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On Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves of our good fortune and of those deserving our support.
We have recently been involved in some court cases in Southern California dealing with the legal status of North Korean refugees who managed to enter the United States. The law in this area is a tangled mess; well-done pieces by Jane Kim, the GAO and Roberta Cohen provide an introduction.
If refugees have access to citizenship in third countries or are “firmly settled” there, they have no grounds to claim that they fear persecution on return to their home country. The Board of Immigration has issued a recent ruling that even tightens this restriction. You get the picture: North Koreans might have access to the US if they came here directly from their points of transit out of China. But if they go to South Korea and accept citizenship, they in effect have to show that they face persecution in South Korea in order to be eligible for refugee status and asylum.
As we argued in Witness to Transformation, this constraint has operated on US policy for some time. Prior to the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act (NKHRA) in 2004, the US argued that North Korean refugees were essentially a South Korean problem. The NKHRA, and particularly its 2008 amendment, sought to change that by pressing the government to be more forthcoming with respect to North Korean asylum cases.
So how are we doing? Miserably. The table below updates data provided in the Kim piece cited above. The update is significant because it reflects the first two full years after the passage of the 2008 NKHRA amendment. Last year, the US admitted 73,311 refugees. Eight came from North Korea. Through the end of 2010, fewer than 100 North Koreans had been admitted, with another 25 or so apparently gaining entry in 2011 according to Roberta Cohen.
Something is wrong when the US can’t take refugees from one of the most abusive regimes on earth. Some of the problems have to do with US statute; others have to do with the sensitivities of our South Korean allies where Catch-22’s also abound. For example, current South Korean law (the Protection and Settlement Support for North Korean Defectors Act) allows the government to rescind settlement support and protection measures for a variety of reasons spanning from criminal activity to espionage. No problem there. But settlement support can also be rescinded if a refugee seeks asylum in a third country. Those seeking to move on from Korea to the US can easily get caught between the two systems, as the court cases we have seen also reveal clearly. In short, there is work to do to realize the apparently simple ambitions of the North Korean Human Rights Act, which include resettling more North Korean refugees.
