Two items on Jane Jeong Trenka’s blog threw me for a loop today. One is about Korean adoptions and the other is on sponsoring birth parents. Both are about the rights of adoptees.

Since the IMF crisis in 1997, single mothers have been targeted as the new source of Korean children for the West. The Ministry of Health and Welfare reported that in 2004, all but one of the 2,257 children adopted overseas came from single mothers.

It’s hard to believe…all but ONE. This is systemic discrimination against single-parent families. This is an abuse of the human rights of children born to single mothers. It’s not what anyone would want to associate with adoption. Korean children are treated unfairly based on the absence of a father in the family. In essence, the government is saying: Got a deadbeat Korean dad? Sorry, we’d rather not spend a won for you either. And South Korea, a member of the OECD, is a rich country.

As if that weren’t enough, once that adoptee manages to find a birth relative, there isn’t much hope of bringing said relative to live in the US. A woman married to a Korean adoptee wrote in a letter posted in Jane’s blog:

After speaking with expert immigration lawyers in Boston, they told us that the only hope we had of sponsoring his mother was to dissolve his adoption (which he has ample grounds for); this would automatically cause his citizenship to be revoked (!!!! after 26 years) and reapply as my spouse. During that time he would be ineligible to work, could lose all SS benefits etc, and could potentially be deported to Korea.  Then, if all of that worked, maybe we could sponsor her as long as we were not thought to be “circumventing immigration law’ which is exactly what we would be doing. I was really shocked, and incredibly disappointed in this country.

It’s hard to believe (again)… an adult adoptee loses his citizenship upon the dissolution of the adoption. Adoption truly prefaces a child’s personhood upon the adoptive parents. Without them, all the years you spent in America were just an illusion. That’s a good reason for adoptees to make sure they have all their adoption papers handy along with the proof of citizenship. Whether you have deadbeat adoptive parents or not, the US not only won’t recognize your natural parents as worthy to live in the country, your worthiness may be questioned as well!

Why is that exactly? It’s because of legal orphaning. Eliana Kim and Jane explain it here.

In the U.S., the “orphan” was defined in special immigration acts passed by the U.S. Congress explicitly for the purpose of bringing Korean children into American families. The orphan definition requires any and all legal ties to preexisting parents be cut, such that the only recognized genitors of the child are the adopting parents. So adoptees are “as-if” born to the adoptive parents, even before they are formally and legally adopted (which often involves the issuance of new birth certificates, proving the as-if genealogical status of the child). Adoptees are thus “orphans” who are then “reunited” with their “immediate relatives” in the U.S.

It is due to this unusual state of affairs that adult adoptees who reunite with Korean relatives find that the reunification clause in American immigration policy that is the right of all American citizens has, in effect, been “used up” already, in the process of adoption.

You can only reunite once seems to be the unwritten rule. It’s a rule that is inherently biased against adoptees, because it says you can only have one set of parents. Having more than one set of parents is something over which an adoptee had no control. Again, just as in Korea, it’s a rule discriminating against a child’s family status. If you were born without a father in the family or if your as-if birth gave you two families, you are out of luck. 

But even with that rule who says we have to count joining family in the US as reuniting? I certainly didn’t think of it that way. I don’t think any adoptive parent who hasn’t met their child before does. The rule could be tweaked, at the very least.