By Oh Young-jin
Staff Reporter
Immigration officers foiled four attempts by foreigners to gain Korean citizenship through illegal means, the justice ministry said Friday.
The ministry said that all four involved Chinese nationals with Korean ancestry, and were among 119 requests for naturalization that the officers found to be suspicious during their screening process.
According to ministry officials, the first case involved a Chinese woman married to a Korean man trying to get her daughter naturalized as a Korean.
The couple wed in 2008 after the couple supposedly gave birth to the daughter.
The officers found that there were discrepancies between the time when the child was supposedly conceived and the timing of the Korean husband's stay in China.
A DNA test showed that the daughter's DNA didn't match that of the husband. The wife confessed that the father was in fact a Chinese man she had an affair with.
The second case was a request by a Chinese woman for her daughter from a previous marriage with a Chinese man to be naturalized as a Korean.
Immigration officers found discrepancies in their application papers and called for a DNA test, which showed that the two had no biological relationship.
The request was rejected and an investigation was launched over whether it was a money-for-Korean citizenship scam.
The third involved a Chinese woman who asked for her Korean nationality to be restored as her father was Korean. Ministry officials said that she had Korean nationality but gave it up before her father died.
Her request was rejected after a DNA test failed to show a positive match with her Korean siblings. Her belated confession that the deceased Korean was her stepfather didn't sway the immigration officers' decision.
The final case was a Chinese woman who had previously gained Korean citizenship, who requested the authorities to grant Korean citizenship to her daughter from a previous marriage with a Chinese man.
The woman, upon discovering that her daughter was not registered in the registry of Chinese residents, forged documents showing that she had adopted the girl and included them in the naturalization application forms.
Her request was rejected on the grounds that she had intentionally included false information.
"We are enlisting the help of science to foil a growing number of attempts by foreigners to gain Korean citizenship," a ministry official said.
The ministry said that the number of processed naturalization requests, including the four rejections, almost doubled to about 34,000 last year from some 18,000 in 2008.
The rise in the number of applicants for naturalization is attributed to the fact that Korea is developing at a fast clip and offering opportunities for employment.