# Can I emigrate to North Korea? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 10, 2013, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282 "2013-04-10T02:37:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ranger\_Jeff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranger_jeff/32/2065_2.png) [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2013, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/41 "2013-05-05T18:58:53Z")
I heard the NK have their own version of our Miranda Warning. It goes like this: _“You can scream as loudly as you want to. We don’t mind. We have earplugs.”_ ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2013, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/42 "2013-05-05T19:47:33Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > Cruise over to the Vice Guide to Travel and check out the episode where one American on the “tour” asked some critical questions about North Korea. It got ugly very fast. [Here](http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3) is a link to the 1st of 3 parts of the video; I don’t remember where in the video it occurred. It’s been a while since I watched it, but IIRC the issue with things getting ugly wasn’t so much him asking inconvienient questions (their handlers have undoubtedly heard them all and have canned responses) as the fact that him and his cameraman were presenting themselves as tourists since foreign journalists and filmmakers aren’t allowed in the country. When he starts trying to ask questions _on camera_ that sure looks like journalism. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2013, 7:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/43 "2013-05-06T07:38:58Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > You seriously think that North Korea has “all the trappings of democracy”? :eek: Please don’t misquote me; I never said they have _all_ the trappings of democracy. But it is obvious that they do cloak themselves in many of the most important ones. They’ve got a constitution which purports to guarantee freedom of speech, association, privacy, petitions, movement, religion, as well as universal suffrage, a free press, and independent judiciary. They’ve got a nominally multiparty system with regular elections at all levels of government; even their supreme leader goes through the motions of being “approved” by vote of the National Defence Commission and other bodies. Please remember that I am not claiming, and have never claimed, that any of these political features are anything more than a façade. My point is that even the most authoritarian regimes take some measures to maintain the artifice of fairness and legitimacy. > [@](#): > > In case you haven’t noticed yet, North Korea doesn’t care about outside scrutiny. They’ve pretty much immunizied themselves to it. What they want is what they’ve always wanted: control. Of course they want control. But it’s easier to wield that control when you’re not overly restricted by the influence or threats of others. If the DPRK were to openly admit its greatest abuses of human rights it would weaken what little support, or at least indifference, it has from countries like China. It’s more convenient for it to continue to deny its faults and stick to its age-old story of being a benevolent workers’ paradise unfairly harassed by American-imperialist bullying. > [@](#): > > They were not “caught up in the legal system”. They were held hostage. They also were not imprisoned with North Korean prisoners. They weren’t even imprisoned with each other, but were rather held separately in isolation. The point remains that they were appointed defence lawyers, tried in person by a judge at an official court, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment. Courts, lawyers, judges, convictions, sentences, and prisons are all part of such “legal system” as the country has, no matter how much of sham that system might be. They clearly have measures in place to deal with cultural contamination. Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement isn’t so difficult. > [@](#): > > Where are you getting your ideas about North Korea? Again, I hope you realize that many of the “ideas” I’ve presented here are merely my reporting what the DPRK claims about itself (and therefore aren’t “mine” in the sense of my actually believing them). Those claims in particular come from the DPRK laws and constitution, and from the KCNA. Other information and analysis I get from the Western mainstream media (mostly CNN, BBC, and newswire reports), published memoirs and interviews of Western residents in Pyongyang, reports by the HRNK, and articles from ANU researcher Leonid Petrov. ---
**Author:** ![skdo23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@skdo23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/skdo23)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2013, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/44 "2013-05-06T15:47:40Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > This fascinates me!! A tourist who speaks Korean would be able to share some interesting stories. Can you share? I would love to know what goes on in the mind of a North Korean. [This is page](http://www.axisofevilworldtour.com/) is pretty interesting too. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2013, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/45 "2013-05-06T16:15:29Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > This fascinates me!! A tourist who speaks Korean would be able to share some interesting stories. Can you share? I would love to know what goes on in the mind of a North Korean. […] But maybe a Korean speaker could get a little closer than a westerner, and get the N Korean guide to open up his feelings a little. For reasons already mentioned, you’re not going to find a lot of reports of locals dropping their guard around tourists, who don’t stay anywhere long enough to develop a rapport with anyone. You’ll have better luck (but only slightly) if you consult the reports and memoirs of those who’ve spent an extended period of time there. The aforementioned Ling and Lee have done some interviews and published some memoirs where they describe some personal conversations with their guards and investigators. (IIRC one of the investigators was curious about social customs in America and asked if it was really true that people went to bars to pick each other up for casual sex.) Another fascinating (though by now somewhat dated) read is Andrew Holloway’s [_A Year in Pyongyang_](http://aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html), where he describes the time he spent working as a copy editor for the DPRK’s foreign language publishing house. His stay was incredibly monotonous. As with most other foreign workers he had the freedom to wander around Pyongyang unaccompanied, though there was never anything to do or see, and he had almost no opportunities to socialize except with his fellow foreign workers. ---
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2013, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/46 "2013-05-06T23:48:36Z")
I went on a tour of NK last fall. It’s certainly true that I saw no more than they wanted me to see, but it wasn’t completely a “dog and pony show”. My group traveled around quite a bit and not every single thing we saw could have been staged. I was most happy to see the locals having fun, enjoying some holiday time. I’m sure most of the folks I saw were privileged and that the big majority live much harsher lives but, still, it was something. I didn’t any inside stories. Not only do I not speak Korean, I’m not a gregarious person by nature and don’t really have the social skills to draw someone out like that. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/47 "2013-05-08T13:06:24Z")
psychonaut: You can “very much doubt” all you want; the fact remains, though, from the stories of quite a number of people who’ve managed to escape North Korea that trials are essentially a foreign concept. People arrive home or are awakened in the middle of the night and carted off to a prison camp. They’re not even told why. Other fact is that the relatively recent case of foreigners being arrested and tried is that (a) the trial, of course, was a joke, and (b) the two journalists who were probably kidnapped from the Chinese side of the river were not imprisoned with North Korean convicts; they were simply held in what was basically a guest house. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/48 "2013-05-08T13:49:06Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > psychonaut: You can “very much doubt” all you want; the fact remains, though, from the stories of quite a number of people who’ve managed to escape North Korea that trials are essentially a foreign concept. Then you haven’t read the stories of quite a number of escapees who _were_ tried. They’re not particularly difficult to find; the HRNK has interviewed and published case studies for dozens of such prisoners. You can start with David Hawk’s _The Hidden Gulag_, 2nd Ed., ISBN 978-0-615-62367-2, which presents the testimony of 60 former prisoners, some of whom reported that they received a fair trial, some of whom reported that they received an unfair trial, and some of whom reported that they were imprisoned without trial. > [@](#): > > People arrive home or are awakened in the middle of the night and carted off to a prison camp. They’re not even told why. Yes, this happens too, and I never denied that. The fact that many people were imprisoned without trial doesn’t mean that trials don’t exist, or that they’re “essentially a foreign concept”. > [@](#): > > …the two journalists who were probably kidnapped from the Chinese side of the river… Not even the two journalists believe this. Even post-liberation they have always maintained that they illegally crossed into North Korea (albeit accidentally). If they’ve since recanted I haven’t heard about it and would be interested to know when and where this was published. I have to ask, where are _you_ getting your ideas about North Korea? You accuse me of speculation, and every time you’ve questioned or expressed doubt about one of my claims I’ve provided the source. Yet much of what you’ve said here seems to fly in the face of published scholarship and eyewitness testimony. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/49 "2013-05-08T14:48:52Z")
I got my ideas about North Korea from living in South Korea, reading the news in South Korea, and basically paying attention. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/50 "2013-05-08T14:56:09Z")
> [@psychonaut](#): > > Not even the two journalists believe this. Even post-liberation they have always maintained that they illegally crossed into North Korea (albeit accidentally). [Really, now?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_imprisonment_of_American_journalists_by_North_Korea) ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/51 "2013-05-08T15:13:18Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > [Really, now?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_imprisonment_of_American_journalists_by_North_Korea) I assume you’re referring to this: > [@](#): > > Ling and Lee claimed, in a written statement posted on Current TV’s web site, that they had spent only a brief time in North Korean territory before crossing the river back into China, but were pursued by North Korean soldiers who dragged them once again onto North Korean soil. In that case, I stand corrected. They did earlier claim that they were arrested while still on North Korean territory, though I remember Ling’s claims about the amount of time they actually spent there before the capture varied from interview to interview. ---
**Author:** ![Cerealbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7ab992/32.png) [@Cerealbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cerealbox)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/52 "2013-05-08T15:45:28Z")
This has gotten off topic, but I do remember reading recently in more than one source that there is currently one defector left. I hear Chinese exist but are shunned as dark has a racialist ideology. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/53 "2013-05-15T12:09:53Z")
[Told you](http://news.yahoo.com/nkorea-american-starts-life-special-prison-061533898.html): > [@](#): > > PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — An American citizen sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for what Pyongyang has described as hostile acts against the state has started life at a “special prison,” state media said Wednesday. More at the link, of course. As stated above, there’s no way the North Korean authorities would have this American incarcerated with North Koreans in a regular prison. You can’t watch anyone 24 hours a day and that’s just not an acceptable risk for the North. Also, the North has never had any intention of chucking Bae into one of the concentration camps they run. If he were to escape, then he’d definitely spill the beans. Right now, the North’s content with denying the assertions of North Koreans who’ve fled. By the way, North Koreans who make it to the South really aren’t automatically granted South Korean citizenship. First off, of course, they’re asked if they want to stay in South Korea. Then they’re interviewed (interrogated/grilled/what-have-you) by the South’s National Intelligence Service. After that, they’re recognized as South Korean citizens/granted SK citizenship. As for Bae, he’s obviously not considered a North Korean citizen because (a) he’s been using his American passport to enter and exit the country and (b) the Norks are using him as leverage against the American government. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2013, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/54 "2013-05-16T15:59:26Z")
> [@psychonaut](#): > > They weren’t even imprisoned with each other, but were rather held separately in isolation. The point remains that they were appointed defence lawyers, tried in person by a judge at an official court, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment. Courts, lawyers, judges, convictions, sentences, and prisons are all part of such “legal system” as the country has, no matter how much of sham that system might be. They clearly have measures in place to deal with cultural contamination. Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement isn’t so difficult. I think this gives them too much credit. As you admit, the system is a sham, so just because they have puppets playing the role of judge, bailiff, attorney, etc. doesn’t make it a legal process instead of a hostage taking. To be absurd, if I kidnap my neighbor and lock him up in the basement, does it make a functional difference if I gave him a “trial” first? One where I acted as judge, my wife the prosecution, my kid as his defense attorney, and the dog as the clerk? ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2013, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/55 "2013-05-16T16:03:17Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > I think this gives them too much credit. As you admit, the system is a sham, so just because they have puppets playing the role of judge, bailiff, attorney, etc. doesn’t make it a legal process instead of a hostage taking. > > To be absurd, if I kidnap my neighbor and lock him up in the basement, does it make a functional difference if I gave him a “trial” first? One where I acted as judge, my wife the prosecution, my kid as his defense attorney, and the dog as the clerk? If your house was a recognized sovereign nation-state, perhaps. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2013, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282/56 "2013-05-16T16:32:27Z")
> [@gnoitall](#): > > If your house was a recognized sovereign nation-state, perhaps. Would it? Just because the UN, the United States, or the UK recognizes an entity as sovereign, does that mean that any type of thuggery and deprivation of basic rights are to be considered “legal process” if there are meager attempts at giving them the trappings of legitimacy? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-emigrate-to-north-korea/655282.md?page=2)