Vietnamese women are marrying Korean men to obtain Korean citizenship, according to local news agencies. Vietnamese online newspaper VnExpress recently aired a podcast titled “Using Marriage to Become a Korean Citizen.”
VnExpress shared stories of Vietnamese women who want to divorce their Korean husbands. Under current law, foreigners who enter the country via a marriage immigrant visa can apply for naturalization if they have been married for at least two years. These women stated that they plan to get a divorce after two years to “regain their freedom.”
A 20-year-old Vietnamese woman said she paid 30 million dong to a matchmaking agency to find a Korean husband. “I set a goal to get divorced after three years, after acquiring Korean citizenship, so I can continue to live and work in Korea,” she said.
She received profiles of 20 Korean men through the matchmaking agency and chose the one who seemed the most suitable. The two confirmed their intentions through a video call. The husband-to-be then visited Vietnam, where he stayed for about four to five days so that the two could get to know each other better. This is how she met her 47-year-old Korean husband. Her husband provided her with 8 million dong every month so that she could study Korean. She moved to Korea after six months of marriage, immigration paperwork, and learning Korean.
She is now counting down the days until she can get a divorce. “I saw people from my hometown going to Korea to work illegally, so I decided to get married and acquire Korean citizenship,” she said. “Now, I don’t have to worry about visas like everyone else when I work. Isn’t that reasonable?” She added, “With a Korean passport, I can go anywhere and give my children a happy future. I can also help my family to move to Korea.”
A 27-year-old Vietnamese woman also married a 41-year-old Korean man with similar intentions. “The idea was to invest two to three years to get citizenship,” she said. “My in-laws think it’s a real marriage - I’m the only one who thinks it’s fake,” she added. “I have no intention of staying married to someone I don’t want to live with. I’m just doing this for the short term to qualify for citizenship.”
VnExpress also cited the “2023 Marriage and Divorce Statistics” released by Statistics Korea last month. The number of marriages between Koreans and foreigners amounted to 19,700 last year. Korean men married to foreign women accounted for 14,700 of these cases, of which 33.5% were Vietnamese nationals.
Marriages between Korean women and foreign men rose 7.5% to 5,000 last year, with the number of marriages to Vietnamese men increasing 35.2% to 792. This surge is largely attributed to Vietnamese women, who acquire Korean citizenship through their first marriage and later remarry Vietnamese men after getting a divorce.
In 2022, of the 556 Korean women who remarried Vietnamese men, 482 (86.7%) were naturalized Koreans. Among these, except for two whose previous nationalities could not be confirmed, all had initially held Vietnamese citizenship.
