A. Earlier systems: Tied to private agencies and employers

The early history of officially hosting migrant workers in Israel and South Korea coincided in the early 1990s, following rapid economic growth in both countries during their initial decades. The official introduction of a large-scale overseas workforce was a novel experience for both countries. Until then, the concept of immigration for the two countries centred on obtaining (or rather, ‘regaining’) state citizenship, while working visas were granted to only a very small number of professionals and technical advisers. Yet, even without the official system, non-citizen workers were already present in both countries. Since 1967, Israel has allowed non-citizen Palestinian residents from the occupied territories to take up a significant share of the labour market with and without work permits. Smaller numbers of undocumented workers from neighbouring Arab and North African countries were also present—primarily non-Jewish migrants who were not eligible for citizenship under the Law of Return (D. V. Bartram, Reference Bartram1998, pp. 305–308). Meanwhile, South Korea began to witness an increase in foreign undocumented workers from the late 1980s, mostly from South Asian countries who entered the country with tourist visas.

The year 1993 held significant importance for both countries. Each officially launched a large-scale programme to recruit migrant workers from abroad, simultaneously with the deportation of pre-existing migrant workers. The introduction of the new programme was a political decision for both countries driven by ethnic considerations to maintain the country’s demographic composition while responding to low-skilled labour shortages. South Korea, experiencing rapid economic and democratic development, grappled with demands from both labour and business. Labour pressed for improving working conditions and workers’ rights, while businesses—especially small and medium-sized companies in the manufacturing sector—sought more workers at low wages. When the government proposed formally admitting foreign workers—thereby acknowledging the undocumented workers already in the country—the proposal sparked severe controversy in a society that had long prided itself on its ethnic homogeneity (Han, Reference Han2014, p. 59). In response to this dilemma, South Korea launched the Industrial Trainee Program (ITP) in 1993, designating migrant workers as ‘trainees’ to circumvent labour law protections. Despite performing identical work to citizen workers, trainees were excluded from labour law coverage and most social security benefits—a designation widely criticised as ‘a treacherous system’ (Seol, Reference Seol2021, p. 3).

In the case of Israel, the ethnic dimension of labour policy was shaped by a more complex geopolitical consideration: the state sought to reduce its dependence on Palestinian labour. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed a general closure on the Palestinian territories, severely restricting the mobility of Palestinian workers who had previously commuted daily to jobs in agriculture and construction. This shift marked a turning point in Israel’s labour migration strategy, as the government responded to business concerns about labour shortages by issuing large-scale work permits to migrant workers from Asia. This closure, prompted by increased security tensions resulting from the Palestinian uprisings that began with the 1987 Intifada, affected the agricultural and construction sectors, which were dependent on Palestinian workers commuting from the occupied territories. In response to businesses’ accusations that the government was depriving them of a workforce, the Israeli government commenced issuing mass work permits to migrant workers (D. V. Bartram, Reference Bartram1998, p. 314; Rozenholc, Reference Rozenholc2010, p. 4). Centred on the agricultural, construction and service sectors—often labelled as ‘Arab jobs’ (D. V. Bartram, Reference Bartram1998, p. 310), a term that carries derogatory connotations in HebrewFootnote ⁶—those roles were rapidly filled by migrant workers recruited from multiple regions. In the construction sector specifically, recruitment initially centred on workers from Romania and, subsequently, Türkiye, while agricultural and caregiving positions were increasingly filled by workers from South and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand and the Philippines. The final number of migrant workers was inversely proportional to the number of Palestinian workers, which dwindled to almost one-tenth of its 1989 level of 105,000 (Berthomiere, Reference Berthomiere2005, p. 4).

Similar to its Korean counterpart, which authorised private corporations to run ‘training programmes’, Israel also surrendered state control over foreign employment almost entirely to private employers’ associations. For example, in the construction industry, the Association of Contractors and Builders determines recruitment, allocations and the terms of employment of foreign workers (Amir, Reference Amir2002, p. 44). Employer associations exerted considerable influence over employment methods and terms. Newly migrated Asian workers were mostly employed as subcontractors. As a result, they were exempt from minimum wage laws and substantial labour protections. They also lacked the right to unionise and access the benefits that Palestinian workers had previously enjoyed (Amir, Reference Amir2002, p. 46).

Facing demographic pressures, the two countries adopted broadly similar strategies towards migrant workers: to consolidate their status as temporary, low-cost and low-skilled. Work permits were issued exclusively for low-skilled positions, with no pathways for upskilling or occupational advancement. Permits were valid for less than five years. Even where labour demand persisted, migrants were barred from transferring to higher-skilled visa categories or obtaining permanent residency. In addition to this, their overarching management systems were designed to respond to the needs of the government and employers, i.e., border control and manpower supply, but not to those of workers. Two features characterised these systems: private-led recruitment and a so-called ‘binding’ structure. In both countries—South Korea until the early 2000s and Israel for an additional decade—migrant recruitment relied almost entirely on private agencies in both home and host countries. These agencies have been widely criticised for charging excessive and sometimes coercive recruitment fees, creating debt bondage that deterred workers from asserting rights or reporting abuse (Ellman & Laacher, Reference Ellman and Laacher2003, p. 47). The resulting vulnerability—excessive hours, wage theft and hazardous conditions—drove many workers to abandon their registered employers and enter the undocumented labour market.

The ‘binding’ system refers to a system that matches workers to a specific employer or sector before leaving their home country and allows no or very limited opportunity to change employers once they arrive at their destination.Footnote ⁷ The system is strictly driven by employer demand: employers apply for permits to hire foreign workers, and migrant workers with these permits are matched to the jobs before leaving their home countries. Once in the host country, these workers are generally not allowed to change their workplace for the whole period that the work visa is valid. In other words, the workers are ‘tied’ to their employers. While the degree of bindingness varies by sector and policy period, broadly, the South Korean system operates under the government-controlled centralised system under the ITP and EPS, and Israel uses a ‘tied visa’ system, which often issues workers’ visas with specific employers’ names stamped on them. Under the binding system, workers are not entitled to enjoy a free and open labour market and thus lack negotiating power over their working environment. In more serious situations, it hinders them from reporting abuses. Involvement in labour disputes, reporting abuse or sometimes even being involved in industrial accidents or becoming pregnant may result in their dismissal by employers, consequently making them undocumented in the country (Rozenholc, Reference Rozenholc2010, p. 4). The private-led, binding system that puts migrant workers in vulnerable and poor working conditions actually drives workers to choose to become undocumented, where they can at least earn more through negotiation. Consequently, within a decade of the official launch of migrant worker systems, undocumented migrant workers in both countries outnumbered their documented counterparts (Ellman & Laacher, Reference Ellman and Laacher2003, p. 39; Y. Kim, Reference Kim2021, p. 11).

B. Current systems: Tied to the state and still to employers

The second phase of migrant labour policies in both South Korea and Israel commenced in the early 2000s. The policies and systems put in place during this period remain largely unchanged and operative up to the present day. The need for change arose from social and political pressure over concerns about migrant workers’ human rights, as well as the increased numbers of undocumented workers. After experiencing consecutive failures in regulatory measures to reduce excessive brokerage fees and debt bondage, the two countries chose a major shift towards state control of their migrant labour systems. Under the new nationalized system, migrant workforces are sourced through Bilateral Labour Migration Agreements (BLAs) or Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) established with the sending countries and managed by governmental or public agencies only.

South Korea launched the new programme in 2003. Its previous system, ITP, was already facilitated by MOUs with 14 sending countries, but with significant involvement of private recruitment agencies. Under the new system, namely the Employment Permit System (EPS), a public agency controls the entire employment process and bans brokerage. The EPS consists of two visa categories: the E-9 visa for low-skilled migrant workers from selected countries and the H-2 visa, a preferential employment visa for ethnic Koreans—a distinction that will be further explained later. Meanwhile, Israel decided to establish separate Bilateral Labour Migration Agreements (BLAs) with multiple sending countries targeting specific sectors—construction, agriculture and caregiving—from 2005 onward, with implementation through the 2010s.Footnote ⁸ This transformation of migrant worker schemes, moving away from private agencies, has been acknowledged as a progressive step in migrant policies. It significantly reduced the issue of excessive recruitment or brokerage fees, lessening migrants’ financial burden and the need to consider undocumented labour (Kushnirovich & Raijman, Reference Kushnirovich and Raijman2022, p. 108; OECD, 2019, p. 22). However, while the policy change assisted in reducing undocumented labour, studies indicate that it did not improve the working conditions of migrant workers in general (Y. Kim, Reference Kim2021; Kushnirovich et al., Reference Kushnirovich, Raijman and Barak-Bianco2019; Livnat, Reference Livnat2019; Seol, Reference Seol2021).

The primary reason for the lack of improvement in working conditions is the political choice of both countries to maintain the binding system, despite severe criticism from scholars and civil society regarding its systemic risk of labour exploitation (Y. Kim, Reference Kim2021; Niezna, Reference Niezna2022; Raijman et al., Reference Raijman and Kemp2011; Seol, Reference Seol2021). Responding to the criticism of migrant workers’ ‘bindingness’ to employers, South Korea began to allow workers to change workplaces, but without granting any choice to the workers. The allowed conditions included the employer’s request, company closure and grave unlawful employment practices by the employer. Even when workplace change is allowed, migrant workers have to endure penalties to retain their work visas, and they are forced to find a new workplace within a very limited timeframe; otherwise, their residential permit is suspended, and their legal status becomes undocumented. Moreover, workplace changes carry significant penalties for the extended employment, the so-called ‘assiduous-diligent worker system’. This system allows a limited number of E-9 workers to reissue their visas, only after they return to their home countries, preventing them from applying for permanent residency that requires continuous residence in South Korea (Kang, Reference Kang2019, pp. 9, 20–21). Despite criticism regarding the limited freedom of migrant workers and subsequent human rights risks, the South Korean government introduced even stricter rules that restrict migrant workers to changing their workplace only within the region where they were initially allocated (South Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor, 2023, pp. 1–2). Meanwhile, in Israel, the Supreme Court declared the binding arrangement system unconstitutional in 2006. However, the implementation of this decision faced prolonged obstacles, resulting in a substantial number of migrant workers remaining within the same system (Niezna, Reference Niezna2022, pp. 373–374). Additionally, the Israeli Supreme Court later issued seemingly conflicting decisions, exemplified by its recent validation of the Israeli-Turkish offset agreement involving binding arrangements (Livnat, Reference Livnat2019, p. 46).

While these agreements are often presented as state-level efforts to promote ethical recruitment and regulate migration flows, recent scholarship has problematised their normative and institutional limitations. They are frequently unpublished and non-binding; protections focus on pre-departure stages while conditions during employment remain poorly regulated; and implementation varies widely across sectors (Kurlander & Cohen, Reference Kurlander and Cohen2022; Livnat, Reference Livnat2019; Megiddo, Reference Megiddo2022). Overall, BLAs operate less as comprehensive rights-based frameworks than as technocratic instruments of labour market governance shaped by state interests in managing mobility, retaining deportability and limiting long-term incorporation.

Consequently, working conditions exhibited no significant improvement. Some scholars have even argued that they worsened, with wages declining after BLA implementation (Kushnirovich et al., Reference Kushnirovich, Raijman and Barak-Bianco2019). This deterioration is reflected in the downgrading of both countries—Israel in 2021 and South Korea in 2022—from Tier 1 status, which they had held for over a decade, to Tier 2 status in the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report (‘TIP Report’), which cited ‘woefully inadequate efforts’ in relation to forced labour (Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2021, 2022).

C. Technical changes and ethnonationalism as the persistent logic

The institutional transformation documented in the preceding sections, from private-agency-led to state-administered recruitment, marks a real, if ultimately limited, policy shift. The elimination of private brokers, the establishment of bilateral agreements with sending countries and the measurable reduction in excessive recruitment fees have each constituted improvements in the formal architecture of migrant labour governance. And yet, as scholars across both contexts have consistently documented and as evidenced by the TIP reports, these institutional changes have not translated into substantive improvements in migrant workers’ working conditions.

Existing scholarship has attributed this gap to a range of factors: institutional inertia within bureaucratic systems designed primarily for border control rather than worker protection, insufficient administrative capacity to enforce protections (Y. Kim, Reference Kim2021; Kushnirovich et al., Reference Kushnirovich, Raijman and Barak-Bianco2019; Livnat, Reference Livnat2019; Seol, Reference Seol2021), and short-sighted solutions focusing on exploitation during the home-country recruitment stage (Kushnirovich et al., Reference Kushnirovich, Raijman and Barak-Bianco2019; Livnat, Reference Livnat2019). Building upon these explanations, each of which captures a specific implementation failure, this article argues that they are ultimately expressions of a common underlying intent. The binding system—universally identified in the literature as the most significant structural enabler of labour exploitation in both countries—was retained through the transition to state-administered recruitment. While the institutional actor responsible for migrant workers’ dependency and immobility has changed, the underlying objective served by the system has remained the same: maintaining migrant workers as a workforce dedicated to short-term, low-cost, low-skilled jobs, structurally segregated from the citizen workforce and easily removable when no longer needed. Controlling the movement of migrant workers through binding arrangements, workplace change restrictions and family exclusion policies reflects not only administrative convenience but also a deliberate desire to keep this category of workers separate through the preservation of their vulnerability. This approach has been widely interpreted as signalling to migrant workers that they ‘never can belong’ (D. Bartram, Reference Bartram2011, p. 236; S. Kim, Reference Kim2015, pp. 189–190).

This constitutive signalling, which serves both countries’ ethnonational paradigm, is reinforced by examining their responses to domestic labour market pressures. In Israel, the large influx of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants in the 1990s generated significant competition over lower-skilled positions during a period of economic restructuring. Yet, rather than improving wages and conditions in these sectors to facilitate the absorption of newly arrived Jewish workers, the government chose to maintain and expand the non-Jewish migrant labour system (D. V. Bartram, Reference Bartram1998, p. 507; Doron & Kargar, Reference Doron and Kargar1993). In South Korea, rising youth unemployment following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis similarly created conditions under which labour market reform might have been expected. Instead, growing dependence on migrant labour in low-wage sectors continued unabated (J. Kim, Reference Kim2020, p. 106). In both cases, the state’s response was not to improve the conditions of low-skilled positions but to preserve their unattractiveness to citizens by ensuring a supply of workers who, by virtue of their precarious legal status and lack of social support, had little choice but to accept them. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which precarious conditions justify continued reliance on migrant labour, perpetuating the very conditions that make reform politically inconvenient. While prioritizing national workers in the labour market is a commonly observed feature of global migrant governance, the Israeli and South Korean cases stand out for the extent to which their systems demonstrate a strong reluctance to permit either the up-skilling of migrant workers or their long-term social integration—a stratification that is ethnonational, not merely economic, in origin.

Currently, the two countries face divergent pressures that may shape their future trajectories in different directions. In South Korea, severe demographic decline, with fertility rates now below 0.8, combined with the growing presence of the children of marriage migrants, is gradually, if unevenly, creating a climate more receptive to expanding immigration policies. While concrete policy transformation has yet to materialize, governmental and social discussions concerning the expansion of upskilling opportunities and longer-term residency pathways for low-skilled migrant workers are becoming increasingly active. In Israel, by contrast, the escalation of hostilities following October 2023 has intensified ethnonational closure and deepened the precarity of migrant and Arab-background workers across multiple dimensions.Footnote ⁹ The Israeli government hastily concluded new bilateral labour agreements and opened private recruitment channels to fill labour shortages caused by the conflict, raising civil society concerns about reduced oversight and inadequate protections. Existing reform processes have been halted, and the legal and institutional improvements that had been incrementally developed over the preceding decade are increasingly in abeyance (Kav LaOved, 2024a, 2024b; openDemocracy, 2024). This divergence, while demonstrating that ethnonational aspirations manifest differently according to each country’s distinct political and economic conditions, ultimately reaffirms the shared logic: in both cases, policy responses continue to be organised around the preservation of ethnonational boundaries. The following section elaborates on this argument by examining migrant policies in both countries that demonstrate selective inclusion and exclusion, thereby further institutionalizing stratification along an ethnonational spectrum.

A. Classification by closeness: Encouraged and discouraged family formation

The ethnonational aspiration presents a dual dynamic: it not only restricts the long-term settlement of foreign nationals but also strategically leverages immigration to advance the prosperity of favoured ethnic groups. In a labour context, this phenomenon becomes more evident when comparing a spectrum of migrant subgroups, based on their ethnic and national affiliations with each country. Notably, migrants with blood ties to the states (referred to as diaspora or ‘compatriots’) are accorded special status upon entering their respective ‘homelands’, significantly contributing to demographic dynamics within the labour markets of both countries. The policy trajectory for these ‘compatriot’ workers differs in important respects from that for non-ethnic foreign workers. They commonly enjoy much more generous access to and freedom in the labour market, with guaranteed long-term residence, as well as support for family reunification, enabling them to be easily integrated into the ethnic-nation state. Another group comprises immigrants with family ties to the nationals, particularly through marriage. Despite lacking ethnic similarity, this group also benefits from generous policies compared to non-ethnic migrants, as their contribution to the prosperity of the ethnic community is valued. In both Israel and South Korea, legal spouses of citizens enjoy no restrictions in work or employment, as long as their spouse visa is valid.

While migrants with blood or familial ties benefit from inclusive policies, migrant workers without ethnonational connections face stringent policies regarding their families. Both in South Korea and Israel, low-skilled migrant workers’ family reunification is not only limited but also actively deterred. In Korea, visits to Korea by migrant workers’ family members are permitted only in extreme situations, such as severe injury or death of the worker. Moreover, there have been reported cases in which family members of migrant workers apply for tourist visas, but when the authorities become aware that the workers reside in South Korea, the applications are denied. In the case of migrant workers’ children who are born in South Korea, the child can be granted a family dependent visa if applied for within 90 days of birth. This visa allows the child to reside in Korea until the worker’s permit expires.

Israel adopts an even more hostile policy towards family reunification of migrant workers. Not only are the families of migrant workers not allowed to be invited to Israel, but if a migrant worker has a first-degree relative in Israel—even with valid legal status—the worker’s entry to Israel is denied. If the worker is already in Israel, their work permit is cancelled. When a migrant worker gives birth to a child in Israel, the baby must be sent to the worker’s home country before their work permit expires. If not, the parents’ work permits are not extended after expiration (Shamir, Reference Shamir2013, p. 199). Additionally, reported cases have shown that Israeli authorities request employers to report when their employed migrant workers have romantic or marital relationships with another migrant worker; if such a relationship is found, one partner loses their work permit (Lior, Reference Lior2017; Shamir, Reference Shamir2013; Yaron, Reference Yaron2018).

A particular concern in both countries is the situation of children born to undocumented migrants, often referred to as ‘innocent illegals’, who have been denied legal registration for a prolonged period. Under civil society pressure, both countries have introduced limited measures: South Korea has permitted birth registration for undocumented migrants’ children since 2021, while Israel has offered short-term resident permits under narrow criteria since 2006. Discussions of permanent residency or naturalisation have been actively avoided by both governments. These restrictions on family formation serve not only to segregate migrant workers within the labour market, but to signal that their long-term integration into the ethnonational community remains unwelcome.

B. Migrant subdivisions in social and political contexts

Ethnonational aspiration operates largely through a binary distinction between those with blood ties and those without, encouraging the former to settle more easily for ethnonational reproduction while restricting the latter’s family rights to minimize their impact on the homogeneous national community. Yet these narratives of belonging and threat also interact with deeper socioeconomic and political hierarchies, producing further stratification within migrant populations themselves.

Scholarly accounts of migrant exclusion, including those by Kim and Raijman, identify three recurring dynamics in discriminatory narratives (S. Kim, Reference Kim2015; Raijman, Reference Raijman2013). These are concerns over cultural homogeneity; socioeconomic anxieties regarding competition over social resources; and political and security fears tied to geopolitical conflict, national tensions or criminality. This combination of ‘threat’ narratives shapes preferences organised around country of origin, favouring migrants from Western nations while discriminating against those from post-Soviet or developing countries. Geopolitical security considerations and genealogical proximity further subdivide migrants within the ethnonational hierarchy.

C. The dual logic: Inclusion, exclusion and ethnonational reproduction

The preceding subsections have examined how labour and family policies in Israel and South Korea differentiate among migrant subgroups according to their perceived proximity to the Jewish people and Korean Minjok, extending preferential access to co-ethnic diaspora and marriage migrants while systematically restricting the settlement, family formation and mobility of non-ethnic foreign workers. Taken together, these patterns reveal a governance structure that operates not simply as a hierarchy from nationals to foreigners, but as a more finely graded spectrum of ethnic closeness. This spectrum runs from compatriots, to immigrants with familial ties, to migrant workers, with each group subjected to qualitatively different legal regimes. Further differentiation arises within these categories along lines of national origin, geopolitical context and perceived security risk, producing a multi-tiered society and a segmented labour market.

What this analysis makes visible is something that existing scholarship on migrant labour governance has not fully theorised: that ethnonationalism functions simultaneously as a logic of exclusion and a logic of selective inclusion and that these two movements are not merely parallel but mutually constitutive. The state simultaneously excludes non-ethnic outsiders from long-term social membership and actively recruits ethnic insiders into the national community, with each movement reinforcing and legitimizing the other. The exclusion of foreign workers justifies and naturalizes the privileged access of co-ethnic migrants; the preferential incorporation of diaspora affirms the ethnic boundary that exclusion maintains. Together, they reproduce an aspired ethnonational state.

This dual logic distinguishes the South Korean and Israeli cases from other forms of exclusionary migration governance based on statehood or nationhood. Even in one of the most exclusionary systems—the Kafala system in the Gulf states, for example, the administrative boundary operates along a citizen/non-citizen binary; while similarly deeply hierarchical and closed to upward mobility, the organising principle is not primarily one of ethnic, racial or cultural affinity. In Israel and South Korea, by contrast, ethnic identity precedes and overrides citizenship as the basis for inclusion. Co-ethnic diaspora and marriage migrants and their families are welcomed before they hold citizenship, while non-ethnic workers remain excluded regardless of how deeply they become embedded in local communities. The boundary is not between legal members and non-members, but between those who belong to the ethnonational polity and those who do not. This dynamic also carries gendered dimensions, as family reunion and marriage migration policies reflect assumptions about ethnic reproduction.

The implications of this multi-layered stratification extend well beyond its immediate impact on marginalised migrant worker groups. When a substantial portion of the workforce is rendered structurally vulnerable—unable to organise, change employers, form stable communities or participate in workplace governance—the collective bargaining power of the entire labour force is weakened. This effect is particularly pronounced when stratification is based on ethnicity and nationality, as these characteristics are externally observable and thus easily mobilized as the basis for differential treatment (Roscigno & Tomaskovic-Devey, Reference Roscigno and Tomaskovic-Devey2024). Furthermore, such stratification compounds inequality along other axes, including those based on gender (Cohen, Reference Cohen2001). In this respect, the ethnonational governance of migrant labour in Israel and South Korea is not merely a matter of migration policy or border management; it is a structuring feature of the labour market as a whole—one that fragments solidarity, naturalises hierarchy and produces social consequences for all.

A. Labour citizenship: Possibilities and limits in ethnonational contexts

Among the responses that labour scholarship has developed to address migrant workers’ precarious status and exclusion from social membership, the concept of labour citizenship has emerged as one of the more promising and generative normative concepts. Emerging from broader debates surrounding social citizenship and democratic inclusion, it draws on a lineage extending from Marshall’s theorisation of citizenship as the gradual expansion of civil, political and social rights within industrial society. This framework is extended to labour, detaching participation in labour and social life from formal nationality status (Gordon, Reference Gordon2006, pp. 514, 544). Within this tradition, scholars argue that all workers, regardless of formal citizenship status or national origin, deserve political subjecthood within the labour market: rights-based membership and the capacity for political agency (Mundlak, Reference Mundlak2007). This standing is grounded not in a particular legal status or employment agreement, but in workers’ labour and social contribution. Such contribution is conceived as expressing constitutional rights inherent in the dignity of the worker as a person and as reconciling the language of universal human rights with that of citizenship (Fudge, Reference Fudge2014; Mantouvalou, Reference Mantouvalou2013; Mundlak & Fudge, Reference Mundlak, Fudge, Dahan, Lerner and Milman-Sivan2016). Labour citizenship encompasses more than equal workplace protections. It includes the capacity for solidarity and participation in the democratic processes affecting their working conditions—with migrant workers’ legal and social status connected to worker organisations rather than employers, enabling iterative renegotiation of rights and social membership (Gordon, Reference Gordon2006, Reference Gordon2009).

The cases examined in this article, however, reveal stronger constraints on the realisation of labour citizenship and the creation of solidarity-based membership. This iterative process of community building and normative expansion is, within an ethnonationalist context, structurally impeded from the outset. First, as the preceding sections have shown, the democratic spaces in which such contestation might occur are intentionally constrained. State migration schemes prevent migrant workers from joining existing workers’ organisations by imposing short-term settlement conditions and obstructing social integration, depriving them of the very conditions under which solidarity is initially built. Second, even within the labour institutions, the potential for solidarity across ethnic lines is weaker than in other settings, because the symbolic boundaries of the community are shaped not only by state policy but also by cultural attitudes towards ethnic belonging.

B. Organised labour and migrant worker inclusion within an ethnonational framework

The historical experience of organised labour in both Israel and South Korea provides evidence for structural limits in an ethnonationalist context. In both countries, major workers’ organisations emerged within broader ethnonational political projects, but have also shown partial, contested yet meaningful ways in which they have begun to overcome those limits.

The early history of organised labour movements in both countries was fuelled by a strong sense of nationalism during their quests for state independence. In Israel, the Histadrut—founded in 1920 and representing, at its peak in the 1970s, 80 per cent of the country’s workforce (Tzafrir et al., Reference Tzafrir, Meshoulam and Baruch2007, p. 116)—functioned simultaneously as a trade union, the country’s largest employer and a key institution of Zionist state-building (Preminger, Reference Preminger2018, pp. 5–7). Despite formally opening its membership to Palestinian and Arab Israeli citizens from the 1950s, their representation remained very limited, reflecting the organisation’s deep ethnonational foundations.

In South Korea, organised labour emerged in 1945 from the postcolonial nationalist movement. The Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), established with the inaugural government’s support, operated as the sole legally recognised federation until 1999 (Yi, Reference Yi2013), functioning in close alignment with state policy, a relationship widely characterised as ‘puppet’ corporatism (Choi, Reference Choi2011, p. 79). Its founding creed declared principles rooted in democracy and ‘neo-ethnonationalism (Shin Minjokjuui)’, with organising focused almost exclusively on large corporations.

Since the late 1980s, both labour movements have undergone significant transformation under the dual pressure of neoliberal restructuring and demographic change. In Israel, unionisation rates collapsed from a peak of 80 per cent in the 1970s to 33 per cent by the early 2000s and to only 10–12 per cent in the private sector (Adler, Reference Adler2011, p. 26; Preminger, Reference Preminger2018, p. 9). Preminger observes that, confronted with the fragmentation of labour, the Israeli union began to reorient around the identity of the worker as such—irrespective of nationality or employment form—as a basis for solidarity among an increasingly diverse membership (Preminger, Reference Preminger2018, p. 211). Yet this reorientation has not extended to full institutional inclusion of migrant workers. Palestinian workers from the occupied territories and non-Jewish migrant workers remain outside the formal membership structures of the Histadrut and other major unions—a limit that reflects the continuing purchase of ethnonational boundaries within Israeli labour institutions. It is in this gap that civil society organisations have stepped in to play a complementary, if structurally distinct, role. Kav LaOved—a legal aid NGO advocating for the rights of migrant and precarious workers—has, since 2009, contributed to expanding migrant workers’ access to legal protections and public visibility through litigation, advocacy and documentation (Mundlak, Reference Mundlak2007, pp. 133–139). Critically, however, Kav LaOved operates according to a human rights logic rather than a labour organising logic. It is not a union; it is not led by migrant workers themselves; and its mode of action—primarily legal intervention—differs fundamentally from the collective power and democratic participation that define labour citizenship. Its significance lies not in demonstrating inclusive solidarity, but in illustrating the limits of union inclusion and civil society’s capacity to fill that gap through advocacy.

In South Korea, the establishment of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995 offered a more progressive alternative to the corporatist legacy of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU). Yet its founding creed retained a commitment to the ‘healthy ethnonational spirit (provision 7 of the KCTU Creed)’, reflecting the continuing entanglement of labour organising with nationalist identity. The country’s historical financial crisis in 1997 and the subsequent market liberalization dramatically expanded the pool of non-standard and informal workers, including migrant workers classified as ‘industrial trainees’, who remained outside the protection of formal labour organisations. The South Korean trajectory diverges from its Israeli counterpart, however, in one analytically significant respect. In 2010, migrant workers themselves established the Migrant Trade Union (MTU), an organisation founded and led by migrants. The MTU represents a qualitatively different form of labour citizenship—not the extension of rights by established unions to migrant members, nor the provision of legal aid by civil society on behalf of migrant workers, but the autonomous self-organisation of migrants as labour citizens in their own right. This distinction matters analytically: it suggests that the trajectory from ethnonationalist exclusion towards more inclusive forms of solidarity is neither linear nor uniform, but is shaped by each country’s specific institutional landscape and the degree to which migrant workers have been able to claim organisational agency within it.

Taken together, the two cases reveal a pattern of limited but meaningful transformation: one in which the ethnonationalist foundations of organised labour have been partially destabilized by neoliberal fragmentation and the growing presence of migrant workers, yet without producing a wholesale shift towards cosmopolitan inclusion. In Israel, change has been mediated primarily through civil society advocacy operating outside union structures; in South Korea, in addition to civil society aid, it has found expression in migrant workers’ self-organisation. What both suggest is that the labour market itself, through the contradictions that ethnonationalist governance produces, generates pressures towards broader solidarity, despite limitations. Labour citizenship thus retains its force as a horizon towards which these pressures continue to move.

C. BHR framework as a complementary pathway: Meaningful stakeholder engagement

The limits of the labour citizenship approach within ethnonationalist states lie both in the state’s deliberate reproduction of ethnonational identity and in the structural weakness of labour institutions themselves, including their limited inclusiveness towards migrant workers. Together, these forces restrict the creation of public spaces in which migrant workers can be recognised, heard and positioned as labour citizens in solidarity with others. Given this condition of structural invisibility, this article argues that the BHR framework, and in particular the principle of MSE as a core mechanism within it, can serve as a complementary institutional pathway capable of creating precisely such spaces of recognition and representation.

BHR frameworks have gained increasing attention in labour governance for their potential to address labour rights issues that domestic regulatory systems leave unresolved, particularly in transnational contexts (Bellace & ter Haar, Reference Bellace and ter Haar2019; Bright, Reference Bright, Delautre, Manrique and Fenwick2021; Landau, Reference Landau2023). Worker-driven corporate social responsibility schemes, HRDD processes, trade conditionalities, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and BHR-based grievance mechanisms such as OECD National Contact Points have all been explored as instruments for advancing labour rights where state-led or judicial remedies remain inadequate. Despite their individual limitations, these mechanisms are recognised for opening channels through which workers can express their concerns; these channels are particularly significant where global value chain (GVC) connections create leverage that purely domestic frameworks cannot generate.

Within this emerging landscape of BHR tools, MSE stands out as particularly foundational. MSE is a core procedural component of HRDD as articulated in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2011, p. 19), and it is through MSE that the broader promise of BHR frameworks, as spaces for worker voice and engagement, can be realised. For example, at its most basic level, HRDD requires that business enterprises identify, assess and take steps to prevent actual and potential adverse human rights impacts, act upon their findings and communicate how those impacts are being addressed. MSE provides the essential epistemic infrastructure for this process: as defined across major normative frameworks, MSE is characterised by two-way communication conducted in good faith, with genuine openness to modifying decisions based on stakeholder input. It is both proactive and responsive, ongoing rather than episodic and designed to inform the substantive decisions of enterprises rather than to fulfil post hoc reporting requirements (OECD, 2017, pp. 18–20).

Here, stakeholders are broadly defined as ‘persons or groups that may have an interest in or could be impacted by an enterprise’s activities’ (OECD, 2017, p. 19). The UNGPs further specify that this category prioritises affected stakeholders—those whose individual or collective human rights are, or could be, directly impacted by business activities (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2012, p. 8). Critically, the UNGPs are explicit that companies should pay particular attention to ‘groups or populations that may be at heightened risk of becoming vulnerable or marginalized’ (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2011)—a formulation that squarely encompasses migrant workers operating under the conditions of structural precarity that this article has documented.

What this stakeholder approach makes possible is the recognition of migrant workers in their dominant sectors and industries as at-risk stakeholders and rights holders, whose voices must be actively sought. The case of distant-water fisheries in South Korea illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. Migrant workers in this sector are exempt from the protections of the Labor Standards Act or even the EPS framework and are unrepresented in the dominant trade unions. Under the existing wage-setting arrangement, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries delegated its wage determination to labour-management negotiation bodies composed solely of Korean workers, with the result that domestic union members participated in processes that produced systematically lower wages for migrant workers (Korea Public Interest Lawyers Group [KPIL], 2023; Migration and Human Rights Institute, 2022). In this context, civil society organisations working on migrant workers’ rights engaged in sustained government dialogue and contributed to the gradual dismantling of this discriminatory wage structure. This case illustrates how a stakeholder engagement channel—specifically oriented towards migrant workers as a distinct rights-holder group and conducted in partnership with civil society advocates—can create an alternative channel through which they can participate and articulate their concerns directly as affected stakeholders, even where state institutions and dominant labour organisations have failed to do so.

Several pathways exist through which BHR frameworks and MSE mechanisms may generate meaningful pressure and institutional leverage in the contexts analysed in this article. The first operates through external accountability via supply chain governance, particularly through HRDD. The growing proliferation of HRDD frameworks, reporting standards and sector-specific MSIs has produced an increasingly dense normative architecture. South Korea’s manufacturing, shipbuilding and seafood sectors, and Israel’s agricultural and construction industries, for example, rely heavily on migrant labour while also being deeply integrated into transnational commercial and supply chain networks, whether through export-oriented production, foreign investment, imported industrial inputs or relationships with overseas business partners. HRDD requirements apply to multinational enterprises sourcing from or operating in these sectors across supply chains. The EU’s recent Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has raised the institutional stakes for MSE by embedding it as a principle of corporate due diligence obligations and extending its reach to EU-connected supply chains. This provision has relevance for both Korean and Israeli industries with significant European market exposure.

The second pathway operates through domestic mandatory HRDD legislation and the institutionalisation of stakeholder engagement channels within national regulatory frameworks. An increasing number of countries have enacted mandatory HRDD or supply chain transparency laws, and several more—including South Korea—are currently deliberating such legislation.Footnote ¹¹ National-level mandatory HRDD laws would not only amplify the voicing mechanisms described above, but would promote institutionalised engagement channels that create domestic legal obligations to consult migrant workers as affected stakeholders. Where direct engagement remains structurally constrained, the UNGPs and the OECD Due Diligence Guidance both provide that companies should engage ‘reasonable alternatives, such as independent experts, civil society organisations and human rights defenders’. This provision creates normative space for states and businesses operating in migrant-worker-dominant industries to recognise organisations such as South Korea’s Migrant Trade Union as legitimate MSE interlocutors. Other civil society organisations can similarly serve as alternative engagement channels where direct worker participation is structurally blocked. MSE principles also encourage consultation across multiple stakeholder constituencies simultaneously, including trade unions, civil society organisations and international advocacy networks, creating the conditions for new forms of transnational and cross-organisational solidarity. The KTNC Watch, a civil society network that brings together NGOs and trade unions to address the human rights impacts of Korean corporations, represents one model through which migrant worker concerns can be raised collaboratively across labour and human rights advocacy boundaries.

Meanwhile, the article acknowledges that the proposal to develop MSE as a complementary pathway for migrant worker rights operates within a field defined by both normative ambitions and significant empirical limitations. Within the BHR field, MSE, while attracting increasing attention, remains far from a well-established or reliably implemented mechanism. HRDD practices have been criticised as business-driven, leaving corporations with wide discretion over stakeholder identification and the depth of engagement, frequently resulting in procedural compliance without transforming structural vulnerability. This article’s argument is therefore not a claim about what MSE currently is, but a call for its more genuine institutionalisation. When understood as a governance space rather than a procedural formality, MSE and labour citizenship together offer mutually reinforcing pathways towards migrant worker protection and solidarity.