Let me elaborate, in this sentence he is referring to the US military and US citizens but in other parts of our discussion he made it very clear that every foreigner, from factory workers to engineers were not needed by Korea and that was the general feeling of the population.

You'll find people like him wherever. If it's not "Why should I respect someone because the foreign policy of their nations does X", it's "Why should I respect someone who believes in some mystical teachings by some prophet and whose followers do X". Same mentality.

I agree but I am curious to know if Koreans are more accepting of foreigners now than they were a few years back. I think at one stage there was a lot of resistance to NET's and a lot of hatred towards 'poor SE Asian factory workers'.

I think that resistance at times was overblown.

1)  People are notoriously bad at weighting things involving negativity. If they have 50 positive interactions and 1 negative interaction, the negative interaction will stand out far more than the others. Same goes for news stories. There can be 10-20 positive stories about foreigners and no one bats an eye. One negative story and it stands out.
2) AES had like what, 50 actual hardcore members? The guy claimed 40,000 or some such, but I'm guessing those numbers were inflated.
3) As I've said, the average Korean person is just not that obsessed with us. If one spends their time on ESL sites and looking for the latest story that gets them riled, yeah it can seem like things are crazy. Kind of like the twitter effect and how "twitter isn't real life." It seemed that those that had the biggest problems coincidentally spent a disproportionately large amount of time on ESL sites and reading the news.

"Koreans think we're all drug-addicted pedophiles with AIDs"
"Uhm, if that's the case, we sure got an unusual reception at the bar when we ended up drinking with half the Koreans there."

The disconnect between the digital world and the real world.

That being said, I don't think anyone who has been here hasn't experienced some kind of xenophobia or racism and I don't think anyone would deny that things have trended positively. I think the factory worker thing has faded out somewhat because everyone has finally dealt with some lazy son/daughter/cousin who could be working a decent factory job and instead is bumming around working 16 hours a week at some coffee shop or Innisfree and they realize that it's not the immigrants' fault.  Then again, things could always spike.