During the early 1990s, the two recent countries of immigration in East Asia, Japan and South Korea, adopted convergent immigration policies that resulted in gaps between official policies and their actual outcomes. These policies included admitting a variety of de facto unskilled immigrant workers, including industrial trainees and co-ethnics from abroad. By the early 2000s, immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge. In 2004 South Korea inaugurated the Employment Permit System by which unskilled workers arrived on contract and were guaranteed labor law protection. Two years later, it abolished the industrial trainee system entirely. In contrast, Japan has not initiated the major immigration reform to this day. In this article, I examine the roles of civil society and social movements in shaping governmental policy in Japan and South Korea. Results indicate that differing histories of industrialization, democracy and civil society have created contrasting state-civic relationships in the two countries, leading to varying culture, organization and strategy for civil society, thus contributing to a divergence in immigration policies in the mid-2000s.