North Korean laborers began migrating to Russia's Far East as early as the 1940s. Initially, they were engaged in fishing activities, mostly in the Sakhalin region, a sparsely populated and inhospitable area. This movement of North Korean migrant work...
North Korean laborers began migrating to Russia's Far East as early as the 1940s. Initially, they were engaged in fishing activities, mostly in the Sakhalin region, a sparsely populated and inhospitable area. This movement of North Korean migrant workers became more active after the Korean War, and in 1967, more than 3,500 forestry workers from North Korea moved to the Soviet Union as a result of a bilateral forestry agreement between Kim Il Sung and Brezhnev. This was followed by a major influx of North Korean workers to the Khabarovsk and Amur regions, and bilateral agreements on labor migration were repeatedly extended and expanded.
Around the same time, in Southeast Asia, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which had won the civil war against South Vietnam, sent students and workers to its socialist brother in Europe, East Germany. Similar to the North Korea-Soviet Union case, the migration of Vietnamese students and workers to the GDR can be traced back to the 1950s, with the first "Moritzburgers" arriving in the GDR in 1955-1956, and a large number of Vietnamese trainees working in the GDR until the early 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam War. A formal labor agreement between the two countries was signed in 1980, and in total, more than 70,000 Vietnamese workers would sign contracts and travel to East Germany to work in various fields until the GDR government disappeared.
In this study, we focus on migrant workers from the socialist camp. Initially, the migration of North Korean and Vietnamese workers to the Soviet Union and East Germany was characterized as a counter-migration of support or aid based on proletarian internationalism, the political norm of the socialist camp, and solidarity between brotherly countries. On the other hand, there was also an economic dimension to this solidarity: from the perspective of the Soviet Union and East Germany, migrant workers from North Korea and Vietnam were able to effectively fill the shortage of labor in their own countries, mainly in the secondary sector of their dual labor markets.
These migrants can be categorized as students, trainees, or workers, depending on their status, or by the type of work they are engaged in at any given time, such as fishing, forestry, or construction. However, this form of migrant labor has changed since the 1990s, with the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Eastern bloc following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Vietnamese workers who had been working in the country since the demise of the East German government have returned home in large numbers under repatriation agreements signed between the German and Vietnamese governments, and some have successfully resettled in the country, the migration of North Korean workers to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has continued to this day in various forms. This can be explained by a variety of factors, including the geographical proximity of the two countries to each other in the Far East and their shared ideology in the past, the comparative advantage of North Korea's labor force over Russia's in economic terms, and mutual political needs, and it is expected that North Korean migration to Russia will continue in the future.