A recent article in a Korean American newspaper, referring to newly-published statistics from South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has revealed that the number of Koreans cutting off their ties with the U.S. reached an 11-year high last year: 2,158 Koreans gave up U.S. green cards or citizenship in 2011. Very clearly, this is larger than the Federal Register number for the same year — and of course, the Federal Register includes people of all nationalities, not just Koreans.

Keep in mind that the Federal Register is only supposed to cover citizens and “long term residents”, those who have had their green cards for more than eight out of the past fifteen years, so some of those 2,158 were not supposed to show up in the “name-and-shame list” anyway. That said, this article is another piece of evidence to add to the ones we already have that the Federal Register grossly understates the number of people ceasing to be U.S. Persons. I’ve translated the article and various background materials below.

As we all know, journalists everywhere are prone to misinterpretations of government reports, so I did some due diligence on these numbers — and found out, to my surprise, that the reporter’s description is accurate. The first relevant source is the Diplomacy Whitebook‘s appendix, at page 301. The 2,158 figure for “reverse migrants” comes from Table 3, which lists “people declaring permanent return” (영주귀국 신고자); it also lists “people giving up on moving overseas” (해외이주 포기자), which is not included in that 2,158 and isn’t relevant for our purposes. The columns are: Year, U.S., Canada, Central/South America, Australia, New Zealand, Other, and Total. You can see that out of all emigrants declaring their return to South Korea that year, those from the U.S. made up a bit more than half of the total of 4,164 reverse migrants who officially reported their return to the South Korean government.

South Korea’s actual Overseas Migration Act, which governs the procedure for declaring permanent return, states:

So what exactly are those “documents proving permanent return”? The answer is found in the Overseas Migration Act Implementation Regulations, which explain (emphasis mine):

So that confirms it: each of those 2,158 provided proof to the South Korean government of the cancellation of their right to stay in the United States. Also note that the regulations don’t specify anything ridiculous like a fine of 300% of your assets for failing to file this paperwork. So this number of self-reports is highly likely to be an underestimate of the actual number of Koreans who gave up U.S. green cards — kind of like how early FBAR figures are far smaller than the actual size of the U.S. population abroad.

The Regulations quoted above do not yet seem to have been amended to take into account South Korea’s recent moves to permit dual citizenship, so it’s not clear whether that 2,158 includes former citizens, or just former green card holders. People restoring South Korean citizenship would show up in nationality statistics as well, however. According to those figures, 3,740 Koreans had their nationality restored in 2008. This was back when regaining South Korean nationality meant giving up any other citizenship you had obtained. If that number is divided up anything like the “permanent return” figures, probably about half of those 3,740 are former Americans — utterly dwarfing the Federal Register statistic of 235 people losing citizenship that year.

Keep in mind that the U.S. has more than 35 million foreign-born residents. People born in South Korea barely form 3% of that total. Even if people of some other nationalities have only one-tenth the reverse migration rate of Koreans, you can do the math yourself and compare that to the U.S. government’s published numbers. Again, at this point we may still have some lively discussion about who exactly doesn’t get included in the Federal Register, but it gets harder and harder to claim with a straight face that it includes everyone losing U.S. citizenship or long-term green cards.

Here, unlike above, the journalist has made an obvious error. Again, you can refer to the whitebook’s appendix at page 301. Table 1 lists the number of “people making declarations of moving overseas” (해외이주 신고자), whence the 618 mentioned above. Table 2 lists “local move” (현지이주), whatever that means; the figure for U.S. given there is 13,386, which sounds like roughly the right magnitude for the number of people who moved out of South Korea without telling the South Korean government. In otherwords, the 618 is based on the number of self-reports of migration.

Since the South Korean government does not appear to be threatening to steal 300% of anyone’s assets for failing to fill out this not-very-useful self report, apparently no one bothers with it. (In the free world, this is the proper attitude towards paperwork for a country in which you no longer live). For comparison, the Department of Homeland Security reported that 22,824 South Koreans were granted green cards in 2011, and that 12,664 naturalised as U.S. citizens. The problem seems to be that the reporter misinterpreted the table.

As mentioned above, many former green card holders do not show up in the Federal Register either. Those who were in the U.S. for fewer than eight of the last fifteen years aren’t considered “long term residents” under 877(a) or 877A and so don’t even have to file Form 8854. The Federal Register list only began including the note that “[f]or purposes of this listing, long-term residents, as defined in section 877(e)(2), are treated as if they were citizens of the United States who lost citizenship” in the Q1 2012 list. However it seems reasonable to guess that the list has included long-term residents with green cards all along, since the wording of the actual law authorising the list has not changed, and of course the IRS would never make major changes without Congress explicitly amending a tax law first, right?

So how many of these 2,158 were “long-term residents”? The reason of “inability to adapt to immigrant life” only accounted for about two hundred of the cases of return; it’s probably safe to bet that most of them didn’t stay in the U.S. for eight years. People responding with the most common reason, “old age”, appear to comprise senior citizens who spent long years raising their children in the U.S., but hope to go back to their hometowns in South Korea for retirement, so they’re all likely to fall into the “long-term resident” category. With the other reasons, it’s hard to say how many of them are long-term vs. short-term green card holders, let alone citizens.

For those of you who are interested in reading more about the phenomenon of reverse migration among Koreans in the U.S., New American Media has an English-language report on this phenomenon focused specifically on the elderly. As the report points out, there’s no pressure from the South Korean side for reverse migrants to give up U.S. citizenship and restore the South Korean one, as they can easily qualify for an ex-citizen’s F4 visa. It’s only the U.S. which will make their lives difficult if they exercise their human right to settle down outside of their passport-issuing country.