From an article last week in a South Korean newspaper, I was able to get a lead on some statistics I’d been trying to find for a while: the number of U.S. green card holders who reside in South Korea without making declarations of permanent return (which would require them to cancel their green cards). I’m still working on gathering all the earlier statistics from government yearbooks, but after the jump I translated the article itself, which provides some interesting insight into South Korea’s diaspora policy and how they are reforming it to cut unnecessary red tape and adapt to the reality of a globally-mobile population.

To summarise: right now there’s more than thirty-five thousand green card holders who are recorded as living in South Korea, up by about 30% since they started keeping track in 2005. These are distinct from the 1,991 people who made declarations of permanent return last year; the latter had their green cards or U.S. citizenship cancelled and their residents’ registration restored, whereas the former still have green cards and so face certain restrictions on financial transactions and real estate purchases in South Korea.

A newly-proposed reform plan would remove the requirement to give up foreign permanent residence or citizenship in order to restore South Korean resident registration. This is good news for the Korean diaspora, though the reform plan probably also means that the South Korean government will stop keeping statistics on how many of its citizens give up U.S. green cards.

‘2015년부터 영주권자에 주민등록증 발급’ 안행부, 6일 국무회의서 국외이주민 주민등록 개선안 보고	‘Issue resident registration cards to people with overseas permanent residency beginning in 2015’ Ministry of Security and Public Administration’s 6 [August] State Council report on reform plan for resident registration of overseas emigrants
http://www.dongponews.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=24379
박상석 기자, 2013.08.07 10:40:10	Reporter Park Sang-seok, 7 August 2013, 10:40:10
오는 2015년부터 국외로 이주해 영주권을 취득한 재외국민에게도 주민등록증을 발급하게 된다. 사진은 지난 6월 25일 국회의원회관 제2소회의실에서 새누리당 재외국민위원회 주최로 열린 새누리당맞춤형동포정책 토론회.	Starting in 2015, overseas residents who moved abroad and obtained permanent residence will be able to receive [South Korean] resident registration cards. The photo is from the “Transforming Diaspora Policy” Forum, hosted by the New Frontier Party on 25 June in Conference Room #2 of the National Assembly Building.

First, a word about the source. The Dongpo Shinmun (동포신문; 同胞新聞) is a South Korean newspaper founded in 2003 that focuses on diaspora issues; the name literally translates as “Compatriots News”. It circulates all over the world, and features reprints of articles from “ethnic media” in Korean emigrant communities around the world as well as content written by South Korean reporters. This is one small facet of a larger reality: the South Korean diaspora has far more influence in South Korea than the American diaspora has in the U.S., both in terms of “soft power” and political power.

One recent example of the importance of the diaspora to South Korean politics was when Los Angeles real estate agent Chris Nam moved back to South Korea to become the head of the Overseas Residents Commission of the Grand National Party (now New Frontier Party) — roughly speaking, South Korea’s equivalent of Republicans Abroad. It was later discovered that he illegally held dual citizenship; in South Korea, like in Germany or the Netherlands, dual citizenship is mostly only legal for people who were born with it, with a very limited range of other exceptions. However, instead of resigning Nam even went as far as to renounce U.S. citizenship to try to preserve his position, and showed up in the Q2 2012 Federal Register list. It didn’t help, so the party appointed his successor: a sitting legislator, and not just some freshman nobody either, but the chairman of the National Assembly’s Defence Committee.

That’s not to deny the existence of anti-diaspora prejudice in South Korea — witness the nomination of Korean American businessman Kim Jeong-hoon to be Innovation & Science Minister last year, which was derailed by inane rumours that the CIA wouldn’t let him renounce U.S. citizenship — but the diaspora has a professional platform from which to fight back.

Overview of policy reforms

The U.S. remains steadfast in its refusal to amend its laws and strip out all the horribly-out-of-date early-20th-century assumptions about the nature of immigration & emigration and life abroad in general. South Korea, in contrast, realised a while ago that its 1962 Overseas Migration Act — written by the Park Chung-hee junta in an age when some migrants were still leaving the country by ship (often with the goal of permanently getting as far away as possible from Park Chung-hee) — made insufficient provisions for emigrants who gained permanent residence overseas but then returned to South Korea temporarily or without knowing if their return would be temporary or permanent.

The result was the 1999 Overseas Residents’ Entry/Exit and Legal Status Act. The Act ensured that emigrants & their descendants, whether they were South Korean or foreign citizens, could have a way to live in South Korea that’s less final than the Declaration of Permanent Return that can be made under the 1962 Act. This was the origin of the Declaration of Domestic Residence procedure mentioned above, and of the F4 “diaspora visa” that I’ve mentioned elsewhere. I’ll translate the relevant sections of the law in my next post.

The most sensitive part of South Korean diaspora policy is, naturally, the military service requirement. Under the current system, men who emigrated before age six are exempt from conscription even if they never acquired foreign citizenship, as long as they lived overseas until age 18 (with the exception of up to three years attending a school in South Korea), haven’t made a Declaration of Permanent Return. Those who were dual citizens at birth are similarly exempt. They can return to South Korea for visits or to attend school; military service is only a requirement for those who seek to start a career in South Korea.

Government bureaux get together to eliminate red tape

It’s good to know that at least one government somewhere in the world is concerned about getting rid of pointless duplicative paperwork instead of coming up with lame excuses about how important it isto fighting money laundering & drug trafficking. Can you imagine State, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice — and let’s not even dream of Treasury & the IRS — getting together to look at all the problems they’re causing overseas American residents? PATRIOT Act closing U.S. bank accounts? Demanding that dual citizens use a U.S. passport to enter the U.S., meaning that they have to keep on paying for a passport they never use anywhere else?

South Korea had its very own “Kenneth Dart moment” in 2001, just two years after the 1999 Act mentioned above, when pop star Yoo Seung-jun fled to Los Angeles and naturalised as a U.S. citizen instead of living up to his pledge to cancel his green card and serve in the army. And the national conversation on the rights & responsibilities of the diaspora in the aftermath was often characterised by ugly, xenophobic stereotypes; a few defended Yoo, but on the other side the most extreme commentators called Korean Americans thieves stealing from two countries, moving to the U.S. to evade the draft in South Korea while hiding their wealth in Kangnam real estate and pretending to be poor in Los Angeles so they could get U.S. welfare, food stamps, and SSI. To their credit, however, South Korean lawmakers and government officials rose above the fray to ensure that measures to deter bad actors did not put undue burdens on genuine emigrants & overseas-born Koreans who wanted to maintain their links to the country.

In contrast to the Korean diaspora whose politicians promoted real reform instead of giving a platform to domestic venom, the American diaspora gets Lloyd Doggett claiming that we “discover one day that the Port Royal Golf Course in Bermuda is their hometown, that they have new citizenship”, William Proxmire calling us “mink-swathed, high-living jet-setters living at the taxpayer’s expense”, and Jack Reed & Chuck Schumer threatening to turn us into permanent exiles. And let’s just say we’re not holding our breath for the day that any political party in the U.S. would even admit that there is such a thing as a U.S. diaspora policy that needs to be reformed, let alone hold a public meeting about it in the Capitol and get Congressmembers to act on their findings. Carolyn Maloney can barely find co-sponsors for her bill to create a powerless Commission on Americans Living Abroad.

Bipartisan support for reform and simplification

The primary beneficiaries of the South Korean reform will probably not be U.S. green card holders — who have other reasons to rid themselves of their U.S. status as soon as possible. Rather, as a human-interest story from a few days later (link in Korean; machine translation here) in the opposition-leaning Hankyoreh newspaper makes clear, Koreans born in Japan are most enthusiastic about the proposed reforms; they live right next door, making it much easier for them to circulate between the two countries if they wish, and Japan doesn’t impose any ridiculous paperwork or life-altering fines on citizens or permanent residents who leave the country.

Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. While Koreans who moved to Japan in that era weren’t entirely equal with Japanese, they did get the same voting rights. After World War II, the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco deprived Korean and Taiwanese residents in Japan of their old Japanese imperial subject status. Afterwards, those who could not or did not want to apply for naturalisation could register for citizenship with whichever half of their ancestral country they supported ideologically or they could remain effectively stateless, while being sort of grandfathered-in to the Japanese immigration system under what was eventually codified as “special permanent resident” status.

This status interacts unfortunately with South Korean law: under the current system, Koreans in Japan who took South Korean citizenship can’t get resident registration in South Korea unless they’re willing to give up their “special permanent resident” status and cut off their links to Japan, the country where they were born. As a result, they can’t exercise any of what are misleadingly referred to as “the rights of citizenship”. Most of these, such as the right to purchase rural land, aren’t particularly attractive to people who don’t plan to live in South Korea. However, up until the most recent election they didn’t have voting rights in South Korea either; this was a particularly pernicious deprivation, since it left Koreans in Japan with nowhere at all to exercise the franchise. (Japan does not let non-citizens vote in local elections, though there have been proposals to change this; South Korea, like European Union & some British Commonwealth member states, has extended the vote to some foreign residents since 2005.)

It’s worth noting that this puts Koreans in Japan — some of whose families have not lived on the Korean peninsula for five generations — ahead of many members of the second generation of the American diaspora. The U.S. voting system is based on residence in a state: if you’re born abroad and never lived in the U.S., you have no right to vote unless your parents’ state passed a law allowing the overseas-born children of former state residents to register there. Half of U.S. states have not even done so.

Statistics

The article apparently quotes 2011 statistics; the 2012 statistics state that they now number 35,244 people. Anyway, if I were a green card holder in South Korea, I’d be very worried: even if you closed your “non-resident’s freely-remittable won deposit” account and opened a new account at a different bank which knows nothing of your “American indicia”, the South Korean government still knows that you are a U.S. Person (even if they don’t think of it in those terms) and has you on a list somewhere.

Right now that list is probably just sitting there on an Immigration Service computer, going relatively unnoticed and unused, but lists have a strange tendency to get shared and abused for purposes other than that for which they were intended. And FATCA wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. government used census or registration data — whether their own or that of other countries — to track down people based on their group identity & punish them. Not only was the 1940 Census used to find Japanese Americans so they could be interned, the U.S. government pressured neutral Latin American countries into rounding up their Japanese immigrants and shipping them off to the U.S. to live behind barbed wire.