It appears the illegal immigration reform South Korea has implemented has had some success in reducing the number of illegal immigrants:
One out of 10 foreigners living in South Korea are illegal aliens, government data showed Tuesday.
According to the data released by the Ministry of Justice, 211,320, or 10.5 percent of the total number of foreigners living here as of end-January, are staying without a valid visa.
The number is up 1.1 percent from what was tallied the previous month, which stood at 208,971, it said.
The total shot up to 223,464 in 2007 and dropped to 177,955 in 2009. Since 2014, the number has hovered around 200,000.
The percentage of illegal aliens, meanwhile, has been declining from 12.3 percent in 2012 to 11.3 percent in 2015 and 10.2 percent in 2016 with the overall rise in the number of foreigners living here. [Korea Times]
The South Korean government implemented a program where if illegal immigrants self deported, after six months they could apply for a work visa for the prior job they were working. It seems a program like this could be something that could work in the United States as well.
I hope the Korean consulate and advocacy groups are recommending to the illegal immigrants calling them to go back to Korea instead of remaining as criminals in the US:
Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs take an undocumented immigrant to a patrol car in Los Angeles on Feb, 7, 2017, in this photo released by The Associated Press. (Yonhap)
Park Sang-ok, a consul responsible for immigration affairs at the South Korean Consulate General in Los Angeles, was inundated with telephone calls all day long on Friday.
Many Koreans who are not legally in the United States called him for inquiries, as they were becoming aware that the anti-immigration polices of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration were imminent and are scared of possibly being deported.
According to Park, the callers, including one from Boston, Massachusetts, were responding to the consulate general’s posting of a notice about the U.S. administration’s measures to toughen immigration polices and related information.
Advocacy groups supporting the rights of Korean immigrants, such as the Los Angeles-based Korean Resource Center (KRC), have been dealing with an increasing number of callers seeking more information about the administration’s campaign to crack down on illegal immigration. The center, founded in 1983, was created to educate, serve and organize the Korean-American community in Los Angeles.
One of the officials at the KRC, Chung Sang-hyuk, said, “We received an average of 20 calls a day last week. There were calls from Ohio State and New York as well as Los Angeles.”
The Korean-American community has been gripped by fear since the Trump administration on Tuesday announced new guidelines that could lead to more aggressive deportations of undocumented immigrants inside the country and at the border. [Yonhap]
The new immigration policy deports illegal immigrants arrested for crimes. Such as this guy here quoted in the article:
A Korean-American in his 20s living in Georgia State said to Yonhap News Agency, “I have been fined for drunk driving in the past and my visa has expired. I am so worried about agents coming after me.”
If an illegal immigrant is driving around drunk, putting people at risk, why should American citizens be expected to let this person stay?
Here is the other effect from President Trump’s new immigration policy, it is forcing people to apply for residency and citizenship:
Against the backdrop, lawyers specializing in immigration law are cashing in on many Koreans’ needs to obtain permanent residence rights and citizenships earlier.
A 49-year-old Korean resident near Los Angeles said on the condition of anonymity that he hurriedly applied for citizenship right after President Trump’s inauguration. “But it remains to be seen whether I will get it in due time,” he said.
I have little sympathy for illegal immigrants that have had years to apply for residency and did not do it.
Have you wondered how many illegal Korean immigrants there are in the United States? According to the Korea Times the number of Korean illegal immigrants has actually been declining in recent years and has dropped to 160,000 people:
Trump reaffirmed his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border.
“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people, but we are going to make a determination on that,” he said.
Early this month, the Pew Research Center estimated that 160,000 Koreans were in the U.S illegally.
The center said the number of illegal Korean immigrants in the U.S. had risen steadily since 1990 to a peak of about 200,000 in 2010 before declining moderately to 190,000 in 2011 and 180,000 in 2012. [Korea Times]
The argument that illegal immigrants in the United States will not self deport is often made to explain why they should just be given amnesty. As the case with South Korea shows illegal immigrants there self deported once they had a viable option to seek legal status:
An amnesty program for overstaying foreigners is having an unexpected consequence: Korea is suddenly short of nannies, restaurant help and construction workers.
In April, the Ministry of Justice announced an amnesty for people who overstayed their visas or illegally immigrated. It said that they could apply for overseas Korean visas, known as F-4, if they left Korea and went home in the next six months.
This was the first time the ministry has promised to allow all overstayers to apply for visas to return to Korea.
The amnesty is working. Over 12,000 foreigners who were in Korea illegally left the country from April to May, twice the 5,300 who left in the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Justice. (…………)
“When I went to Incheon airport at 5 a.m., the third floor was crowded with illegal immigrants waiting to leave,” said Lee Byung-chun, who works for the Han-a administrative agency. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but the big different though with South Korea compared to the US is that there isn’t an entire political party trying to lock in the illegal immigrant vote. This is likely why Korea was able to successfully implement immigration reform and the United States cannot.
I wonder if Donald Trump will mention South Korea’s illegal immigration crackdown on the campaign trail?:
The government said Monday it will clamp down on foreigners staying in South Korea without proper visas and reduce the rate of illegal aliens in the country below 10 percent by 2018.
The government will selectively allow entry to foreigners with low possibility of violating the immigration control law and beef up screening of visa issuance, it said during a planning committee meeting on foreigners policy held in Seoul.
The government’s move is in response to a recent series of airport-related security problems that caused alarm bells to go off.
In January, two Chinese nationals snuck into the country without being noticed by immigration officials or picked up by the airport’s security systems. Later in the same month, a Vietnamese transfer passenger forced his way through the gate of an unmanned automatic immigration checkpoint without being checked.
All the people that entered South Korea illegally were later apprehended.
Last year, 11.3 percent of foreigners in South Korea were believed to be staying here illegally, according to the Ministry of Justice. [Yonhap]
With stories like this I can understand special legislation to deal with these situations on a case by case basis, but it does not require mass amnesty for illegal immigrants sweeping across the border to address this:
The pending deportation of Adam Thomas Crapser, an undocumented Korean American adoptee and survivor of severe child abuse, has sparked a dialogue on a major loophole in immigration law, according to NBC News.
When Adam first arrived in the U.S. in 1979 as a Korean adoptee, his childhood quickly turned into a nightmare. He and his biological sister were adopted by the Wright family in Michigan, where he suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In 1986, the Wrights relinquished their parental rights to Child Services without completing Adam’s naturalization paperwork. As wards of the state, Adam and his sister became separated from each other. After living in a group home for a year, Adam was formally adopted by Thomas and Dolly-Jean Crapser in Oregon.
The Crapsers, along with their biological sons, subjected Adam and seven other foster children to years of heinous abuse and torture. In an interview with Gazillion Strong, Adam revealed that he would get choked, beaten or burnt on a daily basis during the five years he lived with his abusive adoptive family. In 1991, the Crapsers were arrested and convicted of multiple counts of child abuse, child sexual abuse and child rape.
Adam, now a husband and father of three children, faces possible deportation because both sets of adoptive parents failed to complete his naturalization process and refused to provide him with his adoption papers, according to the blog Reappropriate. As an undocumented American, Adam has struggled to attend school or find work for most of his adult life. If deported, he will be sent to a country where he does not even speak the language. [KoreAm Journal]
You can read more at the link, but hopefully this gets worked out for Adam Crapser, especially since the US government is to blame for his situation considering they allowed him to be adopted without naturalization paperwork and then not once, but twice put him in abusive homes.
This was a pretty good ploy by this guys to smuggle themselves into the country:
Immigration officers are on the hunt for 77 Indian Hindus who illegally came to Korea in July by disguising themselves as pastors of Christian churches, local media reported Monday.
Eighty two Indians reportedly arrived in Korea early July by falsely claiming that they were church leaders invited to attend the “World Religious Leaders Forum,” which was held in Busan by the International Youth Fellowship (IYF).
“We arrested and deported five of them, who were illegally working for an auto parts factory in Busan,” a spokesman for the Korea Immigration Service said.
“Seventy seven of them are still missing.” [Korea Observer]
