Bloomsbury Korean International Students and the Making of Racialized Transnational Elites (Korean Communities across the World)

Global mobility does not erase inequality—it often remakes it in new and revealing ways. This book examines highly skilled and privileged Asian migrants - Korean international students who obtain permanent residency in the United States - as a form of racialized transnational elite. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in both New York City and South Korea, Sung-Choon Park traces how these individuals navigate overlapping systems of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Park shows that, while these migrants hold elite status, they remain embedded in U.S. racial hierarchies and simultaneously face class-based and nationalist tensions with non-migrant co-ethnics in their country of origin. Park further argues that these migrants’ strategies for responding to local social dynamics shape their transnational practices, including diaspora formation, knowledge transfer, cultural capital conversion, and cross-border discussions about race. Organized across seven chapters, it explores themes such as global academic hierarchies, racial formation through language, shifting ethnic identification, conflicts over capital and expertise, transnational communication about racism, emergent forms of diasporic nationalism, and the role of digital media in sustaining cross-border lives. This book challenges assumptions that privilege and mobility translate into unambiguous advantage, demonstrating instead that transnational elites occupy complex, often contradictory positions – an insight that reshapes how we understand inequality in an increasingly globalized world.