Illegal emigration is departure from a country in violation of emigration laws. Countries often seek to regulate who departs a country for diverse reasons, such as stopping criminals from leaving, preventing labor shortages and capital flight, and averting brain drain. The simplest case is when a country prohibits certain persons from physically leaving. Another common situation is when a person legally goes abroad but refuses to return when demanded by his or her country of origin.
Special cases are when one flees a country as a refugee escaping persecution or, after committing a crime, trying to escape prosecution. However, a person who enters another country as an illegal immigrant may be sent back, and if a criminal, a person may face extradition or prosecution in the other country.
The position of the United Nations is that freedom to emigrate is a human right, part of the right to freedom of movement. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country".
History
A Freedom of movement policy was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Eastern Bloc
The Russian Republic implemented emigration restrictions two months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the various Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union thereafter banning emigration. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc from countries occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II, Eastern Bloc countries instituted emigration bans similar to those in the Soviet Union. After the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, emigration mostly halted from east-to-west. A few thousand escape attempts from East Germany occurred, including those by defecting border guards. (More generally, escape by any citizen was considered defection.)
Passport system in the Soviet Union was highly restrictive of any travel external to the Eastern Bloc, and often required approval by the KGB. Soviet Jews and a few others who were not allowed emigrate from the USSR were described by the slang term "refuseniks".
During the final stages of World War II, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics. These included Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (became Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR). Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania, and later East Germany from the Soviet zone of German occupation.
By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to controlling national movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc (along with China, Mongolia and North Korea). Up until 1952, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones could be easily crossed in most places. Accordingly, before 1961, most of that east–west flow took place between East and West Germany, with over 3.5 million East Germans emigrating to West Germany. On August 13, 1961, barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by East Germany. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall.
In East Germany, the term Republikflucht (fugitives from the Republic) was used for anyone wishing to leave to non-socialist countries. A propaganda booklet published by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1955 for the use of party agitators outlined the seriousness of 'flight from the republic', stating "leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity", and "workers throughout Germany will demand punishment for those who today leave the German Democratic Republic, the strong bastion of the fight for peace, to serve the deadly enemy of the German people, the imperialists and militarists".