A New Approach to Regional Migration to Jeju in the 2000s

Abstract

Changes in population movement are a social indicator and reflect the state of society. In the past, Korea's population movement was dominated by outward movement from central cities, reflecting the compressed growth of modernization. However, since the 2000s, population outflows from metropolitan areas have begun to exceed population inflows, indicating a change in population movement from the past. In the case of Jeju, inflow of people has exceeded the outflow of people since 2010. The purpose of this article is to explore a theoretical framework that can adequately analyze regional migration to Jeju as a cause of the rapid population growth in Jeju since 2010, noting that migration is not a characteristic of Jeju but a phenomenon of counterurbanization in Korean society. I first reviews the flow of research on regional migration to Jeju and then reviews the research on the counterurbanization of population movement in Korea. Based on this, the applicability of mobility theory as a new theoretical approach is explored in order to comprehensively and systematically study regional migration to Jeju, which exhibits various regional migration patterns.