Perceived Population Aging and Immigration Attitudes: Competing Mediating Roles of Labor-Market and Fiscal Burden Perceptions In the Korean Context

Background and Purpose: Population aging is frequently cited to justify expanding immigration, based on the assumption that immigrants can offset labor shortages and sustain welfare systems. However, public attitudes do not always follow this functionalist logic. I examine the relationship between perceptions of population aging and attitudes toward increased immigration, with particular attention to the mediating roles of perceived labor market complementarity of immigrants and perceived welfare-related fiscal burden associated with immigration. The Korean context, characterized by rapid demographic aging, a segmented labor market, and limited immigration experience, provides a useful setting for understanding how demographic concerns are translated into immigration attitudes.

Methods: I used data from a nationally structured survey of 1,200 respondents in South Korea to test parallel mediation models. The dependent variable is support for immigration expansion, measured using a composite index based on six Likert-scale items. The key independent variable is perceived seriousness of population aging, measured using a seven-item Likert-scale index. The two mediating variables are (1) perceived labor market complementarity of immigrants and (2) perceived fiscal burden associated with immigration, both measured on four-point Likert scales. Control variables include age, gender, income, and education. Mediation effects are estimated using regression-based models with 5,000 bootstrap replications to obtain robust standard errors and confidence intervals.

Results: The total indirect effect was negative and statistically significant (β = -0.040, p = .008) indicating that demographic perceptions are meaningfully and negatively associated with immigration support through mediating mechanisms. However, this effect is entirely driven by the labor-market mechanism (β = -0.037, p = .001), while the fiscal burden mechanism is not statistically significant (β = -0.003, p = 0.667). The difference between the two indirect effects is statistically significant, further confirming the dominance of the labor-market pathway. These results indicate that, at least in the Korean context, individuals do not primarily associate population aging with fiscal concerns. Instead, they interpret demographic aging through perceptions of whether immigration can effectively address labor-market shortages.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings challenge the assumption that demographic pressures naturally generate public support for immigration. In the Korean context, perceptions of population aging appear to heighten concerns about labor-market functionality rather than fiscal sustainability, shaping immigration attitudes through doubts about immigrants’ labor market contribution. Social work interventions and policy efforts aimed at increasing public support for immigration should therefore address perceived labor-market insecurity and improve understanding of immigrants’ roles in alleviating structural labor shortages. More broadly, the study highlights the importance of perception-based mechanisms in linking demographic change to immigration policy attitudes.