Reconfiguring borders through high-skilled migration: Korea and Europe in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article examines how high-skilled migration policies reconfigure legal borders by comparing South Korea’s Top-Tier Visa and the European Union’s EU Blue Card. In response to population ageing, low fertility, labour shortages, and global competition for talent, both Korea and the EU have strengthened legal pathways for attracting high-skilled migrants. However, their institutional designs differ significantly. Korea’s Top-Tier Visa is structured around state-led selection, national strategic industries, and conditional pathways to settlement, whereas the EU Blue Card relies on standardized legal criteria, employment contracts, salary thresholds, professional qualifications, rights-based residence, and intra-EU mobility. Using legal and policy analysis combined with a comparative legal approach, this study examines four dimensions: selection criteria, residence stability, labour market access and mobility, and pathways to long-term settlement. The analysis shows that Korea selectively admits top-tier talent in advanced sectors such as semiconductors, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and batteries, but its system remains strongly conditioned by administrative verification and industrial policy objectives. By contrast, the EU Blue Card provides a more rights-based and multi-level framework by linking residence and work authorization with family reunification, equal treatment, social rights, and mobility across member states. The article argues that high-skilled migration policy should not be understood as debordering or simple liberalization. Rather, it represents selective legal openness through which states and supranational legal orders differentially allocate mobility, residence rights, labour market access, and settlement opportunities. Contemporary borders are therefore not disappearing but being reconfigured as normative and institutional boundaries that privilege particular categories of talent.