Her life revolved around her children and grandchildren -- but she rarely talked about her life in North Korea, Roh says. In the past few years, Koh began opening up more about her teenage years and showed interest in the idea of reuniting with her family. The group has maintained a registry of families impacted for the past several years with the help of community members across the country. Volunteers tasked with updating the registry earlier this year made contact with about 50 families in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, said Paul Kyumin Lee, the group's president.
Lee believes there are many other elderly Korean Americans who may not be part of the registry. US officials have previously estimated that , people may be impacted by the separations, but Lee says those figures are not accurate anymore because many of those people have passed away.
While North and South Korea have facilitated more than 20 opportunities for family reunions in the past, there is no official channel to connect Korean Americans with their relatives in North Korea. Last week, the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Divided Families Reunification Act, which urges the State Department to consult with the South Korean government on how to arrange reunions for Korean Americans and their North Korean families, including by video.
It also requires the department's special envoy on North Korean human rights to work with the Korean American community to identify those same opportunities. The legislation is now in the Senate, where it has been referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations. Democratic Rep. Grace Meng of New York, the lead sponsor of the bill, said in a statement that the legislation was critical because many of the people impacted are now in their 70s, 80s and 90s.
Other administrations took initial steps to reunite families. Chahee Lee Stanfield was four years old when her mother and most of her siblings left Manchuria for South Korea in , thinking her father and one of her brothers would stay behind to farm their land only for a few weeks.
The year-old retired librarian has not seen them since then and what happened to them remained a mystery for several decades. An undated photo of Sang Moon, who was separated from his wife and most of his children in when they left Manchuria for South Korea. The foreign-born population includes naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees, legal nonimmigrants including those on student, work, or other temporary visas , and persons residing in the country without authorization.
The terms foreign born and immigrant are used interchangeably and refer to those who were born in another country and later emigrated to the United States. Data-collection constraints do not permit inclusion of those who gained Korean citizenship via naturalization and later moved to the United States.
Distribution by State and Key Cities. As of , almost half of all Korean immigrants resided in three states: California 31 percent , New York 9 percent , and New Jersey 7 percent.
Together, the four counties accounted for about 29 percent of the total Korean immigrant population in the United States. Figure 2. Note: Pooled ACS data were used to get statistically valid estimates at the state and metropolitan statistical area levels, for smaller-population geographies.
Not shown are populations in Alaska and Hawaii, which are small in size; for details, visit the Migration Policy Institute MPI Data Hub for an interactive map showing geographic distribution of immigrants by state and county, available online.
Source: MPI tabulation of data from U. Census Bureau pooled ACS. Click here for an interactive map that shows the geographic distribution of immigrants by state and county.
Select Korea from the dropdown menu to see which states and counties have the highest distributions of Korean immigrants. In the period, 40 percent of Korean immigrants were concentrated in the greater metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. Figure 3. Source: MPI tabulation of data from the U. Table 1. Click here for an interactive map that highlights the metropolitan areas with the highest concentrations of immigrant groups.
Select Korea from the dropdown menu to see which metropolitan areas have the highest concentrations of Korean immigrants. In , half of Korean immigrants ages 5 and older reported having limited English proficiency, compared to about 48 percent of the total foreign-born population. However, slightly more Korean immigrants reported speaking only English at home 19 percent than the total immigrant population 16 percent.
Age, Education, and Employment. Korean immigrants have high educational attainment compared to the overall foreign-born and native-born populations. Likewise, more Korean immigrants had graduate or professional degrees 20 percent than other immigrants 13 percent and native-born individuals 12 percent. Korean immigrants tend to be older than the overall foreign- and native-born populations. The median age of Korean immigrants was 48 in , compared to 45 for the overall foreign-born population and 36 for the U.
However, more Korean immigrants are of workforce participation age than U. Census Bureau ACS. Korean immigrants participated in the civilian labor force at a lower rate 61 percent than foreign-born individuals 66 percent.
For comparison, the native-born labor force participation rate was 62 percent. Korean immigrant women were less likely to participate in the workforce 53 percent , compared to foreign-born 56 percent and U. More than half of Korean immigrants were employed in management, business, science, and arts occupations, compared to just 32 percent of all immigrants and 39 percent of natives. In contrast, far fewer Korean immigrants worked in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations 3 percent and production, transportation, and material moving occupations 8 percent than the other two populations see Figure 5.
Figure 5. Korean immigrants tend to have higher incomes than both the foreign- and native-born populations. In , Korean immigrant families experienced poverty at a rate comparable to that of U. Immigration Pathways and Naturalization. But they were able to stay on a U visa for crime victims.
He thinks the country should do more for North Koreans, providing money and benefits. A large tide of South Koreans emigrated to the US in the s and s, after the Korean war, and old prejudices and suspicions toward North Koreans linger. Ok Soon Joo is one of the fortunate ones with a green card. In September , she arrived in the US. After escaping from North Korea on her second try, she spent several years in China, married to a Chinese man. She eventually escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand, where she was able to phone an aunt who had made it to America several months earlier.
Because she had late-stage stomach cancer, her application was expedited. She arrived in Colorado and immediately had surgery.
When she left her small town in North Korea, she left her year-old son and husband behind. Later she learned that they ran out of food and the boy went missing.
Joo spent years in China during which she had a six-year old daughter with the Chinese man.
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