Seoul: People with a migration background accounted for more than 5 percent of South Korea's total population in 2024, marking a slight increase from the previous year, government data showed Monday.

According to Yonhap News Agency, as of November 1, 2024, there were 2.72 million people with a migration background in Korea, constituting 5.2 percent of the country's total population, as reported by the Ministry of Statistics and Data. This figure represented a 0.3 percentage point rise from the corresponding tally for 2023.

This marks the first time the statistics ministry released a registration-based census survey on the population with a migration background. South Korean nationals accounted for 24.8 percent, or 672,000, of the total population with a migration background in 2024, while foreigners took up the remaining 75.2 percent, or 2.04 million. Of the Korean nationals with such a background, 381,000 were second-generation immigrants, while 245,000 were naturalized or acknowledged citizens.

By gender, 52.5 percent of the migratory population were male, and 47.5 percent were female. By age, those in their 30s accounted for 24.3 percent of the migratory population, followed by those in their 20s at 21 percent, those in their 40s at 15.4 percent, and those in their 50s at 11.6 percent. The working-age population, aged between 15 and 64, accounted for 81.9 percent of the total, while those aged 14 or below took up 12.7 percent and the elderly population aged 65 or above stood at 5.5 percent.

Meanwhile, there were 738,000 children and adolescents aged 24 or below with a migration background last year, up 7.9 percent from 2023. Of the 738,000 children and adolescents, 27.2 percent had Vietnamese parents, while 16.5 percent had Chinese parents and 12 percent had Chinese citizens of Korean descent as their parents. Data also showed that nearly 57 percent of those who migrated to Korea resided in the greater Seoul area, comprising the capital city, Gyeonggi Province, and the city of Incheon. Some 10.6 percent lived in the central Chungcheong provinces, another 9.3 percent in the southeastern Gyeongsang provinces, and 6.3 percent in the southeastern Jeolla provinces.