English

About

KIRD is a site that collects and reorganizes the official statistics counting immigrants who live in Korea. It is not a government publication, and every source table is published by MOJ, MOIS, KEDI, and MOU.

Background

The yearbooks and statistical tables are public, but each ministry counts a different population, so comparing them directly gives mismatched figures. Registered foreigners, staying foreigners, and foreign residents (MOIS) have similar names and very different counts. Deciding which figure to cite takes time, and at the district level even finding the data is difficult.

Linking one year to the next is not simple either. Each yearbook is issued separately, and the table layout, the nationality names, and the status-of-stay codes differ from edition to edition, so a district in 2009 does not line up with the same district in 2019. Administrative boundaries also change over that period. Incheon Nam-gu became Michuhol-gu in 2018, Cheongwon-gun was absorbed into Cheongju-si Cheongwon-gu in 2014, Yeongi-gun became Sejong in 2012, and Gunwi-gun moved from Gyeongsangbuk-do to Daegu in 2023. Left as they are, the names break the time series for one area partway through.

Comparison across districts also requires the denominator and the index formula to be the same in every year. From 2014 the yearbook lists every nationality at the district level, so a diversity index computed on the data as published jumps in that year even when the population does not change. The dataset was built to remove that step.

The work of linking yearbooks whose structure changes every year is done by the public pipeline. The same code produced the tables, which can be downloaded from openICPSR and recalculated yourself.

Composition

Section	Contents	Selectable units
Registered foreigners	By district, by nationality, by language, by status of stay	250 districts, 192 countries, 1,594 languages, 35 statuses
Population groups	International students, multicultural families, nationality acquisition, refugees, North Korean defectors	Five populations
National map	Registered foreigner share by district	250 districts, by year
Service map	Organization list, service gaps	1,715 organizations, 249 districts
Guides	Health coverage, grant programs	Treatment cost paths and 41 grant programs
Data and about	Open dataset, indicators and scope, about	26 files, 1,392,172 rows

Source: The numbers in this table were counted from the data files the pages actually read.

How to read this

Summary paragraph

Every page opens with a paragraph giving the size and composition of the unit in words. The sentence frame is fixed and the values are filled in, so changing the unit or the year changes only the numbers, in the same places.

Tables and figures

Every item mentioned in the summary paragraph has a numbered table or figure. View as table under each figure holds the exact values that figure used.

Sources and notes

Every plate carries its source in the source line and its method and caveats in the note line. Which table from which ministry a value came from is visible inside the plate.

Citation

When you cite a figure, state which basis it uses. The differences between the bases are set out in Indicators and scope.

Credits

Author Nari Yoo, University of Michigan School of Social Work. Her research examines how language access affects the mental health of immigrants nariyoo@umich.edu
Code The full pipeline that turns the source data into 26 tables kird-korea-immigration
Data CSV and Stata dta, variable definitions, terms of use openICPSR

Note: Tell us about errors in the data or missing organizations and we will fix them. This site reorganizes published statistics and is not a government publication.

Citation

Yoo, N. (2026). Spatiotemporal administrative dataset of nationality, residential diversity, and language demand among immigrants in South Korea, 2006–2024 [Data set]. Ann Arbor, MI: openICPSR. https://doi.org/10.3886/E249944

License

The open dataset is CC BY 4.0. Copyright in the source data belongs to each ministry.