Korea's foreigner data: Visa types, locations & more in interactive stats map via HiKorea

HiKorea, your favorite website that you probably dread having to use, has an interesting new interactive map that collects tons of big data info into a fun browsable interface. From here, you can view all kinds of statistics on foreigners living around the country, narrowing down data points to specific regions and even visa types. Let's take a look at some examples of the data you can find here.

Korean Immigration Office's Big Data Analysis & Visualization Tool
(이민행정 빅데이터 분석·시각화)

How to access the data map

To find it, go to the main menus section of the HiKorea website, and go to <정보광장>, then look down to find the entry for <빅데이터 분석·시각화>. 

It's circled on the image below:

There's also a direct link here:

🔗 https://hikorea.go.kr/bix5/shares/4dfcf20b67bb00809e7b4ee7ca5b71b1

The page will open with some general data figures from the UN about immigration and foreigners worldwide. 

General worldwide data provided by UN

Probably not very interesting to anyone reading this right now. Pretty interesting though to see just how many people choose to immigrate to the United States. It's the world's preferred destination by far. Until seeing it illustrated in this way, I really never realized how true that is. Also pretty shocking to see that the UAE is 88% immigrants. I've heard stats like that before, but still pretty interesting. 

Anyway, for interesting data on Korea, let's take a look at the section on the left titled  <지역별거주외국인>, or Resident Foreigners:

Examples of data on foreigners in Korea

Resident foreigners in Korea data portal

From here we can tap various provinces in Korea to see a wealth of immigration data on them. For one example, we can use the red graphs to see what proportions each country of origin make up for foreigners residing in that region. 

Seoul vs Geyongsangdo

So for example, here's a comparison of Seoul's foreigners (left) and Gyeongsang-do (-bukdo and -namdo, right). 

Foreign population makeup, Seoul vs. Gyeongsangdo

We can see that Chinese-Koreans make up the overwhelming majoirty of foreigners in the city, but that in the relatively more rural southern areas of Gyeongsangdo, it's Vietnamese who make up the majority of foreigners. Americans come in at a respectable #3 largest foreigners in Seoul, but aren't even a blip on the foreigner makeup of Gyeongsangdo. 

Lowest concentration of foreigners

What if I am sick of foreigners completely? What's the area of Korea with the least foreigners altogether?

Sejong City: foreigner free!

Not surprising if you think about it: it's Sejong City, the new administrative capital and home to an army of civil service bureaucrats who, surprise surprise, are comprised of essentially 100% native Koreans.  

Gangwondo foreigners

Gangwondo foreigner stats

Let's take a peek at the stats for Gangwondo just for fun.

Where do most Gangwondo foreigners live?

Answer: Wonju. Followed by Chuncheon and Gangneung. Not surprising really: the same stats are probably true for where native Koreans in Gangwondo mostly live too. 

Where do Gangwon-do foreigners come from?

More foreigner statistics from Gangwon-do

Like other rural areas of Korea, immigrants from Vietnam make up the lion's share of foreigners in Gangwondo, with Korean-Chinese, Chinese, and Nepalese rounding out the rest. Americans show up in that #5 spot. 

What are most of these foreigners doing? 

The blue bars show us their visa statuses: E-9 makes up the majority (non-professional industries, such as agriculture, fishing, manufacturing, construction, etc.), followed by F-4 (overseas Koreans), D-2 (studying abroad students), and F-6 (marriage visas). 

How old are these foreigners? 

The purple-pink bars break down their ages. Looks like they are quite young, mostly in their 20s and 30s. That matches with the large number of E-9 immigrant worker visas. Notice how few child foreigners there are there, compared to say Gyeonggi-do. 

Overall foreigner types in Korea

We can see the overall types of foreigners in Korea at large based on visa status, which is probably interesting to some people:

Residency visa status of foreigners in Korea 

1. F-4 (Overseas Korean) - 28%
2. E-9 (Non-professional industry, construction, agriculture, etc) - 16%
3. F-5 (Permanent resident) - 10%
4. D-2 (Student) - 8%
5. F-6 (Marriage visa) - 7%
6. F-1 (Family visa) - 5%
7. H-2 (Work-and-visit visa) - 5%
8. D-4 (Training, Language study) - 3%
9. F-2 (Other long term resident) - 2%
10. G-1 (Misc) - 2%

This is interesting to me because for all the online words spilled about English teachers in Korea (on the E-2 visa), there are only 13,489 E-2 visa holders. Sounds like a lot, but out of 1,891,853 foreigners in Korea, that's a measly 0.7%. 

To put that in perspective there are 23 times more unskilled foreigner laborers in Korea than E2 English teachers. And presumably that's just counting legal foreign workers. 

Final thoughts

The site has lots of other interesting tidbits of data you can easily browse. Most of it is embedded weirdly so that Chrome auto-translate is not super functional but it can give you a starting point. It's pretty fascinating to see the rapid multiculturalism overtaking Korea in the past few years, which seems to show no signs of stopping. 

I assume the data sets here will be updated as time goes on so be sure to check back yearly and see the latest info. 

Happy stat mining.