Busan Wants Settlers, but Employers Want Workers

BUSAN — Busan will hold its 2026 Dream Job Fair for foreign students on April 30 at BEXCO Exhibition Center 2, with city officials expecting about 1,000 students from Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang and 44 participating companies. The fair will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and include on-site recruitment, interviews and resume submissions. It will also have the kind of side programming common at large city-backed fairs, including ID-photo support, makeup, performances and food events. 

Taken on its own, that is not unusual. Cities host job fairs all the time. What makes this one worth watching is how much Busan has built around it. The city’s 2025 fair was described as the third of its kind, with 35 companies taking part, up from 21 the year before. That event was explicitly linked to visa pathways including the F-2-R regional-specialized visa and the E-7 visa for specific activities. This year’s expansion to 44 companies suggests Busan is no longer experimenting with the idea of connecting foreign students to local employers. It has already made that choice. 

The fair now sits inside a broader local effort to turn foreign students into longer-term workers and residents. In February, Busan opened the Study Busan Hub and said the city was already home to about 22,000 international students. The hub was introduced as a one-stop platform for immigration support, employment services, Korean-language education and settlement assistance. It opened in Yeonje-gu on the second floor of the National Pension Service’s Busan office, and the city said it would operate with multilingual staff and expand gradually into overseas recruitment, mentoring, club activities, job fairs and policy research. Separate reporting said the hub was also designed to connect students to banking services, multilingual medical consultations, internships and job information. 

That is the strongest part of Busan’s case. This is not just branding. The city has a fair, a support hub and a visa-linked policy track. In April, it began fingerprint registration for international students at the hub in cooperation with the Busan Immigration Office, another sign that the city is trying to reduce the administrative friction that often complicates long-term stay. When the hub opened, Mayor Park Heong-joon framed it as part of Busan’s move toward an “era of 30,000 international students,” with the city aiming to become a place where global talent can “learn, work, grow and stay.” That is not the language of a city focused only on university recruitment. It is the language of a city trying to retain working-age population. 

The policy logic is not hard to see. Busan is dealing with the same pressures facing much of regional Korea: population aging, youth outflow and employers struggling to fill jobs. An OECD report published last year found that 54.5 percent of internal migrants aged 20 to 34 moved to the Seoul capital region in 2024, while Busan’s old-age dependency ratio rose from 19.7 percent in 2015 to 33 percent in 2023. Foreign students are not a full answer to those pressures, but in a city like Busan they can look like one of the few available sources of future workers. 

Busan has tried to move beyond end-of-study job matching as well. Under the local-government visa pilot, the city said it would attract 1,000 international students over two years into programs linked to semiconductors, secondary batteries and future mobility parts. By October 2025, it said 335 students from 10 countries had been recruited into departments tied to those sectors. That is important because it shows Busan trying to shape the pipeline earlier, at the admissions and training stage, rather than waiting until graduation to start recruiting. 

Still, the closer one looks, the narrower the labor story becomes. Busan often uses the broad language of “global talent,” but local demand appears to be concentrated in more specific parts of the labor market. A Busan Chamber of Commerce survey reported in January 2025 found that the largest share of demand for foreign students was in manufacturing and production, at 64.2 percent. Office administration followed at 11.5 percent, logistics and transport at 10.3 percent, sales and marketing at 8.9 percent and research and development at 2.2 percent. The same survey found that firms preferred associate-degree holders in 60.6 percent of cases, compared with 37.2 percent for four-year degree holders and 2.2 percent for those with master’s degrees or higher. Companies that had already hired foreign students reported high satisfaction, but the pattern of demand was clear: local hiring needs were concentrated far more in production and operations than in research-heavy roles. 

That does not make Busan’s policy hollow. It does make it more concrete than the phrase “global talent” sometimes suggests. The city appears to be trying to do two things at once. One is to retain some degree-holding foreign students for strategic industries. The other is to help local employers in manufacturing, logistics and services deal with chronic labor shortages. Those two goals overlap, but they are not identical, and they carry different implications for wages, career paths and the likelihood that foreign graduates will build stable lives in the region. 

National trends help explain why Busan believes the effort is worth scaling. According to Korea Immigration Service data reported in March, the number of foreign students in South Korea reached 314,397 as of February 2026, the first time it had passed 310,000. Year-end reporting on Education Ministry data also showed that 4,993 of 36,271 foreign higher-education graduates found jobs in Korea in 2024, for an employment rate of 33.4 percent, up from 21.7 percent a year earlier. Busan is not trying to invent a trend from scratch. It is trying to secure a larger share of one that is already underway. 

The weaker part of Busan’s public case lies further down the chain. The city can show the front end clearly enough: more companies, a larger fair, a dedicated support hub, a visa pilot and hundreds of students recruited into designated academic tracks. What it has not shown with the same clarity is the back end. Publicly available city materials do not clearly say how many students who joined earlier fairs received job offers, how many moved from D-2 study status into D-10, E-7 or other work-eligible pathways, how many were still employed six months later, or how many were still living in Busan or the wider southeast a year on. That does not prove the strategy has failed. It does mean Busan has made setup more visible than outcome. 

There are also reasons to think the back end is the harder part. Reporting on official foreign-resident data in March said 22 percent of student-status foreigners had experienced financial hardship during the previous year. Even when cities create pathways into hiring, settlement still depends on language, income, paperwork, housing and the quality of work on offer. A job fair can open a door. It cannot by itself guarantee that students will remain in the region long enough to count as more than a short-term labor-market fix. 

That is why the April 30 fair matters. Not because job fairs are new, and not because 44 participating companies alone will change Busan’s future. It matters because the event shows the city trying to connect universities, employers, visa policy and settlement support into a single local model. Busan has moved beyond slogans. It has a growing fair, a support hub, a visa-linked recruitment track and a clearer sense of what it wants foreign students to do after graduation. What it has not yet shown with equal force is whether those pieces are producing long-term results. Until that part becomes more visible, Busan’s foreign-student strategy is best understood not as a finished success story and not as empty promotion, but as a serious regional experiment whose most important outcomes still lie further down the chain.