South Korea Emigration and Immigration

Online Records

 * 1946-1971 Free Access: Africa, Asia and Europe, Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons, 1946-1971 Ancestry, free. Index and images. Passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern European countries and some non-European countries.

British Overseas Subjects

 * British Armed Forces and Overseas Births and Baptisms, South Korea, index and images, ($)


 * British Armed Forces and Overseas Banns and Marriages, South Korea, index and images, ($)


 * British Armed Forces and Overseas Deaths and Burials, index and images, ($)

Finding the Town of Origin in South Korea
If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in South Korea, see South Korea Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

South Korea Emigration and Immigration
"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country. Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

The early history of Korean immigrants can be divided into two distinct periods involving two very different locales:
 * Koreans in the Far East Region (South Ussuri Maritime Province) from the 1860s until the time of the mass relocation
 * Koreans in Kazakhstan and Central Asia from 1937 to the present

Koreans in the Far East Region of Russia (South Ussuri Maritime Province), 1860-1937

 * In 1860, during the czarist era, the Russian Empire acquired the virtually uninhabited lands of the Far East Region from China under the terms of the Treaty of Peking. The newly secured boundary placed Russia at the back door of Korea.
 * Koreans provided cheap labor for this sparsely inhabited land, working as tenants, lessees, and farm laborers. Those without any means of support were sent by the local Russian administration to various parts of the region. The first large Korean village, Blagoslovennoe, was formed in 1872 as a result of such relocation.
 * After the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 and the unsuccessful uprising of 1 March 1919, Koreans fled to Russia for political reasons.
 * The last major wave of immigration occurred between 1917 and 1923, with the majority of these new arrivals settling in the Maritime Province. The 1923 census counted 34,559 Koreans as Russian subjects and 72,258 as noncitizen residents.
 * In October 1917, Korean peasants formed Red Army detachments and actively participated in partisan activities, fighting alongside Russian units. The Revolution did not immediately improve their lot, however. It was only after 1923 that the new Soviet regime began to regulate the distribution of land among the peasants. By 1926, in Vladivostok alone, 10,007 Korean families had acquired property, whereas before the Revolution the number of households with land had totaled only 2,290. In fact, by 1926 a majority of the Koreans who had settled in the Soviet Far East had received Soviet citizenship.

Koreans in Kazakhstan and Central Asia from 1937 to the present

 * The hard work and effort by the early Korean settlers went unrewarded, however, when in 1937, under Joseph Stalin, all 182,000 Koreans in the area were ordered to relocate to Central Asia.
 * It took three months, from September to December 1937, to relocate Korean families on freight trains from the Far East to Central Asia. Thousands perished on the way, but some survived the ordeal of being forcibly transplanted thousands of miles from their original homeland to a territory totally alien to them. They became the pioneers of this virgin land and once again had to begin cultivating undeveloped territory. A number of exemplary collective and state farms were organized and run by Koreans.

Repatriation to South Korea

 * More and more immigrants from Korea are returning to South Korea which is now seen as the land of opportunity.

Korean Modern Diaspora

 * Korean emigration to the United States was known to have begun as early as 1903, but the Korean American community did not grow to a significant size until after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; as of 2017, excluding the undocumented and uncounted, roughly 1.85 million Koreans emigrants and people of Korean descent live in the United States according to the official figure by the US Census.
 * The Greater Los Angeles Area and New York metropolitan area in the United States contain the largest populations of ethnic Koreans outside of Korea or China.
 * Significant Korean populations are present in China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil and Canada as well.
 * During the 1990s and 2000s, the number of Koreans in the Philippines and Koreans in Vietnam have also grown significantly.
 * Koreans in the United Kingdom now form Western Europe's largest Korean community, albeit still relatively small; Koreans in Germany used to outnumber those in the UK until the late 1990s.
 * In Australia, Korean Australians comprise a modest minority.