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Although Korea and Japan have had to confront rapidly declining working-age population projections, both countries kept their borders closed to unskilled workers from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and met labour demands through de facto guest worker programs and preferential policies for co-ethnic immigrants. However, by the mid-2000s, government officials could no longer turn a blind eye to the swelling ranks of immigrants within their borders and announced two contrasting proposals for immigrant incorporation: centralized rights-based legislation that targets specific immigrant groups in Korea and decentralized guidelines that prioritize community-based partnerships in Japan. Instead of resulting from deliberate decision making by either state to manage the permanent settlement of immigrants, I argue that these divergent approaches reflect grassroots movements that drew on existing strategies previously applied to incorporate historically marginalized groups in each society prior to the establishment of official incorporation programs. Migrant workers in Korea made significant inroads in gaining rights largely because of the strong tradition of labour and civil society activism in Korea's democratization movement. In Japan, grassroots movements led by generations of zainichi Koreans from the 1960s set the foundation for decentralized, community-based strategies for incorporating new immigrants from the late 1980s. Comparing two seemingly similar countries in East Asia, this article identifies patterns of interaction between new immigration and existing practices that have shaped relationships between dominant and minority communities and between state and non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]