organize their mobility around uneven recognition attached to place.

Strategic Occidentalism: Prestige, Pragmatism, and Uneven Value

Despite the exclusivity of destinations like the United States, some South Koreans still overcome significant barriers to secure student visas, drawn by its reputation as the “dream” site for English study. Its cultural and educational prestige and long-established co-ethnic Korean networks, especially in hubs like Los Angeles, sustain this appeal as the coveted choice. Yet many do not follow elite academic pathways to four-year colleges. Instead, they pursue precarious educational routes, relying on the co-ethnic economy and off-the-books jobs to cover tuition and living expenses while extending their stay. For them, ELS serve as institutional anchors for visa maintenance as much as sites of instruction.

Faced with limited access to prestigious tracks, migrants in Los Angeles sought to make their time in these “high-status” destinations count. Viewing their stay as an opportunity to “achieve something” and avoid returning home empty-handed, they layered English study with vocational training in fields like lash extensions, welding, or textile design through informal apprenticeships or non-student-visa-eligible programs. These arrangements allowed them to leave with recognizable markers associated with United States even when the training itself was lower stakes or redundant. Many juggled dual enrollments, maintaining ELS registration for visa compliance while pursuing skills-based training alongside it, often under the strain of double tuition and multiple part-time jobs.

Jiyeon, a design school graduate originally from Busan, followed this path. Struggling to break into South Korea’s fashion industry, she discovered a vocational textile design program in Los Angeles through a church contact. Although she saw the technical training itself as less advanced than what was available in South Korea, she saw advantage in its U.S. affiliation. Being “trained-in-U.S.,” she believed, would register differently in South Korea’s hypercompetitive labor market. Unable to afford elite institutions such as the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Jiyeon enrolled in an ELS to maintain her F-1 visa while taking textile design classes at the vocational school. She supported herself through three part-time jobs while paying roughly $600 in monthly tuition, enduring significant physical strain to sustain both tracks. Her goal, however, remained clear:

It was my dream when I was younger to be not a regular designer, but someone who makes their own clothes, fabric, and patterns . . . It was also one of the reasons why I decided to go into textiles when I got to the States. The merit of being trained in the US was big.

Prior to leaving, Jiyeon had already built a foundation in the fashion field. With a background in design and experience both as a fashion intern and a retail worker in a Dongdaemun swapmeet, she was not starting from scratch. Instead, her move did not provide more advanced technical training so much as a way to rebrand the skills she already had. The appeal of U.S.-based training lies in its capacity to reorganize existing experience into something more favorably read back home. Place thus operates as a credentialing frame, reflecting practices of strategic Occidentalism where migrants enhance their trajectories by associating with Western prestige.

A similar dynamic appears in Chul’s trajectory, though through a different occupational path. A former athlete from southern Gyeonggido, whose minor league career ended after an injury, Chul turned to the United States after graduating high school to rebuild his future. Inspired by his father’s background in construction, Chul decided to leave South Korea to pursue a weekend welding apprenticeship run out of a Korean immigrant church basement in Orange County. The program itself was modest but working toward an American Welding Society certificate⁶ meant his credentials would travel differently than comparable training in South Korea.

If you obtain the welding license, then I can learn about construction and get paid. In Korea, earnings for welders are not bad. But in the US, earnings for welding are even better . . . I will go back to Korea after earning my license and use it in Korea. I’d stick out as a global welder.

In Chul’s case, what matters is not so much the depth of technical training as the ability to attach certification of that training to a site whose symbolic standing amplifies its perceived significance. The designation “global welder” reflects an effort to translate otherwise comparable skills into distinction through location, in a crowded labor market. The dynamic resonates with what Nonie Tuxen and Shanthi Robertson (2019) describe as the foreign stamp, where place-based markers carry value beyond the substance of training.

Under tighter financial constraints, this strategy takes a different form in the Philippines. Here, South Koreans pursue cost-effective pathways that allow them to accumulate preliminary credentials. The accessibility of Philippine ELS enables students to prepare for standardized English competency exams like TOEFL and TOEIC,⁷ often required for college graduation or entry into white-collar employment in South Korea. ELS in the Philippines operates like “cram schools,” centered on exam preparation and credential acquisition. The credentials produced are designed to circulate beyond the site of training while minimizing attention to where and how they were earned.

Banjang, also known as Gom, an early high school leaver from Andong, exemplifies how these pathways are structured by limited resources. After spending time working, he sought to re-enter the educational track by obtaining his Korean GED equivalent and preparing for college admission. Unable to afford the high costs of housing and private education courses in Seoul or Busan, where preparatory training centers are concentrated, he drew on savings from food delivery work and military service to finance study in the Philippines. Its affordability, coupled with English test preparation, made it a viable alternative. His aim was to return to South Korea, sit for the English-heavy college admissions exam, and secure entry into a four-year university.

Banjang’s trajectory was far from unusual. Many students I interviewed in the Philippines oriented their time toward exams like the TOEIC. Yejoo, a university student from Gumi, participated in her college’s study-abroad program, where she focused on TOEIC preparation. In fact, she was one in a group of thirty students from her local college studying in Bacolod. Describing her plans, she explained,

My college requires TOEIC to graduate. It helps improve employability. So, since I am in school of social work, I will be focusing this month on that . . . the Philippines is . . . like a hagwon [cram school].

For students like Banjang and Yejoo, Philippine English schools provided an affordable route to preparatory test training, whose value emerged through subsequent conversion. Instead of citing their “English language school completion certificate” at job interviews, students translate these experiences into standardized international test scores, which carry broader recognition in South Korea. In contrast to Chul and Jiyeon in the United States, where place itself can signal distinction, the Philippines pathway relies more heavily on conversion into standardized metrics, foregrounding the score while the site of acquisition recedes from view. This draws on what Kristin Cipollone and Amy Stich (2017) call shadow capital, or cultural resources that approximate dominant forms while carrying diminished exchange value. Here, “shadow” captures how value emerges through processes of translation as experiences must be repackaged to become legible. Selectively reframing experiences via standardized markers serves to obscure the non-Western origins of their training. Students move across differently valued cultural spheres within a racialized hierarchy (Carter 2005) where Western sites and credentials remain the primary reference points for recognition.

This logic extends beyond educational projects and into entrepreneurial experimentation, where migrants use their time abroad to imagine new livelihoods (see Abelmann, Park, and Kim 2009). Anxious about uncertain job prospects at home, some leverage lower costs of leisure and training in places such as the Philippines to develop business ideas in areas like surfing, massage, and scuba diving, parlaying these experiences into ventures upon return. Jiman left his online hotel sales job in his late twenties when it could no longer sustain both himself and his aging parents. He described his Philippines-Australia yonge yonsu as a restart, a chance to study English while exploring more profitable business possibilities. His visionboarding for “Great Barrier Reef Korea” illustrates this process. Although he obtained his scuba certification in the Philippines, he planned to brand his future shop back home around a brief trip to the Great Barrier Reef. He even wanted to adopt an Australian accent to authenticate the venture, a move that concealed the stepwise nature of his trajectory. As he put it,

I’ll get my scuba license in the Philippines at a cheaper price. In Australia, I’ll gain real experience diving in the Great Barrier Reef . . . I’ll have to at least pick up an Australian accent if I want to call my shop, ‘Great Barrier Reef Korea.’

By presenting his training through Australian-coded markers, Jiman enhances its perceived legitimacy for prospective South Korean clients, projecting the authenticity associated with Australian scuba diving while downplaying the conditions under which his skills were developed in the Philippines. His account points to a broader pattern in which migrants recalibrate their trajectories to align with sites that hold greater symbolic weight within a hierarchy of value.

Not all entrepreneurial adaptations relied on Western-coded markers. In some cases, migrants drew on local cultural forms encountered in the Philippines, reworking them into new economic possibilities upon return. Arang, an early-twenties donut shop part-timer, initially approached her time abroad as a period of leisure, funded by a wealthier relative who wanted to support her education. Spending much of her downtime dining out in town, she became familiar with Filipino sweets, such as halo-halo, an encounter that led her to envision a small business in South Korea. As she put it, “I kept thinking, these would sell so well back home. Perfect for Korean taste buds.” Before returning, she invested in learning the techniques of Filipino dessert-making, turning casual consumption into the basis for potential venture.

This pathway operates through the selective recombination of cultural repertoires, where familiarity with diverse and omnivorous tastes becomes a resource for market differentiation (see Khan 2011). Unlike Jiman or Jiyeon, who stake their trajectories on Western-coded forms of value, Arang works with locally encountered forms, reshaping them into products that can resonate despite their non-Western origins. Her case suggests that migrants draw on a wider range of experiences, adapting them to specific contexts than simply reproducing dominant forms.

These cases show how migrants navigate uneven systems of valuation by actively repackaging how their experiences are read and converted. In “higher-status” destinations, recognition attaches to place itself, where sites function as credentials in their own right. In lower-cost settings such as the Philippines, the same process depends on standardized markers like test-based credentials that “shadow” their origins. In other cases, migrants recombine experiences across sites, reworking them into entrepreneurial projects that open new market possibilities. Across these contexts, strategic Occidentalism takes different forms as migrants work to make their experiences valuable within labor market hierarchies that continue to privilege Western-coded markers.

Return, Recognition, and Constraint

Upon return to South Korea, this navigational labor encounters the constraints of the domestic labor market, where overseas experience is unevenly recognized. Returnees orient themselves toward more credible, often Western-coded markers while confronting uncertain and competitive labor market conditions. Attempts to strategically spin their overseas exposure reveal the tension between symbolic value and its limited convertibility within South Korea’s racialized valuation of global credentials. These efforts can generate provisional recognition, but rarely equivalent standing with more established credentials, producing forms of legitimacy that remain partial and unstable (Bhabha 1994).

Roni, a mid-twenties coffee shop worker based in Paju, illustrates this dynamic. Having recently returned from a two-year working holiday in Australia, she hoped to leverage her time abroad for career advancement. While in Australia, she enrolled in a barista certification course despite already possessing significant professional experience; prior to leaving, she had worked as a store manager at a top U.S. global coffee chain near her home. Roni believed this credential would enhance her prospects in the coffee sector, explaining,

I got the barista certification thinking it’d help me work as a barista in Australia . . . But the cash cleaning jobs actually paid better. I also mistakenly thought that it would be helpful in South Korea, especially because there is no Australia-style coffee here.

Yet upon return, this additional credential did not translate into advantage. Despite her prior experience and newly minted certification, she was rehired by her former employer but required to start over again from an entry-level position. Her extended time abroad, rather than enhancing her profile, was read as an interruption, while her Australian certification did little to offset this perceived gap. That this credential failed to register as added value, particularly within a U.S.-affiliated job context, underscores the hierarchy operating among Western destinations. Roni’s trajectory highlights a form of incomplete conversion, in which overseas experience enables re-entry but fails to produce advancement, instead resulting in a downward reset within the same occupational field.

Faced with the limits of credentialing, some migrants rework and embellish how their overseas experiences could be viewed. Sorah, a high school graduate in her late teens from southern Gyeonggido, illuminates this process. After two years on a working holiday visa in Australia, where she was employed in hotel housekeeping near Cairns, she returned to South Korea with limited options. Drawing on informal nail art skills she had developed abroad, she began to reposition these practices as a form of distinction. Branding herself through social media and word-of-mouth as offering a “Western-style” nail aesthetic, she foregrounded stylistic elements associated with her time overseas, transforming informal experience into a marketable identity. This framing appealed to clients who associated overseas exposure with a more ornate cosmopolitan design, allowing her to attract customers and generate income as she worked toward formal licensure.

By contrast, Jeenah, a returnee from greater Busan, reworked her fragmented overseas experiences into a more legible narrative of accomplishment. She spent close to five years on an F-1 student visa, attending ELS intermittently while juggling off-the-books jobs as a medical office receptionist and a hostess in Koreatown’s nightlife economy. In her final year, after a failed attempt at securing a marriage visa, she redirected her savings into a three-month TESOL⁸ certification program, egged on by her sister. Reflecting on her path, Jeenah explained,

My sister told me to prepare for English and get the TESOL certificate, so I took a TESOL class. There’s a lot of class options, but I was running out of time, so I did the shortest one, only one hundred hours . . . At first, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in Korea. It was only because I took that TESOL class, I [got] my job.

Jeenah’s account shows how extended periods of uncertainty and “uncountable” work can be recast into legible trajectories of accomplishment and even sustained commitment. Banking on the TESOL certificate, even as a last minute addition, allowed her to condense and obscure much of her time in Los Angeles, which had been marked by intermittent school enrollment, visa-maintaining ELS attendance, and off-the-books work in the nightlife economy. Upon returning, this credential, combined with her “prolonged” time in the United States, proved legible to employers in the less competitive English tutor labor market in Busan, allowing her to gain a foothold as an English teacher before opening her own study room business.

Even where partial or improvised forms of conversion are possible, these efforts do not consistently stabilize into durable outcomes upon return. In some cases, they break down altogether. For example, although Jiman obtained a scuba diving license and envisioned the venture “Great Barrier Reef Korea,” the prohibitive costs of launching a business quickly derailed his plans. Within a few months of returning home, drawing on savings accumulated from his time working in Australia, he pivoted to the idea of selling imported porcelain. However, he struggled to stay afloat, hindered by gaps in his employment history and age-based exclusion from entry-level office work. While holding onto this venture by a thread, he relied on part-time catering work before eventually moving into delivery truck driving. Jiman described the toll:

In South Korea it’s so hard. Even if I do what I want to do I don’t have the strength . . . I have no reason to . . . hang out. I do want to venture out and do something new . . . I’m just really burnt out . . . All my friends my age are married with kids. I’m just everyday “experiencing.” I . . . don’t want to live as this exceptional person. I wanted to do something I liked . . . I’m older and it’s not been easy. I’ve been super stressed. In the meantime, I am avoiding my friends, and my relatives are criticizing me.

Jiman’s account underscores how these efforts are lived not just as stalled mobility but also as shame. Age-graded expectations around stability, family formation, and “respectable” adulthood reassert themselves upon return, recasting structural constraints as personal failure. The inability to translate these Western-coded forms of value into lasting economic security becomes a source of reckoning for some, shaped by precarious work, age bias, and narrowed options for late or re-entry into professional paths. Here, strategic Occidentalism exposes the limits of conversion itself as aspirations cultivated abroad confront the terms of recognition at home. Yet even within such limits, outcomes remain uneven, shaped by whatever forms of experience can be made convertible under shifting local conditions.

Encountering similar constraints but arriving at a more provisional outcome, Heejae, a pub server from Gwangju, did not rely on Western-coded markers in the same way. After graduating with what he calls a “less-useful” degree in Japanese, he found himself frustrated with part-time work and set his sights on Australia to earn money. But knowing his English was not strong, he first took up a managerial position at an ELS in Bacolod, handling administrative tasks in exchange for free classes and room and board, his own makeshift yonge yonsu. While a fallout with the friend he planned to travel with to Australia prevented his onward move, upon returning home (and briefly resuming pub work), Heejae secured a temporary position at an export-oriented drone company. He recounted,

There’s . . . merit for English speaking . . . but no merit for the graduation certificate. They never asked me to show the certificate but rather just asked me how much English I know, and I replied that I studied English in the Philippines and worked as a manager there. I told him I don’t know . . . business English . . . he said he understood and that was as far as he asked . . . It’s like he liked that I wasn’t just a student.

By presenting his Philippine experience as evidence of practical English and managerial responsibility, Heejae satisfied his employer’s need for functional English skills, particularly suitable for Gwangju’s less competitive job market. Under these conditions, his Philippine managerial experience, initially taken up as a workaround for limited funds, came to signal professional value. While the job itself was temporary, it provided the initial footing needed for re-entry into paid work. Yet such pathways remain narrowly bounded, contingent on specific local conditions and difficult to translate beyond them in a labor market that continues to privilege Western-coded markers.

The preceding cases map the uneven terrain on which the practice of strategic Occidentalism unfolds. Returnees attempt to reposition themselves largely through Western-coded credentials, aesthetic distinction, or narrative reframing, yet these efforts yield divergent outcomes across sites and over time. Their strategies remain tethered to racialized hierarchies of value in the South Korean labor market that govern what registers as credible, transferable, and ultimately valuable. The worth attached to overseas experiences does not travel intact across sites but must be continually negotiated, leaving its conversion into durable advancement uncertain.

Discussion and Conclusion

This research traces how South Korean migrants pursuing English study abroad navigate how these experiences are evaluated across unequal contexts of mobility. Instead of functioning as a straightforward pathway to advancement, overseas education becomes a site of strategic Occidentalism, where migrants orient toward Western-coded credentials, spaces, and forms of self-presentation within a labor market where Western affiliation continues to confer distinction. Practices such as credential stacking, selective narration, and reframing of work experience reflect both tactical ingenuity and structural constraint, highlighting how overseas experience is assessed through recognizable signals rather than skill or expertise alone. Yet outcomes diverge; some trajectories stall entirely, while others narrow into context-specific footholds, showing how such efforts yield limited recognition and fall short of sustained mobility.

These patterns point to the limits of treating overseas experiences as a reliable path to social mobility. What matters is less what migrants actually accumulate abroad than how their trajectories are interpreted within a domestic labor market marked by intense competition, age-based expectations, and employer preferences for particular credentials. Western-coded markers retain their desirability through historically structured racial hierarchies of value even as their wider circulation reduces their distinctiveness. Migrants are compelled to pursue them while confronting diminishing returns, as the worth attached to such experiences remains contingent and unevenly convertible.

South Korea’s specificity lies not only in its chaebol-centered economy and U.S. geopolitical ties but also in how its postcolonial developmental trajectory has made Westernness structurally productive. U.S. military legacies, state-led globalization, and recurrent crisis-driven restructuring have together cemented Western-coded credentials as the operative currency of distinction, while simultaneously widening mobility pathways that cannot deliver the recognition they promise. This gap between the structural demand for Western-coded distinction and its uneven convertibility is what strategic Occidentalism seeks to explain and the South Korean case makes visible with clarity.

By centering lower-resourced migrants, this study challenges celebratory accounts of mobility that emphasize cosmopolitan accumulation while overlooking how unevenly such experiences translate into advantage, if at all. Strategic Occidentalism describes this unevenness while remaining attentive to the tactical awareness migrants bring to navigating it. The framework travels beyond this case, naming a condition that recurs wherever neoliberal restructuring and postcolonial hierarchies converge. In such conditions, the terms of recognition are set elsewhere, the standards of value shift across contexts, and migrants bear the burden of navigating them largely on their own.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank and acknowledge Moon Charania, Robert Chlala, Paul Nadal, Beth Lew-Williams, Rhacel Parreñas, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, Shamus Khan, Yuri Doolan, Van Nguyen, Christine Peralta, and Grayson Lee for their guidance. Special thanks to the organizers, panelists, and attendees of the 2024 University of Michigan Nam Center for Korean Studies’ The Politics of Migration, Diaspora, and Race in Transnational Korea conference as well as the 2025 Association for Asian American Studies “Disavowing the Client State” panel in Boston for their valuable feedback on this paper.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from the Korea Foundation, Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Academy of Korean Studies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Carolyn Choi

Notes

Author Biography

Carolyn Choi (she/hers) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Princeton University. Her book project, After Ascent: South Korean Youth, Subempire, and Uneven Global Mobility, traces how South Korea’s subimperial position shapes youth encounters across the Philippines, Australia, and the United States. Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, International Migration Review, and Positions: Asia Critique; she is also co-author of IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All, a children’s book on intersectionality.

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