Korea is open for visitors, but is it ready for residents?

Korea welcomed 18.7 million foreign visitors in 2025, the highest number in the country's history, surpassing the previous record of 17.5 million set in 2019. The government had reason to celebrate.

Years of investment in Korean soft power, from music and film to food, had delivered the kind of global interest it set out to build. But beyond the arrivals hall at Incheon International Airport, in the neighborhoods where foreign residents navigate health insurance forms and housing registration, in the clinics where staff and patients sometimes cannot understand each other, the infrastructure tells a different story. Korea has become extraordinarily good at welcoming visitors. Whether it is equally good at accommodating the people who stay is a harder question.

The answer matters. The number of foreigners residing in the country crossed 2.8 million for the first time in October 2025, driven by increases in long-term stays for work, study and seasonal employment. More than half of all registered foreign residents live in Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area — a concentration that shapes the demands placed on housing, health services and municipalities in ways that national policy has been slow to address. This is not a future trend. It is a present reality and the gap between that reality and what the system offers is widening.

Consider health care. Visa status, language barriers and limited awareness of rights are among the most significant contributors to unmet medical needs among the foreign resident population. Many clinics outside major urban centers have no English-speaking staff and the complexity of National Health Insurance Service enrollment — mandatory for most long-term visa holders — is itself a barrier for the newly arrived.

Banking access has improved in incremental ways: The Ministry of Justice launched a mobile residence card for registered expats in January 2025 and financial verification for foreign residents expanded to a broader range of institutions later that year. But access to basic financial services for newly arrived foreigners without an established credit record remains cumbersome. Beyond Seoul, municipal services in Korean-only formats persist across many government offices. These are not insurmountable problems. They are policy choices that have simply not been made.

Which raises the question Korean politics has been notably reluctant to engage: If the foreign population is growing steadily while the birthrate continues to fall, what exactly is the long-term plan?

Korea's total fertility rate stood at 0.8 in 2025, one of the lowest in the world. The Bank of Korea has projected that if this demographic trajectory continues, potential growth could fall to near zero by the 2040s. Against this backdrop, economists and demographers have pointed to immigration as one variable in a broader structural response. Yet Korea chooses to manage labor shortfalls through tightly controlled short-term work programs rather than engaging seriously with longer-term integration. Immigration reform as a structural policy response remains the domain of think tanks and demographic researchers.

The political logic behind that silence is not hard to read. A 2024 Ministry of Justice survey of 6,000 Koreans found that the largest group of respondents, or 41.5 percent, favored maintaining current immigration levels, while only 24.1 percent supported an increase. Meanwhile, 2023 data from the World Values Survey shows a paradox that the share of Koreans who believe immigrants should be welcomed has risen to 80.5 percent, up from 71.9 percent in 2019, while negative biases based on race and nationality have simultaneously increased over the same period. What this suggests is not simply a resistant public but a conflicted one — broadly open in the abstract, more cautious when it comes to specifics.

Navigating that ambivalence requires a kind of political candor that few parties are eager to supply. It is easier to promise another round of birth incentives than to have an honest public conversation about what Korea will look like, ethnically and culturally, in a generation. That conversation, however, is becoming harder to defer.

Korea has successfully exported K-culture to the world. The people who follow that culture here — as visitors, students, workers or long-term residents — now encounter a country whose systems have not kept pace with its own ambitions. What kind of host Korea intends to be is a question the country has not fully answered yet.

Kwon Mee-yoo is politics and city desk editor of The Korea Times.