A building-sized North Korean flag flies from a tower on the de facto border with South Korea, marking territory that experts say has become almost impossible to escape.
The total number of North Koreans who have arrived in South Korea over the past six years is lower than the number who have defected each year for decades – and looks set to decline further in 2026.
The root cause is leader Kim Jong Un’s goal of preserving his family dynasty by closing the country from the outside, keeping people in and information out, experts say.
“From what I understand, bringing family members directly from North Korea is currently impossible,” Chae Yoon-seo, 29, who fled in 2019, told AFP.
She swam across a river into China at night with the help of a smuggler and traveled through Laos, Vietnam and Thailand before finally flying to South Korea.
Defections to the South peaked at more than 2,900 in 2009 and remained well above 1,000 per year for the following decade.
But there were only 63 in the first half of this year, a drop of more than a third from the same period in 2025, Seoul’s Unification Ministry said.
– “Soviet-style border” –
Arrivals have fluctuated over the decades, but fell sharply during the Covid pandemic, when many countries closed their borders.
A key change in North Korea, however, began years before.
After taking power in 2011, Kim began restricting informal trade and migration ties along the roughly 1,415-kilometer (880-mile) northern border with China.
Besides being an economic lifeline, the Chinese border region was also the first step toward escape for most defectors.
The long border was relatively porous, unlike the heavily mined, fenced, and patrolled demilitarized zone (DMZ) that serves as the Koreas’ de facto border.
Along the border with China, Kim’s government has erected fences and installed cameras and sand strips that preserve the fingerprints of anyone who crosses it.
“The North Koreans have built a real Soviet-style border security system,” said Andrei Lankov, a North expert at Kookmin University in Seoul.
Beijing also helped, Lankov said, emphasizing China’s preference to maintain the status quo of the Kim dynasty by opposing potential instability from defectors or their supporters.
As part of its efforts, China has reportedly implemented hundreds of facial recognition cameras, noted Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior researcher at the Stimson Center’s 38 North.
She said Beijing has also added more patrol boats and new or planned deportation facilities along its northeast border.
– Ousted, killed or exiled –
The approximately 34,500 defectors who have joined the South since 1998 represent only a fraction of North Korea’s 26.6 million inhabitants, according to UN figures, but the fall in the number of escapes has consequences.
“Defectors are the main source of information about the North,” said Fyodor Tertitsky, a lecturer at Korea University in Seoul, noting that South Korean intelligence and researchers interrogate them.
Although some people are still getting by.
Defector Gyuri Kang’s escape by boat in 2023 with her mother and aunt – across the maritime border with the South, an extremely rare feat – was a “miracle”, she told a UN hearing.
It also illustrates why North Korea has gone to great lengths to shut itself down.
Kang highlighted the influence of South Korean dramas smuggled in on USB drives, finding them “so refreshing and more credible than North Korea’s state propaganda.”
“North Korean authorities are well aware of the impact of external media,” she said.
In 2020, North Korea made owning foreign media a crime punishable by years of hard labor – and potentially death sentences if widely distributed, according to Amnesty International.
Lankov, of Kookmin University, said outside information poses the biggest threat to the long-term survival of North Korea’s leadership.
“If they allow their people to interact with the outside world, they are likely to be overthrown, and perhaps killed or driven into exile,” he added.
Chae, the defector, said she hopes the North’s isolated populations are not one day simply forgotten by the outside world.
“These days there are a lot of cynical reactions to helping other countries, so I’m a little worried that one day interest in human rights in North Korea will also disappear,” she added.
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