60% of Foreigners Living in Capital Area
The number of foreigners living in South Korea topped two million. The exact number as of the end of 2018 was 2,054,621, which is equivalent to approximately 4 percent of the total population of the country. Sixty percent of the foreigners were residing in Seoul and the surrounding capital area at that time. South Gyeongsang Province was home to many foreigners, too.
The Ministry of the Interior and Safety announced on Oct. 31 that the number of foreign residents in South Korea totaled 1,106,884 in 2009, almost doubled in nine years, and increased by 193,537 in 2018.
The foreign residents consist of foreign workers living in South Korea, South Koreans with foreign nationalities, married immigrants, naturalized South Korean citizens, and the sons and daughters of those residents. The first three groups accounted for 80.4 percent of the residents, followed by the fifth (11 percent) and fourth (8.6 percent) groups.
Most of the foreign residents who maintained their original nationality in 2018 are Chinese, including 531,263 Korean-Chinese and 215,367 Chinese. They are followed by 169,177 Vietnamese, 151,104 Thai, 66,003 American, 57,998 Uzbek, 47,532 Filipino, 45,144 Cambodian, 38,890 Indonesian, and 37,346 Nepali.