Japan's New Approach to Immigration: A First Step in the Right Direction

A new entry path for foreign nationals (Image by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash)

Japan is facing a demographic crisis. Its fertility rate has collapsed while its life expectancy is among the highest in the world. According to the Statistics Bureau of Japan, the country has lost over 1.5m people since 2009 and its population is set to shrink from 126.4m in 2018 to 88m people by 2065. As a result, Japan now faces two critical threats to its future prosperity. The first is worsening labour shortages, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has argued will crimp short and long term economic growth. The second is a surging old-age dependency ratio, i.e. fewer taxpayers and more people aged over 65. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this threatens growth and the sustainability of government social spending.

In response to these economic threats, Japanese governments have introduced measures including increasing the retirement age and boosting female workforce participation. These have had some success. Yet, as argued in the second chapter of a 2018 IMF report, advanced economies now need to look at expanding immigration to counter the ageing of their populations. This has always been a bitter pill to swallow for a historically isolated nation, which prides itself on its cultural uniqueness and perceives itself as racially and culturally homogeneous. As a result, the ‘i’ word tends to be taboo in Japanese political discourse and successive governments have done little.

For decades, governments, nervous about punishment at the ballot box, have eschewed taking concrete steps to open Japan up to foreign nationals and help them integrate successfully. This has led to too few immigrants being accepted and a lack of support for the integration and wellbeing of those let in. Yet, as the demographic crunch has worsened, it appears that times have changed, or at least are beginning to. Last April, the government passed a controversial bill creating new visas for foreign workers, aiming to bring in 345,000 by 2024. Shortly after, the government took unprecedented steps to bolster integration support for newly arrived foreign nationals in Japan as well as for those already there.

In this article, I outline the recent reforms and evaluate to what extent they effectively build on the previous system. I then offer policy recommendations for using immigration to defuse Japan’s demographic timebomb, without provoking widespread anti-immigration backlash.

A controversial bill: lawmakers from opposition parties attempt to prevent the Judicial Affairs Committee Chairman, Shinichi Yokoyama, (seated in the first frame of the clip) from moving to hold a vote on a bill amending the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act. Dec. 8, 2018.

A new visa system

On 1st April 2019, the government enacted an amendment to the 1951 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, creating two new types of visa. The Category 1 visa enables low-skilled workers, with basic technical and Japanese language skills, to work for up to 5 years in fourteen designated sectors with labour shortages, including hospitality, nursing care, shipbuilding and construction. These workers cannot bring their families to Japan to live with them. The government aims to attract 345,000 workers using this visa by 2024. The Category 2 visa is an upgrade only available to Category 1 visa-holders who work in shipbuilding or construction and are proven to have a high skill level. It grants permanent residence and the ability to bring family members to Japan.

The government has sought to downplay the significance of these new visas, through concern about a potential anti-immigration backlash. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has insisted that it is not an ‘immigration policy’ [imin seisaku], and has portrayed the reform as a necessary measure to inject a set quota of labour into Japan’s economy, for a set period. In a similar vein, a government policy document which mentions the reform refers to attracting foreign nationals as ‘accepting foreign human resources’. Opposition lawmakers have criticised the PM’s representation of his reform, suggesting that he is trying to fool the public by making up a definition of immigration that his new visas technically sit outside of. Given the visas offer 5-year residence and permanent residence, PM Abe’s representation certainly sits ill with the definitions for ‘long-term migrants’ employed by both the OECD, of which Japan is a member, and the European Union. These emphasise a 12-month stay as the minimum period for a person to be considered a ‘long-term migrant’.

Though the government sought to downplay the reform’s importance with its unusual definition of immigration, the creation of the new visas quietly represents a milestone for Japan. Introducing the Category 1 visa is the first time that the country has ever created an official path for the entry of low-skilled labour. It is both significant and commendable that lawmakers from the right-wing, ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have mustered the courage to implement a policy openly aiming to attract hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers, even on a temporary basis. After decades of LDP governments avoiding the topics of immigration and foreign workers, as labour shortages worsened, a majority of LDP lawmakers now recognise that practical economic reality necessitates drastic action. This signals a willingness on their part to be less rigid and put their conservative instincts to one side. This may bode well for progressive reform generally.

Limited economic relief

The new visa reform is welcome as it will provide the economy with a much-needed injection of labour, which will partially stem the workforce’s collapse. However, there is still more work to do before the reform will make a real difference.

First, the reform’s effectiveness may be undermined if too few Category 1 visa applicants are able to pass the Japanese language and job skills tests. This has already become a problem. The government set a target of 47,550 Category 1 workers for the 2019 fiscal year, which started last April. Yet, by early November – over halfway through the fiscal year – it had only approved 895 work permits for Category 1 visa applicants. This can be attributed to the government’s failure to set up enough test centres abroad and the slow pace of the visa application process. To remedy this, it should urgently establish more test centres and provide applicants with more guidance about the process.

Secondly, with Japan’s population set to decline to 122.5m by 2025, down from 126.5m in 2018, the scope of the reform is too limited, even if the government meets its target of 345,000. In 2016, the Liberal Democratic Party’s select committee on matters related to foreign workers, chaired by lawmaker Yoshio Kimura, recommended accepting 900,000 new foreign workers. In June 2018, before the government’s visa reform was debated in the Diet (the Japanese legislature), a panel led by PM Abe proposed letting in 500,000 blue-collar workers by 2025. This target was then lowered to 345,000 by 2024. When asked in an interview with The Japan Times to comment on the Abe panel’s proposal, Kimura cautioned: “Some 500,000 is not enough at all. Some people who don’t know about the reality (of the Japanese economy) must have just made up that figure”. While his words are somewhat stinging, Kimura’s sentiment is correct. Though it is helpful that the government is now setting targets, these should become bolder.

A potential win for foreign workers’ rights

Another critical point is that the creation of the Category 1 visa may represent an enormous improvement on the previous system, with regard to the workers’ rights of foreign nationals. Before introducing the recent reform, Japan attempted to plug its blue-collar labour gap with foreign students working part-time and through a backdoor channel introduced in 1993 known as the Technical Intern Trainee Program (TITP). The programme is currently still in place, despite the creation of the new visas and calls for the government to abolish it. Under the TITP, young foreign nationals from developing countries come to Japan for up to five years, supposedly to intern and develop skills to take back home. In reality, foreign nationals of all ages – the most recent figure sits at 328,000 people – have entered Japan on TITP visas and work blue-collar jobs. They are, by definition, foreign workers.

‘Trainees’ having the opportunity to work in Japan is not inherently problematic. The problem with this system is that the government has always refused to officially recognise them as foreign workers, for political reasons. As a result, they have never received protection of their workers’ rights under Japanese law. Moreover, to prevent ‘trainees’ from abandoning labour-starved rural areas and pouring into the big cities, they are unable to legally change jobs. This has created a system where many ‘trainees’ are held hostage by employers who exploit them through underpayment, overwork and poor working conditions. A recent government probe found that 171 ‘trainees’ died between 2012 and 2017 from workplace accidents, illness and suicide, and over 9,000 are missing. They are believed to have fled their jobs.

Official recognition of Category 1 visa-holders as workers is significant as it should prevent the same problems from plaguing the new system. Recognition means that the government is obliged to protect the workers’ rights of Category 1 workers. Moreover, the new reform permits these workers to switch employers and the government has guaranteed that they will be paid the same wages as their Japanese blue-collar counterparts. While this is bad news for cash-strapped Japanese firms which rely on cheap foreign labour, it may represent an important victory for those thinking of moving to Japan as well as for those who have completed the TITP and want to extend their stay. The key factor will be to what extent the government honours its obligations to protect them and ensure their salaries are adequate.

In their response to the visa reform bill, opposition lawmakers highlighted this point. They blasted the government for a lack of specifics around how it would prevent human rights violations. They rightly warned that, without concrete measures to enforce rights, the Category 1 visa could become the new ‘trainee’ visa. The government responded in March 2019 by creating a watchdog for the construction industry, designed to protect the rights of foreign workers. Though we cannot yet tell how thorough the new watchdog will be, this is a step in the right direction – effective watchdogs should be created for all industries with ‘trainees’ and Category 1 workers.

Another opposition worry surrounding the visa reform, as highlighted in an article by the Deputy Leader of Japan’s largest opposition party, was the lack of accompanying measures to properly support the wellbeing and integration of foreign nationals. Opposition lawmakers were concerned that a lack of supportive social infrastructure would undermine foreign nationals’ living standards and leave many disconnected from Japanese society. Implied was the risk of creating friction between foreign nationals and locals, which would ultimately undermine Japan’s social cohesion. This view was warranted given Japan has historically lacked any kind of integration policy, despite its foreign resident population reaching a record 2.7m in 2018, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan, an increase of around 170,000 on the previous year. The government responded positively.

Support for social integration

To assuage opposition concerns, the government accompanied its visa reform with a clear and unprecedented commitment to support the integration of foreign residents. According to a government policy document, it aims to “realize a society where the human rights of foreign people are protected and in which they can comfortably coexist.” The government also took steps to evidence its sincerity, which mark a significant step forward.

First, it supported a bill submitted by a cross-party group of lawmakers which states, for the first time, the responsibility of the central and local governments to provide Japanese-language education to foreign residents of all backgrounds and ages. The bill, passed unanimously by the Diet last June, was mostly symbolic; the government has not yet earmarked funds for fulfilling this responsibility. Until now, the responsibility of teaching Japanese to foreign nationals has only been shouldered in a small number of communities with high foreign populations. Local volunteers run a limited number of Japanese-language classes in these communities, without financial support from local or national authorities. Though admirable, these efforts are naturally too small-scale and sparse to meet the needs of Japan’s rapidly growing foreign resident population. This has left many with few means to learn Japanese and facing insurmountable language barriers.

These barriers undermine the wellbeing of foreign residents in several ways. One is that, in a society where few speak a second language, many are severely isolated. A recent study reviewing studies on the matter found that difficulty communicating in Japanese is the most common barrier to the mental wellbeing of migrants in Japan. Another issue is the growing trend of hospitals refusing to operate on non-Japanese speakers, out of fear of medical accidents due to linguistic misunderstandings. These problems are compounded for foreign schoolchildren in Japan. Government data suggests that one in every six foreign children in elementary and junior high may not be attending school. Their reasons for dropping out most likely include xenophobic bullying by their classmates and academic difficulties. The latter is caused by a lack of remedial Japanese-language learning opportunities. If the central government fulfils its responsibility to provide such opportunities to all foreign nationals – for instance by funding existing community initiatives, establishing new ones, and giving municipal governments the funds to do the same – it will be a significant step towards supporting their integration and well being.

Secondly, the government took steps to expand access to important life guidance for foreign nationals. In 2019, it created a guidebook on daily life and employment in Japan, which it plans to translate into multiple languages. In a 2018 policy document, it indicated that it will offer consultation services on life issues, in multiple languages. These measures are likely to make a difference for those struggling to adapt to Japanese society. Still, it remains to be seen how many languages the guidebook and consultations will be available in and how useful foreign nationals will find them.

Meeting the challenge of the demographic crunch

The government’s enactment of laws creating new visas and supporting integration is a strong and unprecedented step towards countering Japan’s de-population woes and maintaining social cohesion. To ensure its new laws bear fruit, the government should make sure that it hits the 345,000 entry-target for Category 1 workers and fulfils its commitments. These include protecting the workers’ rights and wages – for instance through effective watchdog bodies – as well as providing life guidance in foreign languages and allocating enough funding to Japanese-language instruction across the country, particularly for foreign schoolchildren. Still, there is more work to do.

To fundamentally tackle the demographic crunch, through immigration, the government should let in more foreign nationals and give more of them a genuine opportunity to settle. This latter point makes sense at an economic level, since firms will be more encouraged to think about long-term productivity and invest in their foreign staff if they know they will not be forced to replace them every 5 years – and at a social level, since the possibility of settling will give immigrants a greater incentive to integrate. Specific policy recommendations to let more people in for longer include increasing the target for Category 1 visa admissions and ensuring that any law-abiding Category 1 worker who has worked hard, regardless of sector, has a genuine chance of obtaining a Category 2 visa.

Unfortunately, these policies are unlikely to materialise in the current political climate. Successive Liberal Democratic Party governments skirted around immigration for decades while labour shortages worsened. With the new visa reform, the government only partially acknowledged the findings of Yoshio Kimura’s select committee, with its recommended target of 900,000 foreign workers. These choices by LDP governments are the combined result of the historically conservative and rigid attitudes of the party’s lawmakers as well as a fear of public backlash, amplified by the immigration taboo in the political discourse. Encouragingly, the new visa reform suggests that the former may be receding to some extent – most LDP lawmakers are increasingly willing to be flexible and compromise with regard to immigration. This willingness is likely to deepen as Japan’s demographic crisis worsens.

Looking to the future, this implies that fear of public backlash will be the main obstacle to the immigration reforms that Japan needs to counter its de-population woes. Only when politicians know that voters will reward them, or at least not punish them heavily, will they implement more ambitious reforms. Before identifying what will be required for politicians to overcome their backlash worry, we must first establish if it is warranted. After all, though it may have been justified 20 years ago when labour shortages were much lower down the political agenda, it is not as obvious how heavily today’s Japanese public will punish pro-immigration reform. Survey findings help shed light on this matter.

Two surveys of the response to the recent visa reforms, one by Kyodo News and another by The Mainichi newspaper, suggested that the public is evenly split. The former found that 51% are in support and 40% against, while the latter found only 30% in support with 55% against. Meanwhile, two surveys of general attitudes produced results that appear contradictory. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that 71% of Japanese do not want more immigrants, while a 2019 Nikkei Research survey found that 69% of Japanese think an increase in the number of foreign people, at work and in the community, is ‘good’. Interestingly, 82% of the supporters of an increase, in the Nikkei survey, said that the reason for their decision was the “importance [of foreign people] as workers”. Additionally, 50% of the supporters did not welcome the need for foreign people, saying “I don’t like it, but it can’t be helped”.

These survey findings point to two conclusions. First, the Japanese public is more or less split down the middle over increasing immigration. Second, many of those in support are reluctant and only want more immigrants for functional reasons. This suggests that the government is right to worry about backlash. If it lets in more immigrants, it will risk alienating not only the half of the population which opposes more immigration, but also the large group of begrudging immigration supporters. The fact that these voters only reluctantly support immigration suggests that they have some negative feelings and concerns about immigration, which they are suppressing as they recognise the economic need for workers. If the government were to allow large numbers of immigrants into Japan, there is a real possibility that many of them would change their minds. As the society around them would rapidly become more diverse and inevitably less cohesive (to some extent), many might suddenly realise that they can no longer recognise with their once homogeneous country. At this point, they would most likely abandon their pro-immigration stance and point the finger at the party that let in the immigrants: the LDP. The government is all too aware of this possibility and so has held back from more ambitious reform.

To incentivise the current and future governments to be bolder, public attitudes must change. Those who currently oppose immigration as well as those who only reluctantly support it need to be shown that it has genuine economic and social benefits, which should be welcomed with open arms, not rejected or grudgingly accepted. Moreover, to avoid a knee-jerk surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in the years to come, the entire population needs to be prepared psychologically for the influx that will follow the recent visa reforms.

Three courses of action would each start to push public attitudes in the right direction and encourage politicians to be bolder – but there are two caveats. One is the uncertainty over whether LDP politicians will be interested in following them, since it is unclear how much they stand to gain from them politically. The other is that, even if followed by most politicians, it is unclear how effectively the courses of action can change attitudes which tend to be deeply rooted in Japan.

First, politicians from all parties should erode the taboo around immigration by speaking about it more openly. Setting up the Yoshio Kimura’s select committee was arguably a step in this direction as it sparked debate around foreign workers and ultimately led to the government’s raft of reforms. Eroding the taboo around immigration would be beneficial in fostering more debate around the issue and preventing politicians from using it as an excuse for inaction.

Second, politicians need to dispel the notion that immigrants are ‘human resources’ to grudgingly ‘accept’ and utilise. They should speak of them as human beings instead. For opposition parties, hammering this distinction home more thoroughly would be an opportunity to gain support from pro-immigration voters. They might even be able to galvanise young voters, who are largely disengaged from politics. According to the Nikkei survey cited previously, young people are some of the most passionately pro-immigration voters, with nearly half of them saying Japan “should actively accept” foreign workers. Moreover, a more open and kinder discourse around immigration would both render the idea less alien to most Japanese people and psychologically prepare them for the expected influx over the coming years. This would have the added benefit of making immigrants feel more welcome in Japan, and so support their integration.

Third, the government should run information campaigns touting the social and economic benefits of immigration. This is a policy which research, based on a large-scale study in Japan, has shown to be effective in bolstering support for immigration. Unfortunately, given the LDP government only recently loosened Japan’s restrictive immigration rules, it is unlikely that it will run such information campaigns any time soon.

Overall, the recent immigration reforms and integrative measures are an important and commendable step forward. The current government has been more courageous than previous administrations in recognising the importance of immigration as a practical policy solution and acting on this. Its commitments to supporting the integration and Japanese-language learning of foreign residents were also unprecedented. However, bolder reform is required. The government should let in more workers and for longer. Realistically, public attitudes need to change before lawmakers will see this as politically feasible. Bringing this about will not be a simple task, or perhaps one that most LDP politicians will be interested in pursuing. However, Japan needs it. For the sake of its future prosperity, politicians from all parties should embrace the challenge with both hands and act urgently. As Japan’s population shrinks, the demographic timebomb is ticking.