Spatial Precarity Noncitizen Migrant Workers in South Korea
摘要
This chapter is about housing and spatial existence in which migrant workers live liminal lives, especially when undocumented and subject to deportation risks. This chapter uses ethnography and interviews; the cases reveal ways in which workers who begin in the Employment Permit System (EPS), when faced with unfair exploitative and violent working conditions, can easily become undocumented and how undocumented workers are simultaneously free to change their job, but always living under the fear of deportation. Using the concept of the invisibility of ghosts (Thais colloquially call the undocumented), the chapter reveals how important fair quality housing is to migrant workers’ right to be territorially present. At the same time, the chapter offers some hope for reform by turning to examine the changes in migrant worker organizing campaigns focused on the rights to change one’s job, housing, regularization of agricultural workers, and anti-discrimination.