Fixing Families: How Street-Level Bureaucrats Deal with Relational Citizenship of Marriage Migrants in South Korea

Intra-Asia marriage migration has attracted attention from scholarly communities, as marriage migrants’ legal and substantive citizenship in destination countries is largely dependent on their family ties with citizens. The South Korean state has viewed these transnational marriages as a solution to address family-level reproductive needs, particularly in response to a ‘bachelor surplus’ and the country’s declining marriage and fertility rates. Drawing on in-depth interviews with South Korea’s street-level bureaucrats working in state-led welfare agencies, this study explores how frontline welfare workers navigate the intimate sphere of citizenship-making for marriage migrants. Contrary to the mainstream understanding of state actors as detached bureaucrats, this study reveals that street-level bureaucrats, embedded in broader gender inequalities affecting both citizens and non-citizens, mobilize themselves to extend beyond the state’s focus on marriage migrant women’s maternal roles. By identifying the root causes of marriage migrants’ struggles within native-born citizens, these frontline workers bring marriage migrants’ native-born spouses and in-laws back into view. This suggests the bridging role that gender plays between migrants and frontline state workers, although the paper also highlights how class divides between them can obstruct this effect. The study further shows that street-level bureaucrats themselves are gendered, demonstrating how frontline state actors’ own gender serves as both capital and a barrier in navigating the intimate sphere of citizenship-making. Ultimately, the paper calls for a more nuanced understanding of the role state actors play in immigrant integration and encourages further analysis of how they are embedded in the social institution of gender.