A drop in the bucket:
Two North Korean defectors who were staying in an Asian country while seeking asylum have recently entered the United States, a U.S. government broadcaster said Sunday.
The female defectors are the latest to be admitted to the U.S. under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 which eased the conditions for accepting their asylum requests. Since the first group of six came in May last year, Washington has accepted a total of 33 North Koreans. [Yonhap]
It is a disgrace that only 33 refugees have been given asylum in three years considering the tens if not hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees hiding in China today.
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7:04 am on October 23rd, 2007 1
I would think that for north Korean refugees, the United States would be low on their priority list as a country in which to seek asylum for a number of reasons:
1. Ignorance of the law of 2004 that allows them to apply for asylum in the States.
2. Even with that knowledge and their loathing for their home country, the U.S. probably isn’t high on their list because of the propaganda that is drilled into their heads on a daily basis in north Korea about the U.S. Imperialists, blah, blah, blah… Even if they decide to ignore this, it’s still probably in the back of their minds.
3. The U.S. isn’t the most “user friendly” when it comes to assimilation of someone from another culture who does not speak English at all. The north Korean refugess would have to be cared for by some of the South Korean embassy and likely passed off to any of a number of Korean-American charity institutions after they gained entrance to the country, if that happened at all.
4. Even if the refugees in China know about the U.S. policy, there’s still the stigma and difficulty in getting to any U.S. consulate or embassy, especially in China and this brings me to my last point,
5. Physical distance - It’s much easier for the north Koreans to find a friendly country in Asia, or even South Korea to go to. Why would they want to lengthen their journey by weeks or months and thousands upon thousands of miles?
I’m not saying that the U.S. is necessarily a bad choice for the north Korean refugees, but there are other alternatives.
7:51 am on October 23rd, 2007 2
I have written before about how the US government should educate and train North Korean defectors to serve in skill and civil servant positions for a future post-Kim Jong-il North Korea but since that isn’t happening now the most likely group of people to help NK refugees adapt to American life are the Korean church groups.
Many of these Korean church groups are already active in China and are responsible for helping many of the NK refugees get out of China and to a third country to seek asylum. If the US gave the green light to more NK refugees the church groups in China would quickly act on getting more NK refugees to apply for asylum to the US through a third country.
I think the drop in the bucket in asylum cases is because the US doesn’t want to offend Kim Jong-il while the six party charade continues.