Here in the US, we debate the problem of people entering our country illegally. Emigration to North Korea happens rarely, and when it does, it's almost never by choice.

If the abduction is planned and conducted well, its victim simply disappears and is eventually presumed dead.

A good example is the case of the five South Korean high school students who disappeared from the island beaches in 1977 and 1978. They all were believed dead for two decades, but in the late 1990s it was discovered that the youngsters were working in North Korea as instructors, teaching the basics of South Korean lifestyle to would-be undercover Northern operatives. [1]

A bunch of high school kids go to the beach, and end up North Korean captives, forced to teach the government machinery of NorK to better exploit their homeland.

Consider these victims from Japan:

Five Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean spies at the height of the cold war returned to Japan yesterday to be reunited with relatives they have not seen for almost a quarter of a century....

The euphoria surrounding the return of the five has been tempered by concern over the fates of eight Japanese nationals whom North Korea has admitted abducting but who, it insists, died several years later. [2]

I dread to imagine how they just happened to have "died". You know those South Korean high school kids: not very sturdy. Sometimes they just keel over and expire while teaching cultural introduction classes.

And we all know Kim Jong Il is quite the artiste:

Not many people can claim to have spent much time with the enigmatic North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. But South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his wife, Choe Eun-hui, have that dubious distinction. They were not his friends or house guests - they were his prisoners.

Choe Eun-hui, an actress now in her late 60s, was the first to arrive after being kidnapped in Hong Kong by Kim Jong-il's secret agents in 1978.... She was taken to Hong Kong's docks, bundled aboard and taken on an eight-day trip to Pyongyang. Her husband immediately flew from Seoul to Hong Kong to look for his wife, and was himself kidnapped soon after....

"Kim Jong-il later confessed to me that the reason he kidnapped my wife first was because he wanted me to come and make films for him," Shin Sang-ok said....

In a series of charm offensives Kim Jong-il went out of his way to make her feel welcome by bringing her piles of expensive clothes and Western cosmetics.... But life in Pyongyang was not all film-making and ball gowns. Shin Sang-ok was sentenced to long terms in prison after twice trying to escape. There he received re-education classes designed to teach him the error of his ways. "I was jailed for about five years... They expected brainwashing to change me."

His wife was also ordered to attend re-education classes. She was forced to study North Korea's "glorious" revolution and later made to sit exams on the subject. "I was very unhappy. I did think of suicide but then I thought of my family and how much this would hurt them. It was an awful time," she said. [3]

And consider the rationale for this particular set of abductions:

There were also more "normal" instances of abductions. The North Koreans kidnapped people who possessed important intelligence. In 1971 Yu Sǒng-gǔn, a South Korean diplomat stationed in West Germany was kidnapped in West Berlin, together with his family -- wife and two children. [4]

When someone does something wrong in North Korea, the government doesn't simply punish the offender: the entire family is punished, including even grandparents. So it's easy to see the purpose of kidnapping this diplomat's family: A man might die under his own torture. But it's so much more effective to bring his precious wife and kiddies along.

Put yourself in those shoes.

Note also they were kidnapped from West Germany. North Korea is apparently willing to go shopping for what it wants. (And I'm sure his kidnappers also had their return guaranteed by having relatives at home.)

In a book recently published in Japan, Jenkins writes, "I saw many people from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia who I am sure had been snatched, and many of the Europeans and Middle Easterners I knew, saw, or met in North Korea were, for one reason or another, unable to leave the country due to obstacles that the North Koreans purposely constructed to keep them there. … It is a tragedy, in my opinion, that more countries don't investigate further… I am certain there are abductees from all over the world in North Korea." [5]