Abstract

Abstract By the mid-1950s, thousands of American missionaries and voluntary aid workers were in South Korea responding to the humanitarian crisis following the Korean War. Among the many children orphaned by the war, mixed race children left behind by their GI fathers posed a unique problem for the image of the US intervention. Believing they should be relocated to adoptive homes in the United States, humanitarians exaggerated the conditions in camptowns, cast Korean mothers as unloving prostitutes, and depicted mixed race children as “young ambassadors” cementing “good will between the countries of their birth and their new American families.” These arguments helped to permanently codify international adoption into US immigration law and create a system where mixed race children could be expediently and justifiably passed on from birth mother to adoptive family—a move that caused actual harm to many Korean women and children.

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