Nicholas Eberstadt: “Bring Them Home”

This is your must-reading of the day.

Nicholas Eberstadt has a new piece out in The Weekly Standard. Here’s a sample.

Not far from Seoul–maybe a half hour’s journey north, by jet plane–an untold number of terrified Koreans are hiding in a foreign land, engaged in a grave and uncertain struggle for survival. . . . These wretched vagabonds–most of them women and children–are escapees from North Korea. They have crossed the Yalu and the Tumen into China in tiny groups, driven into the unknown by Kim Jong Il’s man-made famine. That catastrophe–the only peacetime famine to befall an urbanized, literate society in all of human history–claimed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of victims in the 1990s; though the death toll from the ongoing North Korean food crisis seems for the moment to have subsided, hunger remains a dire problem there–especially for that society’s officially disfavored strata.

Emphasis mine. Eberstadt goes on to argue convincingly that accepting North Korean refugees is (1) morally compelled; (2) legally compelled by the ROK Constitution; (3) beneficial to the long-term socio-economic interests of unification; and (4) an excellent means of nonviolent diplomatic pressure on an intransigent North.

There is too much good material there to excerpt, although some of it will look familiar to regular readers of this site.

Now go read the rest on your own.

HT: Rob at The Kommentariat.