Thousands of children are hidden from the Korean government. Here’s how they live.

An image shows a child reaching out to seek help. [SHUTTERSTOCK]

Olivia was born in Korea and has lived in the country her whole life. But neither of her parents are Korean citizens, and she has no official records.
 
The preschooler was born out of wedlock, a practice widely frowned upon in Korea, and so her parents informed neither the Korean government nor her home country’s embassy of her birth, according to her caseworker, one of two who spoke to the Korea JoongAng Daily on condition of anonymity to prevent identification of their clients.
 
She’s not the only child living under such circumstances. The state-run Board of Audit and Inspection reported that 4,025 children with neither Korean citizenship nor a foreign registration number were born between 2015 and 2022, accounting for 0.1 percent of the country’s newborns during that period. 
 
But Olivia’s lack of state registration blocks her from accessing many of the important state services to which all Korean residents, including non-Korean children, are entitled — such as, crucially, public health insurance and public school.
 
For Olivia and thousands of children like her, receiving such governmental benefits remains a distant hope — for now.
 
Young and vulnerable
 

A child holds cards depicting child abuse at an event to prevent child abuse in Sejong in 2019. [NEWS1]

 
All children born to Korean parents are Korean citizens under the laws of the nation, which does not grant birthright citizenship. Hospitals are required to report all births to health authorities, and eligible children are automatically registered with the government, regardless of whether their parents actually complete the forms.
 
But things are a bit more complicated for the children of immigrants. New non-Korean parents are required to report their births, both to their home country’s embassy and Korean immigration — but not to health authorities — within 90 days. If they fail to do this, their children are not automatically entered into Korea’s database of foreign residents. In practice, this makes it easy for such births to slip under the government’s radar.
 
Many demographics of children go unregistered, but a major one is those born to unmarried parents. Because some nations do not legally permit the registration of children born out of wedlock, such children are often unable to obtain citizenship of their parents’ home countries, and thus have difficulty obtaining proper Korean registration, according to Kang Mi-jeong, leader of the policy and advocacy team at Save the Children. 
 
In other cases, including some that Kang has witnessed, children’s home countries do not have an embassy in Korea, and their parents don’t have the funds to bring them abroad to obtain a passport. “This option is highly costly and time-consuming,” Kang says, characterizing the choice to fly overseas for a child’s citizenship as one “most families could not choose without funding.
 

A form for declaring childbirth is displayed at a community center in Seoul in July 2023. [NEWS1]

 
Private agencies, including one nonprofit that spoke to the Korea JoongAng Daily on condition of anonymity to protect the identities of its clients, have begun tracking these children down, ostensibly with the goal of helping the children they find. But there is no official route for such identifications “because they exist outside the system,” one social worker from the agency said. The primary way such children are identified, in fact, is through third-party child abuse complaints, which can come in from hospitals, schools or hotlines.
 
Olivia’s unregistered status, in fact, was discovered after a police report was filed accusing her parents of child abuse, which the police passed to her agency. The nonprofit now monitors her household on a regular basis, meeting her parents, who declined to be interviewed for fear of compromising their identities, once a month and checking in on the phone each week. Olivia herself gets art therapy and psychotherapy.
 
Such nonprofits, however, can only do so much.
 
Many missing threads
 

Children of immigrant parents pose for a photograph at the Ansan Global Youth Center in Gyeonggi in March 2010. [JOONGANG ILBO]

 
Education is one of the biggest hurdles children like Olivia face. The Seoul city government provides subsidies of 140,000 won ($100) to 270,000 won to non-Korean households with a child younger than 5 for the purposes of enrollment in day care. The benefit is not available to unregistered children, leaving parents to shoulder such costs themselves. 
 
Some public elementary schools admit unregistered children, but the decision is up to each individual principal, according to unregistered third grader Park Eun-byeol, a pseudonym. 
 
The social worker from the agency noted that delayed language development is “frequently observed” among children who lack legal status in Korea.
 
“Early childhood is a critical period for language ability development, which also affects social skills,” the senior social worker said. “Staying outside the kindergarten or nursery means that children lose an opportunity to develop linguistic abilities at the right time. Even when they receive supplementary education from external institutions later, it is not as effective as early childhood education.” 
 
Kang Da-young, a human-rights activist for immigrants working at Anglican Church of Korea’s Yongsan Nanum House in central Seoul, said that several non-Korean children at her agency had been excluded from early childhood education and were now experiencing delayed language development in a parliamentary session on the rights of unregistered foreign children last November.
 
 

An illustration shows a child standing near a door with a form declaring childbirth to their left. [JOONGANG ILBO]

Death is another factor. If a child doesn’t officially exist, their death cannot be recorded — an additional logistical hurdle for grieving families.
 
One Chinese boy, who was born in Korea, remained unregistered his entire life because he’d never been registered in the Chinese hukou system. When he died of leukemia, forms needed to be submitted signed by his official “guardian” in order to hold a funeral — which required a lot of paperwork that is not always easy for unregistered children to obtain, including a birth certificate and a family certificate.”
 
“The child’s father later requested the Chinese Embassy in Seoul provide documents that could help prove a family relationship,” said Lee Jin-hye, an immigration lawyer at Migrant Center Friend. “Those documents were required to arrange cremation.”
 

A notice encouraging people to register undocumented children is posted at a community center in Seoul in July 2023. [NEWS1]

 
“Occasionally, families seek help from their embassies in Korea — or even in Japan, via international mail, when their country does not have diplomatic presence here,” Lee said. “Otherwise, bereaved families have no option but to register the death with no next of kin.”
 
Emerging from the shadows
 

A poster about Siheung, Gyeonggi’s initiative to identify undocumented foreign children [SIHEUNG CITY GOVERNMENT]

 
Siheung, a city in Gyeonggi, has been piloting a program for non-Korean children to receive automatic registration through the city since August 2023. The program was the first of its kind in Korea.
 
Registered children in Siheung, who received a city-issued child registration card, are eligible to receive welfare and national health insurance. The city provides “minimum assistance” to non-Korean children who are not registered in the national foreigner database, according to its council’s provisions.
 
“For undocumented foreign children, the city intervenes if their households are deemed improper to raise them and mediates external philanthropic financing institutions that can cover medical expenses for them,” a Siheung spokesperson told the paper.
 
As of Thursday, 76 undocumented children have been registered and legally recognized. Of them, 68 children were not eligible for Korean citizenship — nearly 90 percent. The rest, despite being born to Korean parents and eligible for automatic registration, have managed to remain undetected.
 
In July, Rep. Lim Mi-ae from the liberal Democratic Party proposed expanding the Act on Registration of Family Relations to automatically register all children born in Korea, rather than just the children of Korean citizens. Lim also proposed granting children born in Korea to parents without valid visas the temporary right to stay in the country. The amendment did not specify the exact length of the temporary stay. 
 
Rep. Lim said the two bills aim to “protect basic and universal rights” of the unregistered children with foreign backgrounds. 
 

Democratic Party Rep. Lim Mi-ae, third from left, and Save the Children hold a press conference to raise awareness of unregistered children in Korea on June 17 at the National Assembly in Yeouido, western Seoul. [SAVE THE CHILDREN]

BY LEE SOO-JUNG [[email protected]]