Like other immigrants around the world, they gradually become Koreans when they work, learn the language, marry, have children, and spend the rest of their lives there.

(Of course South Korea's case is very particular because they actually have an enormous reserve of eager potential immigrants who already speak the language, living just across their land border, an hour away from Seoul. The problem is that the other side of the border won't let anyone go.)

Is that supposed to be a joke? You have a lot to learn about genetics if you think that's why South Korea is full of South Koreans. I'm a White guy - it doesn't matter how hard I work or how good my Korean is, or even my marital status - I can never be a South Korean.

That's a problem of attitude, not genetics. A person born in Korea can become American, British, Swedish, Singaporean, Brazilian, etc. There's no fundamental reason why it wouldn't work the other way if Koreans wanted their society to be open to newcomers. With shrinking population they may want to have that national conversation eventually.

Anyway, when you bring in young single people, the primary cultural diffusion is through their eventual children. They will be Korean in a way that the immigrant parent might never personally feel.

I'm quite sure that South Koreans aren't so much concerned about the declining number of people occupying the area within the arbitrary geographical border known as "South Korea" so much as they are concerned about the declining number of ethnic South Koreans.

To put it crudely, if South Korea was invaded, the indigenous people genocided and the area colonised by a billion foreigners, I don't think South Koreans would regard that as a boon for their demographics.

Doing this more slowly via immigration is not fundamentally different.

It's entirely different if the newcomers are primarily young and single and start families with non-immigrant Koreans. Seeing that as problematic is a slippery slope into Nazi-style racial heritage mathematics where you'd be obsessing over who's only 3/8 Korean, etc.

We'll have to disagree there. I'd much rather be called names than be complicit in the demographic replacement and genocide of my people. I'd even argue that crossbreeding would be more catastrophic for the South Korean ethnicity than population decline. The latter is recoverable as the stock of the nation remains intact, while the former permanently alters the genotype of the population - even if the numbers recover, this is not fundamentally the same people as those who existed before.

dismissing the concept of ethnicity may be appealing in the Western bubble but you will find few takers in the rest of the world.

to reduce the NK situation to "they won't let anyone go" is also disingenuous. even if you ignore that the US refuses to allow any more meaningful peace so it can justify a continued military presence halfway across the globe, the US and South Korea are clearly more powerful and wealthy. clearly they are in a better position than NK to make concessions and pave the way for integration.

I suspect one reason NK developed nukes is precisely because their leadership don't want to be "integrated".

The claim is that they don't have to be Korean. This is generally true for most immigrants.

But if they did, and for whatever reason none of the emigrants wanted to go back to the old country, there's a whole extra Korea just on the northern border, and they used to be the same country…

North Korea