Hate Speech against Immigrants in Korea: A Text Mining Analysis of Comments on News about Foreign Migrant Workers and Korean Chinese Residents

With the advent of the age of migration, movement of people across countries has become common and the nationalities, races, ethnicities, and cultures of people who make up a society are becoming increasingly diverse. This phenomenon has been accelerated by the global trend of increased autonomy in migration caused by the development of info-communication and transportation. Due to a rapid increase in migration to Korea that began in the 1990s, the number of foreigners staying in Korea, including short-term residents, exceeded 2 million in 2016, accounting for 3.96% of the total Korean population. In response to these changes towards a multicultural society, studies on various immigrant groups have soared since the mid-2000s, which has been referred to as a multicultural fever. Through these studies, it was found that the public has discriminatory perceptions (stereotypes) and attitudes (prejudice) towards immigrants (Hwang et al., 2007; In, 2009; Yoon et al., 2010; Kim and Han, 2013).