Are North Koreans Allowed to Travel? What the Rules Actually Say

The News Hook: A Third Annual Commemoration

On July 14, 2026, South Korea held its third annual event honoring people born in North Korea who have resettled in the South. President Lee Jae-myung addressed roughly 1,000 attendees at a ceremony in Goyang, calling mutual understanding between the two Koreas’ people a "special asset" for their shared future, according to Korea JoongAng Daily.

The Ministry of Unification’s own English-language briefing from the day before referred to it as "the third commemorative event recognizing North Korean-born citizens" — a label that didn’t exist three years ago and is still working its way into official use.

Every person honored at that ceremony got from North Korea to a stage in Goyang without ever booking a flight, filling out a passport application, or driving across a provincial line without paperwork. That’s not incidental — it’s close to the entire story. Here’s what North Korea’s travel rules actually allow, on both ends of that trip.

Can North Koreans Travel Inside Their Own Country?

Not freely. North Korea requires ordinary citizens to obtain a government-issued travel permit to move between provinces, and tighter permissions still to enter restricted zones such as Pyongyang or the militarized border regions, according to the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea and Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025. There’s no equivalent of simply getting in a car and driving to the next province over.

Analysis: the closest a US reader has to a mental model here is imagining a country where an internal checkpoint sits on every state line — not a driver’s-license stop, but a permission slip that can be denied outright. It’s an imperfect comparison, since nothing in ordinary American life actually works that way; raising it is meant to show how total the control is, not to suggest a real parallel exists.

Can North Koreans Travel Abroad?

For ordinary citizens, effectively no. Foreign travel is prohibited except in narrow, state-approved circumstances, per the same UN and Human Rights Watch findings cited above. There’s no version of a North Korean citizen applying for a tourist visa to see relatives abroad or take a vacation; travel outside the country is something the state grants on its own terms, not something a citizen requests.

That near-total prohibition is also why the number of people who make it out — and the number who showed up at the July 14 commemoration — is so small next to North Korea’s total population. Leaving isn’t a bureaucratic hurdle to clear. It’s close to structurally impossible.

What Happens After Someone Reaches South Korea

Not every journey out of North Korea looks the same, but all of them end the same way: total separation from the system described above, followed by resettlement in a country most arrivals have never set foot in before.

The number completing that journey is small — and shrinking. According to the Ministry of Unification’s own defector statistics, 223 North Korean defectors resettled in South Korea in 2025, down from 236 in 2024, bringing the cumulative total since record-keeping began to 34,580, with another 43 arrivals recorded in the first quarter of 2026.

Those numbers are what "allowed to travel" collapses down to in practice: not a legal right anyone can exercise, but a small, closely tracked count of people who left North Korea’s system entirely rather than travel within or out of it through any sanctioned channel.

Why South Korea Renamed ‘Defectors’ to ‘Bukhyangmin’

Separately from the travel rules themselves, South Korea has been quietly changing what it calls the people who make that journey. Since January 2026, the Ministry of Unification has used "bukhyangmin" in Korean instead of the older "talbukmin" ("North Korean defector"), and from March 5, 2026 it has used "North Korean-born citizens" as the official English translation, according to The Korea Times and Newsis. The ministry’s own July 13 briefing confirms the new usage is now standard in its English-language communications.

The change hasn’t fully replaced the old vocabulary, though. The statutory term defined under South Korea’s North Korean Refugees Protection and Settlement Support Act — "bukhan-italjumin" — remains the codified legal designation, and it still shows up alongside "bukhyangmin" in the ministry’s own materials: its press-release listing titles the July 14 event "the 3rd bukhan-italjumin (bukhyangmin) Day," using both terms in the same breath.

The Pushback: Did Anyone Actually Ask Them?

Not everyone has welcomed the switch. A human rights group publicly said the ministry moved too fast, calling the renaming premature, according to NK News. The ministry hasn’t reversed course, and the July 14 event went ahead under the new terminology as planned.

Analysis: the ministry’s own habit of pairing "bukhan-italjumin" with "bukhyangmin" in its own press materials, rather than dropping the old term outright, reads less like a confident rebrand and more like an institution hedging while it figures out whether the new name will stick. That’s a read on the ministry’s own behavior, not a claim about what resettlers themselves think of it — the record here doesn’t settle that question either way.

The Other Direction: Why Americans Can’t Go Either

There is a mirror image to all of this on the American side of the ocean.

The tiny number of North Koreans who are permitted to leave the country at all — under the narrow, state-approved exceptions described above — sits opposite a very different, self-imposed restriction facing American travelers: US citizens are barred by their own government from going the other way.

Since September 1, 2017, US passports have been invalid for travel into, in, or through North Korea, a restriction the State Department imposed after the death of detained American student Otto Warmbier and has renewed annually since, most recently via a 2025 Federal Register notice. The only way around it is a Special Validation Passport, granted case by case to a narrow group such as journalists or Red Cross personnel, as NPR reported when the ban first took effect.

Analysis: put the two rules side by side and it’s a genuine mutual lockout, which is worth naming as the real takeaway for a US reader — an American can be blocked by their own government from ever setting foot in North Korea, while an ordinary North Korean can be blocked by their own government from ever leaving it. Neither restriction has anything to do with the other, but they add up to the same practical result: for almost everyone on both sides, that border simply doesn’t open.