Post-230: American Imprisoned in North Korea was an Illegal English Teacher

One of the Americans currently in North Korea was found guilty this week. His name is Matthew Miller.

Matthew Miller, American sentenced to prison in North Korea for spying.

I first heard the name Matthew Miller in April 2014 (when I was in the USA). I remember the official North Korean press release being terse and cryptic…

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Of course, NK official press releases are, usually, terse and cryptic. (But not always. They rev up the engines and soar to the heights of bombast when discoursing on the subject of the perfidious, nefarious eternal enemy, Yankee Imperialism. Flowery language is also used to mock the “South Korean puppet government” [they often use quotation marks around “government”]. See for yourself; all the NK official daily press releases are here in English: KCNA. [The site is blocked under the anti-sedition law in South Korea. I don’t blame them; if you’re gonna have an anti-sedition law, that site’d have to be the first to be banned].)

I now read the following from NKNews.org:

Matthew Miller grew up in the Californian town of Bakersfield, the son of petroleum engineers, and first visited Korea four years ago to stay with a brother stationed with the US Air Force where he found work teaching English.

Miller is reported to be 24 years old. If he was working as a paid English teacher at age 20, he was almost certainly illegal. A prerequisite for even the most basic, bottom-of-the-barrel English-teaching job in South Korea is a college degree. If he didn’t have one, he could never have gotten a work visa (they are strict about his). He was illegal.

Some of the newspapers and TV news in South Korea occasionally run stories vilifying “illegal English teachers” as a menace to Korean society. I wonder what they would do if they figure out Miller was…one of those?