Wherever You Go, There You Are: A Biographical Reconstruction of Korean Immigrants in the United States by Way of Germany
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Abstract
This research focuses on revealing what kind of person chooses to migrate more than once and how their international migrations correlate with their identity development among the Korean migrants who lived in Germany and living in the US until now. The narrative inter-view was applied to collect 24 autobiographical stories in the US; six interviews were selected for the case study and were analyzed by a qualitative reconstruction method, Objective Her-meneutics. The results show that each case has a unique biographical pattern; their biographical patterns were the primary influence factor on their international migration decisions. In other words, the research participants have carried consistency of self on the cross all the different countries, and it is named as a biographical gravity structure in this dissertation applied by an individual’s consistent mechanism of decision making. This finding may contribute to encourage a paradigm shift in international migration study. A routine of many migration studies focuses on an assumption which international migration is correlated to change an individual’s identity. Despite some changes in migrants’ lives, their biographical gravity struc-ture is stronger enough to pull them to be who they were and are: the same ‘me’ despite ever-changing location.