The Underperformance of the North Korean Human Rights Act: A Study on the Politicization of North Korean Human Rights in the United States

Abstract

During the mid-1990s, a food crisis struck the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, resulting in the burgeoning North Korean diaspora that persists to this day. The majority of defectors have resettled to South Korea as the United States has emerged as another destination since passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act (NKHRA), an Act specifically devoted to promoting North Korean human rights and authorizing the admission of North Korean refugees. However, between passage of the NKHRA on October 2004 to the end of the Obama Administration on January 2017, only 212 North Korean refugees were admitted from overseas, while only an estimated 40 have received political asylum.

The total number of North Korean refugees are low in large part because of China’s policy to immediately repatriate all North Korean defectors. However, that does not fully explain why the passage of the NKHRA has not been accompanied by larger numbers of North Korean refugees in the United States. The literature suggests that refugee resettlement in the United States is highly politicized. This thesis examines the impact of this politicization in three dimensions on the refugee resettlement of North Korean defectors.

The three dimensions are: the impact of party polarization on the framing of the NKHRA as a Republican issue, the prioritization of security concerns over human rights, and the discord between two networks with conflicted views on how to balance humanitarian aid concerns with human rights concerns.

The author conducted 18 interviews with North Korean defectors, senior-level members across various NGOs, Christian pastors, members from humanitarian engagement networks, and members from human rights advocacy networks. The author relies profoundly on the large literature pertaining to the negative relationship between human rights considerations and U.S. refugee resettlement practices.

This thesis finds that the politicization of North Korean human rights in the United States helps in adequately explaining the phenomenon above and beyond inefficient procedural reasons and China’s role as an uncooperative middleman. Ultimately, the interplay between these three dimensions of politicization amplified the NKHRA’s underperformance.