Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Master's Capstone Project

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

International Migration Studies

Advisor

Ismael García-Colón

Subject Categories

Other Arts and Humanities

Keywords

Immigration policy, Asylum seekers, Demographic decline, Integration infrastructure, Sweden 2015 refugee crisis, South Korea fertility rate, Political polarization, Welfare state, Comparative migration studies, Institutional capacity

Abstract

The purpose of this capstone project is to analyze how two nations that have little in common in terms of geography or politics have been required to deal with immigration issues in ways that their institutions did not anticipate. One nation has been dealing with immigration-related issues for some time now, while the other nation has yet to do so. In 2015, when Sweden received approximately 162,000 asylum applications in one year alone, Sweden’s housing systems were strained, many of the municipalities were unable to keep up with the demand, and the political climate began to shift in ways that even seasoned analysts had never before observed. South Korea’s situation could hardly look more different on the surface: no refugee surge, no sudden crisis. However, a total fertility rate that decreased to 0.72 in 2023 (the lowest ever recorded fertility rate for any country), along with an increasingly aging workforce and an increasingly fiscally unsustainable pension system, according to demographers, will generate its own slow-moving pressure towards expanding immigration in South Korea. Beyond the immediate immigration pressures each country faces, both are also contending with a shared background condition: demographic decline. Sweden’s fertility rate fell to 1.45 in 2023, a reminder that even well-funded welfare states with long-established liberal immigration traditions are not immune to the population pressures reshaping this century. South Korea’s situation is more acute still, with a fertility rate of 0.72 that has no precedent among developed economies and that makes the immigration question not a matter of if but of when and how.

Sweden’s story, in short, is one of institutions caught flat-footed. Not because the will or the money wasn’t there, but because people arrived faster than the systems built to receive them could adjust. Housing ran short almost immediately. Getting newcomers into the labor market took far longer than anyone had planned for. In the more deprived urban neighborhoods, gang violence climbed and while that had far more to do with residential segregation and blocked opportunity than with immigration itself, that distinction didn’t survive contact with the political moment. Right-wing parties pointed to the visible strain and called it proof of wholesale failure. Voters listened and within a few years, what had been a question of humanitarian administration had become the fault line of Swedish politics.

South Korea hasn’t arrived at anything like that point, but the pieces are slowly falling into place. Integration responsibilities are scattered across ministries with no one really in charge of the whole picture. The national story Koreans tell about themselves still centers on ethnic

unity, and public openness to immigration has generally lasted only as long as immigrants were seen as economically useful. Anti-discrimination law exists mostly on paper, and perhaps the most telling gap: the government hasn’t yet leveled with its own public about what bringing in more people which the demographics clearly require is actually going to mean. The experience

of Korean Chinese and Korean Russian returnees is instructive here. Even people who share Korean ancestry have not slotted in seamlessly, and that is a lesson South Korea hasn’t fully sat with yet.

The argument running through this capstone is that migration doesn’t, by itself, destabilize societies. What creates real instability is the distance between how fast a population is changing and how fast the institutions managing that change can keep up and then, critically, what politicians decide to make of that distance once ordinary people start noticing it. South Korea still has room to avoid the kind of political rupture that redrew Sweden’s electoral map, but that room isn’t unlimited. Keeping it open means investing seriously in integration infrastructure now, getting the relevant institutions to actually work together, and having an honest national conversation about what demographic reality is going to require.

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