Korean immigration to Mexico began in 1905. The first Korean migrant workers settled in Yucatán, while more recent migrants from South Korea often choose Mexico City as their destination. According to the embassy, an estimated 11,800 Korean nationals live in Mexico, with thousands more Mexican nationals of full or partial Korean descent.

In the late 19th century, social instability and natural disasters in Korea resulted in increasing emigration from the country. At first, emigrants chose nearby destinations such as Northeast China and the Russian Far East. By the early 20th century they began going farther afield, for example in 1902 to Hawaii. However, increasing Japanese influence on the Korean peninsula made this controversial: Japanese labor brokers were opposed to Koreans choosing Hawaii as their destination, believing this would interfere with Japanese migration there and they lobbied Japanese foreign minister Komura Jutarō to address the situation. Meanwhile, in Mexico, there was increasing interest in hiring workers from Asia to address labor shortages in the agricultural sector, but the Japanese government placed restrictions on the recruitment of labor migrants for Mexico due to the expectation of poor conditions and the Chinese government was also opposed due to previous experiences with poor treatment of Chinese workers in Peru.

It was against this background that labor brokers began advertising in newspapers in the Korean port city of Incheon in 1904 for workers willing to go to Mexico to work on henequen plantations for four or five-year contracts. Working conditions proved to be harsh with workers being beaten or jailed for either not working or not producing the status quo. A total of more than one thousand were recruited and departed from port of Chemulpo, present (Jung District), Incheon on board a British cargo ship on 4 April 1905, despite efforts by the Korean government to block their departure. They arrived at the Mexican port of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca about a month later on 8 May 1905, from there taking trains to their final destination: Progreso, Yucatán.

By the time their contracts ended, most had not even saved enough money to pay for the return voyage to Korea, despite earlier promises of high wages by recruiters, and furthermore saw little attraction in going back to their no-longer-independent homeland. Most thus settled in Mexico, either continuing to work on henequen plantations or moving to various cities in the country. Some made efforts at onward migration: a Korean American community organization in San Francisco tried to bring some of them to Hawaii, but to no avail. In 1921, after the collapsing demand for henequen fiber threatened their livelihoods, 288 Koreans set off for Cuba from the port of Campeche. About eight hundred of their descendants still live in Cuba.

A new wave of Korean migrants began coming to Mexico in the 1970s. These consisted both of people coming straight from South Korea, as well as members of Korean diaspora communities in other countries of the Americas—particularly from Paraguay and from Argentina—seeking to try their luck in Mexico. Up until the late 1980s their numbers seem to have remained quite small; the Asociación Coreana en México counted only 64 families and 15 or 20 single people among its members. Larger numbers began arriving in the 1990s: according to South Korean government statistics, the size of the community reached its peak in 1997 with around 19,500 individuals before falling to 14,571 by 2005.

According to the 2011 report of South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade on overseas Korean populations, 11,800 overseas Koreans resided in Mexico, down by 2% since the 2009 report. Among them were 876 Mexican citizens, 1,607 South Korean citizens with Mexican permanent resident status, 388 South Korean international students, and the remainder being South Korean citizens with other types of visas. Mexico City was their most common area of residence, with 6,340 recorded as living there; 1,300 others lived in Jalisco state, with the remainder in other locations.

The 2010 Mexican census recorded 3,960 people who responded that their place of birth was South Korea, up from 327 in the previous census in 2010. This made South Korea the 18th-largest foreign country of origin in Mexico, but those born in South Korea comprised only about 0.4% of the 961,121 total foreign-born persons the census found to be residing in the country. A 2012 report by Mexico's National Institute of Migration, based on 2009 statistics, stated that 534 North Korean citizens and 6,028 South Korean citizens lived in Mexico. A plurality but not a majority of each of those groups (258 and 2,261) lived in Mexico City. By migration status, 317 of the North Koreans and 2,970 of the South Koreans were non-immigrants. Each group had a sex ratio somewhat imbalanced towards males.

Other sources also report a wide variety of population estimates. A September 2013 article in The New York Times, citing officials at the Korean Cultural Center, Mexico City, stated that "at least 12,000 Koreans now call Mexico home". The article stated that in 2010 the Korean population in Mexico was ten times as large as the said population in 2000. In contrast, a 2008 report from the Los Angeles Times claimed that the descendants of early henequen plantation laborers alone might number as many as thirty thousand.