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South Korean President Moon Jae-in shakes hands US Vice President Kamala Harris in the ceremonial office in Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House Complex on Friday. (Yonhap News)

On his fourth visit to the US while in office, South Korean President Moon Jae-in met with US Vice President Kamala Harris and US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, both women, for a wide-ranging discussion of women, immigrants and other disadvantaged groups.

This trip brought Moon in touch with a more diverse side of the US than his meetings with former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, both white men.

Moon met with Harris on Friday and discussed immigrant issues and cooperation on developing the South Korea-US alliance and resolving the North Korean nuclear issue, the Blue House said. Harris is the first woman and the first Black person to become vice president of the US.

Harris emphasized the need for a fundamental solution to the issue of immigration from the three Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and asked for South Korea to play a role and provide support. Moon proposed exploring meaningful forms of cooperation, such as development projects aimed at lessening abject poverty.

After his inauguration, US President Joe Biden put Harris in charge of addressing the masses of immigrants coming to the US’s border with Mexico. Biden has promised to halt construction of the border wall promoted by Trump and to find an alternative.

Moon shared his grave concerns with Harris about the recent hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the US and asked for her interest and support for the Korean American community.

Earlier, Moon was told by Pelosi that the US Congress is working to resolve the issue of the “comfort women,” a euphemism for women forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese army in World War II.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in bumps elbows with US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Yonhap News)

Moon stopped by Congress for a meeting with Pelosi, who noted that the US House of Representatives had passed a resolution about the comfort women in 2007 and that she’d brought the issue up several times during meetings with former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Pelosi added that she wants to see justice served.

Pelosi’s remarks Friday appear to reinforce the South Korean government’s emphasis on human rights issues resulting from war crimes at a time when the Biden administration, which seeks trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan, is worried that South Korea-Japan relations have chilled because of historical disputes.

“The topic came up during a conversation with Speaker of the House [Pelosi],” a Blue House official said.

Pelosi produced a New Year’s card that she’d received from Moon last year and said she’d kept it because it was so pretty. She added that she’d been moved by the message of the card, in which Moon said he never stopped working for the peace and prosperity of humankind.

The four Korean American members of the US House of Representatives also met with Moon on Friday. The four are Reps. Andy Kim, D-New Jersey, Marilyn Strickland, D-Washington, Michelle Park Steel, R-California and Young Kim, R-California.

Earlier this year, Strickland drew attention when she wore a traditional hanbok outfit to her swearing-in ceremony. She told Moon how moving it had been to be sworn into Congress in a hanbok as someone who’d been born in South Korea.

Andy Kim said how his parents had immigrated to the US fifty years ago when South Korea was an impoverished country. He said it was very touching to meet the South Korean president as a US congressman.

In November 2020, Andy Kim was reelected while Strickland, Steel, and Young Kim won their first elections, bringing the number of Korean Americans in the House of Representatives from one to four.

After his meetings with Harris and Pelosi, Moon met with Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, on Saturday. Gregory is the first African American to serve as a cardinal in the Catholic Church.

By Lee Wan, staff reporter

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