As I am a child of immigrants, immigration law is important to me. U.S. immigration law, as defined by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, determines whether a person is an alien, as well as the rights, duties, and obligations associated with being an alien in the United States. Immigration law also provides the means by which aliens can become legally naturalized citizens with full rights of citizenship. If they do not personally know someone who immigrated to the United States, American citizens may not fully understand how immigration laws work.
As an American lawyer who does not currently practice immigration law, even I find it to be complex and puzzling at times. I am familiar only with some immigration laws, either from my parents’ personal journey to the United States or through briefly practicing immigration law in the early parts of my career. I recently learned of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 and the Adoptee Citizenship Act during Asian American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month in May of this year.
I think it is incredibly important to shine a light on areas of the law that often get overlooked or areas that most of us do not understand. This column attempts to do just that and is dedicated to my colleague and friend, James Hurt—a Korean American adoptee and an American lawyer—who taught me about the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 and the Adoptee Citizenship Act through an event jointly hosted by his firm (Sheppard Mullin) and the Pan Asian Lawyers of San Diego.
The Korean War began toward the end of June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. The Soviet Union supported North Korea’s cause, while the United States supported South Korea’s cause. America promised to help countries that were threatened by communism. Under President Harry S. Truman, U.S. soldiers deployed to South Korea on June 27, 1950. While the Korean War lasted only three years, the death toll was high. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, about 37,000 Americans lost their lives during the Korean War, 92,000 were wounded, and 8,000 were missing in action. South Korea sustained 1.3 million casualties, including 415,000 dead. As a result of the war, the Korean Peninsula was divided into North Korea and South Korea; this division still stands today. This very brief summary of the Korean War is relevant to U.S. immigration law not only because the war led to a mass immigration of citizens from another country but specifically because it was one of the first mass migrations tied to the adoption of foreign-born children by American citizens.
The subject of Korean adoption is complex and long. Below is a very brief timeline that attempts to hit the main points. During the war, many children were born of mixed American-Korean parentage. In 1961, South Korea enacted the Orphan Adoption Special Procedure Act, which simplified procedures for foreign adoptions in Korea and allowed the creation of “paper orphans”—children who were fraudulently presented and documented as orphans for the purpose of adoption by foreign parents but who were not truly orphans at all.
The 1970s and 1980s were the peak of Korean adoption. South Korea’s Five Year Plan for Adoption and Foster Care of 1976 was intended to facilitate domestic (rather than foreign) adoption. By the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, international adoption had become a source of national shame. The Special Adoption Act of 2011 (effective August 2012) required registration of births before adoption could take place.
Since the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 Korean adoptees have been sent to Western countries, with the majority sent to the United States. Many of these children were adopted at a very young age and never knew their family members. Through these adoptions, many of these children were given the opportunity for a better life in America. While I understand the purpose of Americans adopting foreign-born children during this time, it’s still heartbreaking because many of these children, now adults, lost touch with their families in Korea and their Korean culture, including the Korean language. If they choose to go back to Korea, they do not necessarily know what or whom they would be going back for. I can relate; my parents, who were refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, feel the same way. I “went back” to both countries to see them for myself, but I didn’t have a family home to go back to or relatives to visit. It’s a strange feeling, and I can do nothing to remedy it.
To have a better understanding of Korean adoption, I highly suggest watching In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee by award-winning filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem, which documents her journey to find answers to the question of why her identity was switched before being sent to America for adoption. This movie follows Deann as she returns to Korea to find her “double” and raises questions about the history and ethics of international adoption from South Korea. I personally learned so much about the Korean adoption process, the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, and the Adoptee Citizenship Act from this documentary alone.
The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 allows foreign-born, biological, and adopted children of U.S. citizens to acquire U.S. citizenship if they satisfy certain requirements before age 18. The adoption of foreign-born children comes with a checklist of things for the adoptive parents to do, including filing paperwork on behalf of their child to ensure that the child will be a U.S. citizen. Needless to say, for whatever reason, parents of these adoptees frequently neglect to file the required paperwork, putting that child’s U.S. immigration status in limbo.
While the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 attempted to remedy this issue, it did not apply to individuals who were beyond the age of 18 and were adopted a long time ago. Although they grew up in the United States as part of American families, adoptees without citizenship face barriers to accessing employment, health care, Social Security benefits, and government-issued identification. Thus, some foreign-born individuals who have been in America practically their entire lives and were adopted by American citizens as children could theoretically be deported because they are deemed to be in the United States illegally due to an oversight in the Child Citizenship Act of 2000. In fact, at least 50 intercountry adoptees have been deported to the countries of their birth, where they do not know the language or culture, have no known family, and have little chance of economic survival.
The issue of citizenship is an immigration law issue governed by federal law. However, adoption is based on family law, which in turn is governed by state law. Adoptive parents may not have been aware of the need to perfect citizenship for their adoptive children. When the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 was enacted, adoptees needed to perfect their citizenship status before their 18th birthday or risk deportation from the United States. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 did not include those who were over the age of 18 at the time (i.e., anyone born on or before February 27, 1983). The proposed Adoptee Citizenship Act, first introduced in Congress in 2015, was drafted to resolve this oversight; it would grant citizenship to tens of thousands of individuals adopted as children by U.S. citizen parents, regardless of age.
U.S. Representatives Yvette Clarke (D-NY 9th District) and Alma Adams (D-NC 12th District) introduced the Equal Citizenship for Children Act in the House of Representatives in 2023. This Act attempts to fix loopholes in current law that deny U.S. citizenship to thousands of intercountry adoptees despite their being adopted as children by U.S. citizen parents decades ago. This Act would also amend current law so that those who were or are under 18 years of age and residing in the United States in the legal custody of a U.S. citizen parent, whether adoptive or biological and including naturalized U.S. citizens, would automatically acquire U.S. citizenship, retroactive to those born after 12:00 pm Eastern Time on January 9, 1941. The person, while under the age of 18, must also have been residing in the United States as a legal permanent resident (i.e., in possession of a green card) or had a “pending application to adjust status to lawful permanent resident.” The key provision for intercountry adoptees is retroactivity, which would ensure U.S. citizenship for intercountry adoptees so long as they had met the requirements of the Act while under the age of 18. It’s possible that this would include previously deported adoptees, but we’ll need to wait and see how this Act is interpreted if actually adopted into law.
The Adoptee Citizenship Act or some variant of it has been introduced in every Congress since 2015, but it has never passed. While the Adoptee Citizenship Act appears to be an appropriate solution for those who were adopted legally, immigration reform has always been a hot-button topic and can be seen as a political issue that neither party wants to touch. Provisions of the Adoptee Citizenship Act were part of the original 2022 CHIPS and Science/America COMPETES Act but were stripped out before the legislation was presented to President Joe Biden. The Equal Citizenship for Children Act of 2023 is currently in committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Only time will really tell if these acts will get adopted by Congress. In the meantime, I urge you all to take the time to understand this small facet of immigration law. Individuals who were legally adopted by U.S. citizens as children and who legally resided in America do not deserve to be deported because of an oversight by their adoptive parents or the law. They are just as American as you and me. Let’s support their ability to stay in our great nation. Visit the Adoptee Rights Law Center website to learn more about the Adoptee Citizenship Act; visit the Adoptees United website to learn more about the Equal Citizenship for Children Act of 2023.
