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A new bill would grant U.S. citizenship to international adoptees—many from South Korea—who were legally adopted as children but lacked citizenship due to a loophole in U.S. law.
The proposed legislation aims to grant certain international adoptees “full access to their rights as American citizens,” according to Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), who introduced the bill alongside Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) and Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawai‘i) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Details: The new bill closes a loophole in the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (CCA) that left thousands of legal adoptees born between 1945 and 1998 without citizenship.
- CCA automatically granted citizenship to any international adoptees who were under the age of 18 at the time or adopted after CCA’s effective date in February 2001.
- Adoptees older than 18 at the time of CCA’s implementation were not covered by its protections, however.
More than 49,000 international adoptees lacked U.S. citizenship after CCA was enacted, despite being legally adopted into the U.S. as children, according to the Adoptee Rights Campaign.
- Up to 20,000 of those impacted are from South Korea, per an estimate by the Korean American Grassroots Conference.
- Case in point: Adopted from South Korea in 1967, Adoptee Rights Campaign director Joy Alessi and her family always assumed she had citizenship. She found out the truth when her application for a passport was denied but says she did not receive U.S. citizenship until she turned 52 in 2019.
- In her words: “You can’t work and you can’t drive and you can’t move around … It’s an injustice that’s just never been corrected,” Alessi told USA Today’s Marisa Kwiatkowski in 2020.
A similar bill was proposed in 2019, but made no progress.
- “As the father to two adopted children, I can’t imagine the uncertainty and anxiety faced by these adoptees who were legally adopted in our country, but are now being told they aren’t U.S. citizens,” Bacon said in a recent press release. “While this situation was rectified for newly adopted children when the law was passed in 2000, adoptees from before that year were left in limbo land.”
Historical context: The U.S. saw the beginnings of a wave of international adoptions in the wake of World War II, primarily from countries such as Russia, China, South Korea, Guatemala, and Vietnam.
- Families often had to struggle through long, often confusing paperwork and processes to apply for U.S. citizenship if they adopted children internationally.
- After the Korean War ended in 1953, more than 150,000 Korean children were adopted into the U.S., according to 2000 PBS documentary “First Person Plural.”
- South Korean adoptees create what some call “the world's largest diaspora of adoptees,” the Associated Press’ Kim Tong-Hyung writes.
The number of new international adoptions in the U.S. decreased from almost 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of State.
This story appeared as “The Big Story” in The Yappie’s June 13, 2024 newsletter.
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