What the West Can Learn from Japan About Immigration
By David Josef Volodzko
This article is from journalist and recent TRIGGERnometry guest, David Josef Volodzko. You can read David’s own Substack here.
“One of the reasons why our economy is growing,” President Biden said in May, is “because we welcome immigrants. Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic.”
Except of course, none of this is true.
Not only are we possibly entering a recession, but the economic growth we have seen under Biden wasn’t because we welcome immigrants but mainly because he passed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. Nor are any of the economies he listed stalling due to xenophobia. Russia’s troubles relate to the war in Ukraine. China was hit by its real estate bubble bursting and Xi Jinping’s industrial crackdowns. India’s economy actually grew at an astounding 8.2% last quarter. And Japan stumbled last year, but was in recovery by the time Biden spoke.
How did he end up being so utterly wrong? It’s not because he lacks access to the data, but because he and the Democratic Party, including his “border czar” Vice President Harris, subscribe to the dogma of multiculturalism. This is the belief that diversity is always better than the alternative, not just morally but economically, and that having secure borders with a discriminating immigration policy is inherently unjust.
But as Western nations struggle to find the balance between security, addressing labor shortages, helping refugees, and maintaining their own values, they could learn a lot from Japan.
Despite the notion that more diversity is always a Pareto improvement, Japan manages to be one of the least diverse nations in the world yet one of its greatest liberal democracies. It is famously wealthy, clean, and safe. Its people are incredibly friendly and polite. It has one of the lowest homelessness rates on the planet. And The Economist’s democracy index ranks it above the UK, France, Spain, and the United States.
I lived in Japan for four years and the closest thing to a “bad neighborhood” I ever saw was the Nishinari ward of Osaka, which is crowded and poor, but still remarkably safe. And charming.
So what does Japan’s immigration policy look like? In a 2012 study, sociologist Nana Oishi said Japan has a “closed door” in terms of unskilled migration but is “quite open” to those with needed education and skills, “even more so than some other industrialized countries.”
In the postwar decades, Japan mostly only gave work visas to highly skilled foreign citizens. In 1990, to address labor shortages, it welcomed Brazilian and Peruvian nikkei, or people of Japanese descent. In 1993, Japan created a new program to provide training to workers from developing nations, although the program has faced criticism for poor oversight regarding worker safety.
This focus on its own economic agenda and cultural preservation has remained consistent in recent years. In 2019, Japan started accepting blue-collar workers for the first time since World War II, but only in one of 12 selected fields such as construction. Workers can apply for renewable visas and the right to bring their families to Japan, but only if they pass work skills and language exams.
Last month, Japan enacted laws making it easier for foreign workers to stay longer, while streamlining the processes for accepting asylum seekers and revoking permanent resident status for those who commit serious crimes such as assault or theft.
Each of these policies have been implemented with a singular goal in mind, namely to address labor shortages while ensuring that Japan remains distinctly Japanese. That includes avoiding ideological subversion like the kind America is experiencing or crime waves like the kind much of Europe is experiencing. Simply put, Japan is not afraid to pick and choose who enters based on their cultural values and potential economic contribution.
Of course, the common counterargument to this practice is that it’s racist. But as Konstantin Kisin has pointed out, “not all immigrants are the same.” After all, “There are no Hong Kongese grooming gangs in Britain and Ukrainians aren’t running around stabbing each other on the streets of London.”
But also, another thing Biden got wrong is that Japan is not xenophobic. A 2023 index of xenophobia ranked it among the least xenophobic nations in the world and its social acceptance of migrants is roughly equal to that of France. It’s also one of the most generous nations towards asylum seekers and refugees. Its donations to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) last year were eclipsed only by the U.S. and Germany, and both are larger economies.
In other words, Japan uses immigration to its benefit without allowing it to become a liability, all while remaining unsurpassed for its economic size in terms of aiding those who’ve had to flee their countries. As a result, there is no part of Japan where its values have been subverted. No streets where it’s no longer safe for Japanese women to walk. No cities set ablaze in riot.
Rather, the nation has found a way to welcome foreigners to the benefit of its citizens while maintaining its sense of self, and the West should not be shy about following in its footsteps.
Have you considered buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? My bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company. Competitive premiums, terrific service. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them for ease and convenience.
Allowing hundreds of thousands unskilled immigrants who require housing, medical care, education, and other financial support while providing nothing to the economy or society, is incomprehensible. Unless, of course, the current administration has another agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of its own citizens.
I'm not sure I can totally agree. My reaction is based on working and living in the greater Tokyo area 1990-1993 as a conversational English teacher (at the time at least one of the more common occupations for foreigners or at least those with a native English-speaking background). Thus my impressions are over 30 years old, and perhaps things have changed.
With that grain of salt aside, here's what I experienced:
* Concur, I have never felt safer in another urban center than what I experienced in Japan. I clearly remember commuting home around midnight and seeing moms taking their babies in stroller rides to get them to sleep. They were alone and had no fear. Along with raw safety, yes, the Japanese were nearly universally neat, clean, polite and helpful.
* There were various groups that were "out." I remember seeing homeless WW2 veterans, shunned for the embarrassment of losing the war. Considering how I am treated with general honor as a US veteran myself, I feel for them. Also consider the descendants of the Korean laborers imported to Japan in the first several decades of the 20th century. Their only path to citizenship is to totally renounce their Korean names, language, ancestry, etc. I know this because a certain percentage of them were my students. (Meanwhile, S. Korea doesn't want them back; they feel a certain shame towards them, too. Truly, these are essentially stateless, status-less, and pitiful. The shame is that they are shamed.) I also encountered various groups of illegal immigrants, always workers in various low-skill trades. They were typically Pakistani, Thai and various South and Southeast Asian nationalities, though at least one of them I met was a US citizen and native of Hawaii, crammed into shoddy apartments. Like illegals in the US, they are there because someone is willing to pay them for jobs that need done that native Japanese are unwilling to do--but these same too-good-for-me Japanese still benefit from this illegal trade. Finally, consider that many Japanese men, famously farmers, are unable to find wives willing to work with them out in the countryside: they import Filipina , Thai and other women to marry, join them in the work, and raise a family.
In particular, I dispute the author's account of a lack of xenophobia. Yes, Japanese are almost universally polite, but at least for a certain percentage, this is merely a facade that is culturally enforced.
* I married a Japanese lady that I met in the US in college. As we would ride the trains together, clearly a couple but never engaging in PDA, I would get glares from middle-aged men (the same men who would flip through pornographic magazines while wedged between Japanese schoolgirls). Their glares were very pointed and their message very clear: "How dare you filthy foreign scum come in and steal our virginal Japanese princesses." They never did anything about it, but this was a very common experience. I'm still enraged by their hypocrisy--I know I treated my wife better than they treated theirs.
* At one point, my wife and I were apartment hunting, looking to get a place 1/2 way between my work and hers. The realtor we were working with (they actually use realtors as middlemen to find apartments; potential renters do not approach landlords or properties directly) told us bluntly that our preferred section of Tokyo was exclusively for Japanese and that "gaijin" like me were not welcome. This was the most explicit and clear form of racism I encountered.
* At our wedding in Japan, my wife's very large extended family all showed up. (Her parents came from the large families that were common in WW2, as the Japanese government was seeking a huge birthrate to replace battlefield losses as well as colonize Manchuria and other places in Asia.) All, and I mean all 15+ of her cackly aunts placed bets on how long it would take for their cute niece to come to her senses, dump the cute American playboy (me), and marry a proper Japanese fellow and raise proper Japanese children. (This was in contrast to my parents-in-law who have always treated me kindly and appreciatively.) Well, 30 years later our marriage is strong, our kids aren't on drugs or having babies as teenagers, etc.--and all those cackly aunts have now gone back to my mother-in-law and apologized, wondering what our secret is.
* Many Japanese mistook me for a US serviceman (in spite of my beard!). (I wasn't one then but did join up on my return to the States.) This was not a favorable impression. If you don't think that the Japanese are xenophobic (at least a certain significant percentage), then witness the riotous responses, especially in Okinawa, when a US serviceman allegedly rapes a local or is suspected of some other crime. Sadly, all too often these allegations are in fact borne out. But my point is, all foreigners tend to suffer suspicion as a result of the crimes of a few. That is the definition of xenophobia. One of the particular times I indisputably suffered from this was during a late night subway ride. On the other end of the car from me was a clearly drunk American serviceman making rude noises and gestures. The poor Japanese in the car with us were justifiably offended. And, they kept on looking in horror and disgust at him, and then to me. Like, "Are you like that, too?" I was never more embarrassed of being an American in my life. I wanted to drag that idiot out and throttle him, but of course that wasn't the answer.
* Japanese are xenophobic of their own people. What does this mean? Talk to the kids of e.g. Toyota executives who are posted abroad, e.g. at US factories, and bring their families. These kids are exposed to freedom from the very tight cultural expectations to do certain things at certain times, etc. It's intoxicating. And they do NOT integrate well back home in Japan when their dads return. In fact, the situation is so bad--literally suicidal--that in Tokyo at least they had a shadow school system exclusively for these returnee kids, complete with something approaching Western-style freedoms. See, the point is, the Japanese have this idea that the only real way to be Japanese is to be born in Japan, of Japanese parents, and raised exclusively in Japan. Returnee kids do not fit. My wife is a returnee and she sure didn't fit back into Japan; the reason we moved back to the US was that she was physically and mentally deteriorating under the atmosphere of expectations she could no longer meet.
I could tell more anecdotes, but this is already a long post. Again, my experiences are more than 30 years in the past. Perhaps things have changed--but I wouldn't be posting this if I were skeptical.
However, I will add that many Japanese I encountered were not xenophobes: I am sure their kindness was genuine, and they were embarrassed by both the xenophobic past and present of Japan. In fact, I would say, despite all the above recollections, that I loved my time in Japan and could have spent the rest of my life there. My point is, I was also realistic about the attitudes of many and the attendant constraints it put on my opportunities.