Koreans Shaking at Trump's Threat...an estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants

The Korean community in the U.S. is also paying keen attention to the direction of its policy ahead of the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to deport a large number of illegal immigrants, on January 20 next year.

Most Koreans living in the U.S. have legal residence status such as permanent residency, but some are illegal immigrants because they have not yet received permanent residency due to various circumstances.

During the election, Trump pointed to illegal immigrants as the source of social problems such as crime, unemployment and rising housing prices, and pledged to declare a national emergency and even mobilize the military to deport them on a large scale.

Due to its nature, the number of Koreans illegally staying in the United States does not have accurate statistics and only estimates, but even that, there is no up-to-date data and there is a large difference in estimates by institutions.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's statistics office published in April this year only shows China, which ranks 10th in the U.S. for illegal immigrants (based on estimates), and South Korea is not in the top 10.

Given that the estimated number of illegal immigrants from China is 210,000 as of 2022, the number of illegal immigrants from Korea is less than 210,000.

According to the 2018 data released by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's statistics office, South Korea ranked eighth after China in the list of countries from illegal immigrants as of 2015.

At that time, the number of illegal immigrants from Korea was estimated to be 230,000, accounting for about 2% of the total illegal immigrants (11.96 million) in the United States.

But estimates from the Center for Migration Studies (CMS), a nonprofit organization in New York, are much smaller.

According to the organization, the number of illegal immigrants from South Korea stood at 129,758 as of 2022, ranking 13th by country of origin.

Like the Department of Homeland Security's statistics office, it draws estimates based on the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) sample (about 3 million households), but added a "logical editing" procedure to subtract the number of people who may be legal based on the job of the survey subjects.

When asked about the number of illegal immigrants from South Korea in the United States on the 27th local time, the Consulate General in Los Angeles (LA), which has the largest number of Koreans in the United States, said, "There are no official statistics."

Immigration experts believe that it will be difficult for all illegal immigrant deportations to become a reality immediately, as Trump said.

"Trump said he would even mobilize the military, but under U.S. immigration law, it is impossible to use the military to expel illegal immigrants," said an immigration law lawyer working in LA.

In addition, he added, "Cities such as California and LA have declared 'sanctuary' (meaning refuge and sanctuary) and are not cooperating with the tracking of illegal immigrants, so it will be difficult for the federal government to find them."

The California government enacted a secret law in 2017 that prohibits police from asking people about immigration status or participating in federal immigration enforcement activities, and has been in place so far.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is considered a Democrat, said on the 7th that he would ask the state legislature for additional legal funding in preparation for the second Trump administration to launch a lawsuit to overturn state policy in the future, declaring, "We will not stand still if the freedom we cherish in California is attacked."

According to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data, California has the largest population of illegal immigrants among all U.S. states, with an estimated 2.6 million people - about a quarter of all illegal immigrants (10.99 million estimated) - as of 2022.

The city of L.A. issued and implemented similar administrative guidelines in 2019, but recently enacted and passed the "Sanctuary City" ordinance by the city council, stipulating it legally.

LAPD (police) never ask about their status of stay when they arrest or detain someone, and they have a policy that does not arrest them based on their status of stay alone, L.A. lawyers said.

However, if there is a felony record, the FBI said it holds all of those records and that the federal government can trace their addresses through Social Security Numbers (SSN) and others and try to deport them first.

The Korean community in the U.S. is generally nervous about Trump's threat to deport illegal immigrants.

In particular, Koreans who have not yet received permanent residency and are preparing to apply or are in the process of proceeding with the application are also worried.

The Korean Association of Los Angeles is discussing related measures, fearing that the Deferred Deferred Action for Illegal Youth (DACA) system will damage Korean young people staying there.

DACA is a system that allows those who followed their parents to the U.S. as children and failed to obtain legal status to escape deportation and get a job, and was created in 2012 under the Barack Obama administration.

According to the U.S. Institute for Immigration Policy (MPI), the number of young people from South Korea who were eligible for DACA immediately in 2012 was 44,000, and as of the end of March 2015, the number of DACA applicants from South Korea was 9,000.