Korean Americans

I

Introduction

Korean Americans, residents of the United States who trace their ancestry to Korea. Most Korean Americans are immigrants who have come to the United States since 1965 or their descendants. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 1,070,100 Americans are of Korean descent. They constitute the fifth largest group of Asian Americans, after Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Asian Indian Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. The states with the largest Korean American populations are California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas.

II

History

Korean immigration to the United States began in 1902 when Korean immigrants, most of whom were single men, migrated to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations. From 1902 to 1905, approximately 7,000 Koreans settled in Hawaii. In 1905 the Korean government halted emigration to the United States because of the harsh treatment Korean workers had received in Hawaii. Many of these early immigrants arranged to marry Korean women by mail. About 1,000 such women, known as picture brides because they met their husbands by exchanging photographs, eventually joined their spouses in the United States. Approximately 1,000 Korean immigrants returned to Korea before 1924, when the U.S. government passed new laws severely limiting immigration from Asia.

At the end of World War II in 1945, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) occupied Korea. In 1948 the United States and the USSR divided Korea into two separate countries, communist North Korea and democratic South Korea. The Korean War (1950-1953), a conflict between North and South Korea and their respective allies, brought many American military personnel to South Korea. Several thousand Korean orphans and war brides (women who married U.S. servicemen) emigrated to the United States after the war. Between 1945 and 1965 almost 20,000 Korean immigrants resettled in the United States.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated racist U.S. immigration quotas, led to a surge in emigration from South Korea. By 1972 more than 20,000 Korean immigrants entered the United States each year. From 1975 to 1990, over 30,000 Koreans immigrated to the United States annually. In the peak year of 1987, 35,849 Koreans were admitted to the United States as permanent residents. Beginning in 1988 Korean immigration began to slowly decline. The decline accelerated after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when many Korean American stores were burned or looted. By 1998 the annual rate of emigration from Korea was one-third that of the peak year of 1987.

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III

Employment

Korean immigrants to the United States typically come from urban, middle-class backgrounds. Many are college graduates who previously held professional or administrative jobs in Korea. Because American employers often do not consider most Korean academic degrees valid, many Korean immigrants are forced to take less prestigious jobs than they held in Korea, with earnings below the U.S. average. To maintain family income, the great majority of married women work outside the home. Many Korean Americans start their own small businesses. More than half of working Korean Americans are employed by Korean American-owned businesses.

Among current immigrant groups in the United States, Korean Americans have the highest rates of participation in small business. Korean Americans own about 25 percent of the nation’s laundry and dry cleaning businesses. They are prominent in the fruit and vegetable trade in New York City. In many major cities, Korean Americans opened stores in inner-city, low-income minority neighborhoods. Many Korean Americans bought stores in these mainly African American neighborhoods from white retailers, who began to desert poor urban areas and move to the suburbs in the early 1970s. The highly visible presence of Korean American retailers in low-income neighborhoods has sometimes made them conspicuous targets for the anger and frustration of local residents.

IV

Culture

Korean American parents place a strong faith in education as a means to ensure upward economic mobility for their children. Responding to parental pressure, Korean American students often achieve high levels of education. However, a significant number of Korean American children deal with unreasonable parental expectations. American stereotypes, which depict Asian Americans as highly motivated and uniformly successful students, place additional pressure on many Korean American young people.

An extremely high percentage of Korean Americans participate in organized religion. About 70 percent of the Korean American community attends ethnic Korean Protestant churches, as does about 25 percent of the population of South Korea. From the beginning, Christians have constituted a large majority of Korean immigrants to the United States. Nevertheless, the intensity of Korean American religious participation surprises many observers. Korean ethnic churches evidently play an important role in maintaining religious and ethnic solidarity within Korean American communities.

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