Korean Americans May See Old Home’s Doors Opening

Over the past few years, Korean Americans have learned firsthand the old lesson that you can’t go home again, at least not very easily.

A thicket of legal restrictions makes it difficult for Korean Americans to own property or run a business in South Korea. It is also harder for Korean Americans to retire in South Korea than it is for, say, Italian Americans or Polish Americans to move back to their homelands.

South Korean laws are aimed at making sure Korean citizens enjoy rights and privileges from which foreigners are barred. These restrictions also apply to Korean Americans and other overseas Koreans if they have given up their Korean citizenship.

“You cannot buy a house. You cannot buy a car,” complained Lee Young Jak, a Korean American who lives in Washington but has been working temporarily this fall in Seoul. “If you inherit property, you have to get rid of it. And even then, you can’t get your money out of the country.”

Asian Americans who return home to other countries, such as China or Taiwan, don’t face so many hurdles, Lee noted.

Now, with the election of Kim Dae Jung as South Korea’s next president, there is the prospect that some of these restrictions may be lifted. It’s possible that the 1.5 million Korean Americans (a third of whom live in the Los Angeles area) will be able to get a better deal. And so might another 4 million Koreans who live in other countries.

One of the little-noticed aspects of Kim Dae Jung’s election campaign was that he promised to make things easier for overseas Koreans who return home to South Korea by easing some of these legal restrictions.

“DJ [Kim Dae Jung] will help us to solve these problems,” predicted Byun Don Chung, another Korean American who recently returned to Seoul from his home in the New York area. “Lots of Korean Americans are of the first generation [of immigrants], and they are getting near retirement age. Some of them would like to retire” in South Korea.

Kim has forged closer ties to Korean Americans than any of his predecessors. He lived in exile in the United States for three years in the early 1980s, when he was the leading opponent of the military regime headed by President Chun Doo Hwan.

He set up his own American organization, the Korean Institute for Human Rights, to press for democracy in South Korea. Go back a decade, and you will find this institute described in Washington articles as South Korea’s “embassy in exile.”

In recent years, Kim’s Washington-based organization became, in effect, a part of his political network. During Kim’s campaign this fall, some of the top advisors were Korean Americans who had worked for the Korean Institute for Human Rights.

Among them was Lee Young Jak. In Washington, Lee works as a U.S. government statistician. In Seoul this fall, he served as Kim’s pollster.

During the final two weeks of the campaign, when Kim Dae Jung said he planned to renegotiate with the International Monetary Fund the stringent conditions it placed upon the rescue package aimed at helping South Korea recover from its ongoing financial crisis, he was responding at least in part to Lee’s polls.

“The polls show that people support renegotiating with the IMF,” Lee said in an interview nine days before the election. “We’re focusing upon this issue now, because this is a winning issue for Kim Dae Jung.”

Such talk was a bit premature. Over the next few days, Kim was forced to abandon his position on the IMF because the calls for renegotiation undermined efforts to restore the confidence of foreign investors in South Korea.

While Lee was an insider in Kim Dae Jung’s campaign, he remains an outsider in the eyes of South Korea’s legal system. As a Korean American, he was barred from owning even an automobile. Lee’s visa required him to leave the country every three months.

A few of South Korea’s restrictions are understandable.

Korean citizenship, for instance, is required to hold jobs in the country’s government. One of Kim’s campaign aides--a Korean American--confessed privately that he was in the process of turning in his U.S. passport and regaining Korean citizenship because he hoped to land the job of South Korea’s ambassador to Washington.

Still, the broader restrictions on Korean Americans owning property in South Korea seem hopelessly outdated.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul say they’ve even noticed a trend in recent years of “reverse immigration”: Some Korean Americans have been going through the legal procedures to become Korean citizens again so that they can live or work in South Korea.

Over the past decade or so, a transpacific culture has emerged, made up of Asians who live and work part of the time in the United States and part of the time in their home countries. “There’s a lot of back and forth,” observed author Stanley Karnow, who is writing a book about Asian Americans. “It’s sometimes hard to say whether people live in one country or the other.”

Maybe Kim Dae Jung’s promise to ease the restrictions on Korean Americans was just a campaign tactic. But if he follows through on his promises, it will be easier for Korean Americans to join this transpacific society.

In that sense, Kim--for years the outsider and exile--would have succeeded in leading Korean Americans home.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.