The problem is that identifying who the "best" immigrants are for your country can be very difficult when thousands upon thousands of people are trying to game the system.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. Your best prospects have lots of options and can take a path of lower resistance.
Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.
> And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation.
This isn't actually true in all instances. You can literally buy residency (or even citizenship) in numerous countries, so anyone who is optimizing for the path of least resistance will always have options.
Japan is a very unique destination. It's one of the most developed countries in the world, with world-class infrastructure, a super interesting culture, great food, abundant nature, etc. For Westerners, housing is relatively inexpensive in much of the country, with tons of akiya (empty houses) available for purchase because foreigners can (at least for the time being) buy property with few restrictions. Due to the weak currency, very few developed countries (and basically none in Asia) are as affordable to Westerners.
The problem with the business manager visa is that many of the people obtaining it weren't really interested in running businesses in Japan. They were setting up shell companies to get residency.
Raising the capital requirement and adding new requirements around employment and language will no doubt hurt some legitimate business manager visa holders but realistically, the number of people running legitimate businesses in Japan who might have to leave will be dwarfed by the number of people who used the visa as a workaround to get residency.
Do people starting an 'airbnb' business help with the aging problem? Same thing with some of the other immigrants. They're not really creating economical value as much as they're competing with natives taking the 'easy part'.
This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and consumers...
Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.
"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it.
As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound.
Anyway, migration is a human right.
What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny.
For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"!
So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right.
Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them.
But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it!
[0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are.
[1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
If you attack people as soon as they say that perhaps Japanese (or insert any other country) want to preserve their culture and who they are (which makes it a "shithole" according to you) and immediately label them racists and take the extremist view that it is your "human right" to be let in any country you please then perhaps the issue is not others...
I did not label you as a racist, I labeled the pro-natalist far-right as racist, and argued that social homogeneity sucks for people in the outgroup. I do not believe you are pro-natalist, you even argued against it. So I'm not sure why you think I'm labeling you as a racist.
Human rights are descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, your right to speak does not come from a piece of paper signed by a bunch of 18th century politicians; the Bill of Rights is a recognition of what people have always believed. Likewise, I am not saying that I, personally, deserve the legal right to move to this one specific country. I am saying that human migration is an activity people have been doing for tens of thousands of years and that restricting it is as much of a folly as restricting speech is.
In the realm of speech, we have the concept of the Streisand Effect, where even the smallest attempts at restricting speech immediately backfire by creating more discussion about the speech. And likewise, with immigration control, attempting to keep entire groups of people out also creates a paradoxical reaction. Namely, you create a black market for access, as criminals will organize themselves around figuring out how to evade the system. If your legal immigration system has reasonable paths to immigration that ordinary people can figure out and take advantage of, then nobody risks the illegal path, the state maintains effective control over the border, and we don't have this problem. But if you make your immigration system inscrutable for anyone outside your country's legal profession, set the visa requirements to be unmeetable by most people, or otherwise try to "keep them out", you are going to lose control over your borders purely from the economic demand overruling you.
How this works is that, because most people do not understand and cannot make use of the visa systems on their own, they rely primarily on employer sponsorship. As we've seen with the H-1B program in America, employee-sponsored visas create an underclass of golden-handcuffed visaholders who are only eligible for employment from the small handful of companies that specialize in visa sponsorship. In Japan, they have guest worker programs that are even more restrictive and funnel people into "black companies" (i.e. sweatshops). Some of them don't even bother with visa sponsorship and just rely on inducing well-meaning but law-illiterate people to work illegally.
To make matters worse, the state might even enjoy this state of affairs. As 400 years of American history have shown, it is politically expedient to have a permanent labor underclass. It lets politicians wriggle out of minimum wage, overtime laws, worker safety, and so on. For example, the US H-2A program is full of fronts for Mexican cartels doing human trafficking. The ICE raids on illegal immigrants have the paradoxical effect of giving those cartels more market power, creating a pliant underclass of agricultural slaves. Illegal immigrants could at least ghost farmers offering shitty work[0], but legal immigrants have a sponsor who knows where their family lives.
The things individuals care about with regards to immigration - i.e. damage to "culture" or "social homogeneity" - are downstream of the state deliberately creating this labor underclass. Politicians wouldn't care about them otherwise. Hell, Japan has a long history of denigrating its own traditional culture in favor of looking more western. The joke about any given traditional Japanese art is that its masters are four grandmas and one really passionate white guy. A lot of things we consider to be uniquely Japanese[1] are cultural hand-me-downs from other countries[2], because the Japanese government didn't care about culture until they realized they could use it to scare people into the ballot box.
[0] Again, "if it sucks, hit the bricks".
[1] Like the functioning train network
[2] Like how America threw away its functioning train network
> Not having states with citizenship is not a human right.
Double negatives in English are difficult to parse, and I can read this two ways:
- "There is no legal entitlement to migration."
- "Citizenship is a human right, and must be exclusionary lest new citizens dilute the value of existing citizenships, ergo any policy that makes citizenship easier to obtain is a violation of human rights."
As a statement of fact, the former is true, but I also wasn't arguing that you already have a legally recognized right to enter any country of your choosing. If you were arguing the latter, however, that is bullshit. Citizenship cannot be a human right because it is a status granted by a state. The state does not grant you your human rights[0], it can only promise not to interfere with them.
As for the historical counterexamples to migration as a human right, I can also bring up plenty of historical counterexamples to free speech as a human right. There have been just as many societies that tried to quell speech as there were societies that tried to quell migration. And, likewise, most people were not in a position to migrate, just as prior to the printing press and mass literacy, most people did not have an audience for their speech. But we would not say that "free speech is not a human right because a lot of countries tried to quash it", or "because most people in most times did not have the means to use it". That would be absurd.
Furthermore, we should keep in mind that when I talk of migration as a human right, I am not solely talking about immigration. Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering. The king does not want his servants leaving for a better kingdom; so he welds the exits shut. This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now. You just don't notice it because you're drifting along the same tide. Likewise, two different countries do not become the same merely because that tide is pulling really fast. France and Czechia were far more isolated 40 years ago, than they are now that the Iron Curtain is gone and the EU allows freedom of movement. They are still culturally distinct countries, even though they're moving in similar directions nowadays.
[0] There are countries in Europe that use their constitutions as a place to put general welfare and infrastructure goals. For example, in Finland, broadband Internet access is a "human right". For the purpose of this discussion we're going to only be talking about human rights as negative freedoms - i.e. the Anglo conception of human rights. I am not opposed to positive freedoms, but that's not what we're talking about.
> I can also bring up plenty of historical counterexamples to free speech as a human right
I think human rights are an abstract western concept that aren't as universal as the definitions like to claim.
The free speech thing for example is not upheld in the vast majority of muslim countries when it comes to various discussions and criticism of religion.
And that's a ton of countries.
There's other examples as well,.
>Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering.
I don't think so tho it's of no matter to the discussion. At the end of the day keeping people from leaving was far more difficult than keeping people from coming in to the place where one did have power and jurisdiction.
>This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
India is one such country today and they trade just fine. That's not to say that I think it's just.
>As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now.
Not in the same way in any shape or form.
Despite americanisation, other international influences and local cultural changes I found the culture of my great grandparents recognisable and familiar and can trace the family back hundreds of years in that same spot.
Look at the census list from napoleonic times and all the other family names sound familiar too.
I have their mannerisms, I speak their dialect, i speak their language, i eat their foods, etc.
If i go to an open air museum to look at one of the dwellings from hundreds of years I find a ton of design elements that are essentially the ones I found in my great grandparents farm.
Mind you there are strong differences still and they exist even within less than 40 years but there's an obvious difference between those two kind of changes that one can only look past if they're wilfully doing so.
For example on the contrary I go to my capital and it's surroundings and they don't have the dialects there from a century ago. In fact they don't even speak the same language. Consequentially they watch different media and vote differently. They don't identify themselves with the people that existed there a century ago and to top it off and all of it led to sectarianism affecting our politics to this day. (which was utterly predictable.)
There was a second wave of external migration mostly in the last 2 decades leading to those with national descent being about 20% of the population of which less than a quarter speak the old language (typically without the old dialects).
This is Brussels I'm talking about and the same change that happened there now happens across the country at a slower (read historically breakneck) speed.
It has proven not to be beneficial for the local population (unemployment is trough the roof, there's a ton of religious radicalism, outsized crime and integration issues, etc)
We also still live in a context where a fully sovereign nation has control over who it accepts and were it fully democratic it would answer to it's citizens who when faced with migration that does not serve them would mostly block it. Not by building a wall but by simply barring from the privileges and functions required to exist in society.
Every country does that to some extent and so I'd say the universal part of this supposed human right is so universally rejected that it can't be called one at all.
I don't live in Belgium, and you probably don't want me, a filthy American, living in Belgium. However, I can confidently say what problem you're bumping up against:
Your government does not know how to integrate foreigners.
America used to have an extremely racist and restrictive immigration policy. This was only undone about 50 years ago. As part of the deracialization of American immigration, a bunch of racist senators decided to give America an extremely generous family sponsorship program, specifically to keep the immigrant pool as white as possible. This backfired horribly (for them, not me): America became one of the easiest countries for people from poor countries to immigrate to, because we outsourced the question of who to admit to people who already knew who they are. This derisked the immigration process and resulted in more immigrants from more countries. So every major American city[0] has a pool of well-adjusted, fully integrated immigrants now.
Europe did... none of this. The immigration policy most countries in Europe has is tailored specifically for bringing in temporary workers that can be dismissed as will[2]. This selects for low-skilled rural migrants, and a random sample of those from any country will give you people who are more conservative than average. In contrast, America's relatively liberalized immigration policy means we're taking in migrants from all walks of life.
The proof of this is borne out in opinion polling of EU-external immigrants. For example, Turks who move to America have political opinions about Erdogan in line with the American mainstream - that is to say, they hate him as much as I do, if not more. Turks who move to Germany support Erdogan even more than Turks that did not emigrate.
To make matters worse, this property is self-perpetuating. A random immigrant from one of these countries will fall back upon their local diaspora population for support. In America that means making friends with people from all walks of life. In Germany that means joining an illegal far-right[1] Turkish biker gang.
The problem Europe has right now is not entirely foreign to American history. The restrictive, racist immigration policy America used to have was itself a reaction to the time in which America's immigration policy was "lol"[3]. Immigration used to be a matter of showing up to Ellis Island and answering a few questions. A crop failure and famine in Ireland, as well as widespread poverty in Sicily, triggered two huge waves of crisis migration to a country that had little Italian or Irish already. This naturally triggered a crime wave, followed by a white backlash that resulted in the nadir of American race relations and the passage of those racist policies.
Not that far off from Europe today, right? But at the same time, it's proof that this is a solvable problem, because America already solved it. We saw the problems with having a large Italian and Irish underclass and implemented programs and policies specifically to include and integrate them. The result is... nobody cares. The organized crime that followed the immigrants died out because we smothered it in a blanket of good job opportunities and inclusion programs. Unless you're teaching a New York State history class, you might not even know about any of this. America doesn't have a racial barrier between Irish or Italian immigrants and the rest of the country anymore. They're just... there.
[0] As a European you are probably arguing that America does not have cities because of our comically awful public transportation networks. That is true, but New York City is both the heavy rail capital of the country and the immigration capital of the country, so...
[1] In case this isn't obvious: the Muslims taking over your country are just as worried about western culture taking over theirs. Far-right ideology requires an other that has also adopted (or is perceived to adopt) the same far-right ideology with the labels swapped.
[2] To be clear, America also has visa programs that do this. Those are the ones the Mexican cartels are abusing; because they're designed to create a legal and economic niche for slave labor and human trafficking.
[3] Unless you were Asian. Fun fact: South Asians used to actually pretend to be black in order to avoid this!
Yeah, but folks doing scams to get visas are hardly the "best immigrants", rather amoral scum that is largely incompatible with mentality and moral values of host country. Clearly not the type of immigration they desperately want, can't blame them
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
Don't mistake what the elites want with what working class people want. Elites want a higher population - even if they're immigrants - so the market grows bigger for their businesses. But immigrants come with many problems for the working class people.
The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle.
Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.
This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them.
The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood.
> lower quality
Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.
I'm explaining why Japan is doing this. A lot of people don't understand why Japan would do this when their population is already declining.
It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling.
To businesses and governments, a declining population means lower market size and lower tax income. They're incentivized to want a larger population - sometimes by any means necessary.
And no, you can't mass import high quality immigrants because high quality immigrants have options and generally don't want to move to a country that isn't their culture or speak their own language. You will always end up with lower quality immigrants from the 3rd world.
> Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling.
Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide.
> quality
Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your preference or personal benefit - and economics and history clearly show the benefit of more people with freedom and opportunity, including to the people gaining freedom and opportunity. They are as important as, and have as much 'quality' as you - otherwise, you are not important either.
More of the standard rhetoric. It's like an algorithm generating these comments or an LLM. It just responds with copypasta without even knowing what I said.
I'm sorry but you're spewing a lot of misinformation here.
Japan's relationship with immigration is complex but what you're talking about really has nothing to do with the business manager visa.
Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.
The problem with the business manager visa was that it was being abused by people who weren't actually running real businesses in Japan. They were setting up shells to obtain residency. Much of the abuse was by Chinese nationals, which was for obvious reasons especially disturbing to Japanese given the history between the two countries.
Japan isn't the only country in Asia that has been forced to revisit its visa policies due to Chinese abuse. For example, the Philippines has made changes and added oversight to its SRRV retirement visa program because of abuse by Chinese nationals, most of whom were younger males coming as "retirees" but working and running local businesses illegally.
So yes, immigration is a sensitive, complicated subject in Japan but you're reading way too much into the changes to the business manager visa.
Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.
This is the exact thing I'm talking about. Good for business owners and government. Complicated for working class Japanese people.
It's complicated from a cultural perspective because Japanese are fiercely proud and protective of their culture and, many would argue, xenophobic.
It is not complicated from an economic perspective. There simply aren't enough working-age Japanese to fill these roles.
As Japan ages, it is already struggling to maintain critical services, such as caretaking for the elderly. Without immigration, it would eventually face economy-stopping labor shortages.
The tension is between Japan's demographic reality and economic needs, and its idealistic cultural/religious/historical beliefs.
You cannot maintain the world's fifth-largest economy with a population that has lost 3 million people in the past 5 years that is losing somewhere between 250-500,000 working age people a year and will have more than 40% of its population over 60 by 2030.
And, I would argue, you cannot maintain a belief system structured around the ideas of genetic, cultural and historical superiority when you've had a fertility rate below the replacement rate since 1974.
This doesn't mean that Japan should open the gates to unchecked immigration (there are practical reasons it can't anyway) but having spent a good deal of time there I feel OK to say: Japan is dying and people need to accept it so that they can address it.
Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany.
Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people)
The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live.
We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.
>will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US.
What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
Not even close. There's actual data on this, and more high net worth individuals go to UAE, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia and even Israel than the US.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.