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SEOUL — Several times a week, Washington-based immigration attorney Chun Jong-Joon gets a phone call from yet another flabbergasted Korean American. All have made the same discovery: They or their U.S.-born children hold South Korean citizenship and cannot give it up.
He explains the reason: an amendment made to South Korean citizenship law two decades ago.
By the time they call Chun, they are in the grip of the law’s many real-life implications.
Many of the calls involve young men who learn that they are now subject to roughly two years of service in South Korea’s military, which is mandatory for male citizens after they turn 18.
Some are members of the U.S. military who suddenly find themselves unable to deploy to South Korea. Others are civilians who want to move there for work or marriage, but have no interest in military service, which pays as little as $447 a month and can derail families and careers.
In other cases, acceptances to study abroad programs at South Korean universities were rescinded because only bona fide foreigners are eligible.
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The law can also affect Korean Americans who have no plans to step foot in South Korea: those seeking careers in sensitive U.S. government jobs in intelligence or nuclear energy that prohibit dual citizens.
“Many people still don’t know that they or their children are affected by this law,” said Chun, who at 66 has been lobbying against it for more than a decade.
“I can’t retire because of this,” he said.
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The problem started with a singer named Yoo Seung-jun.
Born in Seoul in 1976, Yoo and his family immigrated to California when he was 12. He eventually caught the attention of a South Korean talent agency, moved back to Seoul, launched a music career and became one of the country’s most beloved stars.
In keeping with his image as a patriotic son, he assured fans in media interviews that he would serve his two-year compulsory military service like everybody else — unlike others who used their wealth or status to avoid it.
But in 2002, six months after receiving his conscription notice, Yoo traveled to the United States, became a naturalized American and renounced his South Korean citizenship, instantly exempting him from military duty.
Responding to the ensuing national outrage, the legislature passed a 2005 law that made it harder for sons with Korean citizenship to renounce it before completing military service.
The main targets of the law were families who timed visits to the United States so their sons would be born there for the express purpose of later dodging conscription. But the U.S.-born sons of families that had permanently moved — the “real diaspora Koreans,” as one legislator put it — were not immune.
With South Korea’s birthrate plummeting, veterans in their 60s and 70s say they can bolster the army’s ranks. But can they keep up with the young?
The Korean citizenship they inherit from their parents used to expire automatically at age 22. But under the new law, if they don’t renounce it before March of the year they turn 18, they are stuck with it until 38.
The law has received little attention in the United States, so many young men find out only after it is too late — which is how they wind up calling Chun.
He estimates that around 250,000 diaspora Koreans around the world unwittingly have dual citizenship because of the law.
The Military Manpower Administration, the country’s conscription agency, does not keep records of how many dual citizens have been charged with draft evasion, according to a spokesperson. But 417, including 122 Korean Americans, have served in the South Korean military since 2011.
Even for those who find out about the law in time to renounce their South Korean citizenship, the process itself is onerous, requiring several in-person trips to the nearest South Korean embassy.
“Many of the people who come to me for help end up giving up halfway through the process,” Chun said.
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Those who discover they are wanted for military service often have little personal experience with South Korea.
Take the case of a 32-year-old software engineer who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his surname, Park. Born and raised in North Carolina, he remembers a childhood filled with lemonade stands and football.
He first heard about the law when he was in college and his mother told him about a young man at their church who had tried to move to South Korea to teach English, only to be told that he would be drafted by the military if he showed up.
Park didn’t think much about it, because he had no plans to move to South Korea.
But in 2015, while doing a study abroad program in China, he began dating a South Korean woman.
As things got serious, he started thinking about moving to South Korea, where she helped her parents run a small construction company.
But having missed the deadline to renounce his South Korean citizenship, he could not legally live or work in the country without serving in the military for two years.
It made little sense to him. He considered himself American and only American. He barely spoke Korean.
Then in 2020, the Constitutional Court sided with an 17-year-old Korean American student who argued that the 2005 law placed disproportionate burdens on diaspora Koreans and violated their basic rights — namely the freedom to choose occupations that forbade dual citizenship, such as working on a Navy nuclear submarine.
The court ordered the legislature to revise the parts of the law within two years. Park and his fiancée saw the ruling in the news and were elated.
“Oh my gosh, it’s happening,” Park recalled thinking. “They’re absolutely going to fix this for us and then we’re going to be able to be together.”
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Park moved to South Korea and got married in October 2022, intending to renounce his South Korean citizenship and apply for a foreign spousal visa.
But the corrective measure the government implemented offered relief to only those who had to prove that exceptional harm was at stake, such as a lost job opportunity in the United States.
“Simply not having known about the original obligation to renounce when you turn 18 isn’t counted as a ‘legitimate reason,’” Chun said. “It did nothing to fix the problem.”
Since the policy was launched in October 2022 until last December, just 134 of 435 of applications were approved, according to the justice ministry.
Park has been living in the country as what the military authorities consider a draft dodger. He works remotely for a U.S. company, which means there are no local tax records to expose him. He and his wife haven’t formally registered their marriage with the government because he is afraid officials will ask about military service. If he is caught, he could face up to several years in prison.
At random intervals, before his tourist stay period in South Korea expires, he leaves to be in the U.S. by himself for several months.
When an airport immigration officer once asked him flat-out if he was a Korean citizen, he evaded the question and told her both of his parents were American — which was the truth.
“I almost had a heart attack,” he recalled.
He has thought about just going through with military service, until reality hits him. His Korean is still shaky. His job would be gone by the time his two years were up.
“It would be devastating,” he said. “We both come from working-class families. We can’t afford for me to not work for two years.”
“I just really want to start my life,” he added. “I’d love to pay taxes, I want to do everything above board. I want to do the right thing. But what am I supposed to do?”
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The 2005 law had been in effect eight years when Chun got his first call about it — from a young Korean American whose scholarship offer to a South Korean university had been canceled after his dual citizenship status came to light.
“That’s when I looked into my own history and discovered that my own son was also in the same situation,” said Chun, who moved to the U.S. in the late 1980s after marrying an American. “If even I had no idea as a lawyer, how many regular people would know about this?”
He has since become the law’s primary opponent, writing newspaper columns and helping affected dual nationals file lawsuits in South Korea’s Constitutional Court
He has met with the South Korean prime minister, as well as several legislators, to convince them to revise the law in a way that would allow inherited Korean citizenship to automatically expire for males, as it did prior to 2005.
He has tried to figure out the risks involved with simply visiting South Korea as a tourist on a U.S. passport.
The government has said that it only targets dual citizens who work or settle in the country. But a 2019 case showed that short-term visits could still go wrong.
That year, a 40-year-old Korean American restaurant owner from Ohio named Don Yi visited South Korea for his father’s funeral, only to be informed that he was wanted for draft evasion and placed in a jail cell for several hours. He was stuck in the country for a month while he renounced his citizenship.
One of Chun’s latest challenges to the law involves a young man who was accepted into a U.S. Navy program involving nuclear energy, a position that required a top-secret clearance and prohibited dual citizenship.
At the time of his birth, his mother was just a few months shy of obtaining U.S. citizenship, meaning she was still a South Korean national. And at 18, he was already too old to renounce his automatic South Korean citizenship.
For the time being, the Navy accepted a signed waiver that testified he had no associations with the South Korean government.
“But I don’t feel it’s a fix or that this is a closed case,” said the man’s father, an IT consultant for the U.S. government, who worried that the problem will block his son from promotions.
And for now, all trips to visit family in South Korea have been halted.
“If my son goes to Korea, he would be a criminal right now,” the father said.
Chun isn’t hopeful that the law will change anytime soon. Decades of hardened public anger at Yoo, the singer, has proven to be difficult to undo.
The government banned Yoo from entering the country and, starting in 2015, rejected all three of his applications for a visa to permanently reside there. Yoo sued and won, with the Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that the refusal was unlawful.
But the entry ban, which is a separate administrative measure, has remained.
Yoo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Two years ago, one sympathetic legislator drafted a new amendment to the citizenship law, but it failed to gather the 10 votes it needed to be formally proposed on the floor. Others are suggesting tightening visa requirements even further.
“In some ways, Yoo became the whipping boy for all the public’s anger at social and political elites,” Chun said. “Political leaders are all afraid of poking the hornet’s nest and taking a stand.”
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