Defectors Increasingly Relying on “Chain Defection” To Escape North Korea

With prices to pay brokers to assist people defecting from North Korea skyrocketing due to the border crackdown during the Kim Jong-un era; it only makes sense that defector families already in South Korea would have to pool their meager resources to get the rest of their family members out:

First came Kim Yong-shil, in 2006. Then her husband, her two grown daughters, her teenaged son. Two years later, out came her mother, then one brother, then in 2012, the other.

One by one over the past decade, the members of this family have escaped from North Korea, the ones who made it out first earning money and meeting brokers so they could bring out the others.

This process — called “chain defection” — is almost the only way to escape from North Korea now, as security along the border has tightened dramatically since Kim Jong Un took control of the state four years ago.

In the past 20 years, some 29,000 North Koreans have fled hunger and repression at home by escaping across the river that forms the country’s border with China. The flow of refugees had been tracking steadily upward until plummeting during Kim’s first year in power. By last year, fewer than 1,300 people had escaped, less than half of the peak recorded in 2009.  [Washington Post]

You can read much more at the link.