Japan will double its visa quota for skilled immigrants, potentially benefiting eight hundred thousand foreign workers. This is stated by the Kyodo agency, citing “a source familiar with the matter.” Although the Japanese economy is far from its best moment and even contracted in the last quarter of the year, vacancies in several sectors force the Fumio Kishida executive to relax a traditionally very restrictive immigration policy.
This program currently welcomes some two hundred thousand professionals with minimal knowledge of Japanese, although 345,000 candidates have benefited from it since its creation five years ago. Expanding it is imperative, since only 80% of the positions offered in the industry have been filled and barely 10% in the hospitality industry. In addition to comfortably doubling the number of foreigners, Tokyo intends to open up some professions to which they could not access within the framework of this program, such as forest rangers or truck, bus and taxi drivers, with an estimated deficit of 25,000 workers per year. steering wheel.
Nursing, food, textile manufacturing, agriculture and railway transportation have so far been the most assisted sectors, of the total of twelve authorized. In all cases, with a maximum ceiling, so as not to harm national workers.
Currently, foreigners represent just over 2% of Japan’s population – 2.5 million out of 125 million – far below the other members of the OECD. Extraordinarily low figures, for a rich and industrialized country, which respond to the discreet xenophobia of a large part of the Japanese population and seven practically uninterrupted decades of conservative government of the Liberal Democratic Party.
The offshoring that stood out in the eighties, the golden years of the Japanese economy, can also be interpreted as a formula for repatriating profits, regardless of labor that is difficult to assimilate socially and culturally.
Japan’s ethnic narcissism goes so far as to continue counting as foreigners the quarter of a million Koreans whose families have been living in the Japanese archipelago since before 1945, when Korea was a Japanese colony. Another significant fact is its almost systematic rejection of asylum applications. Some years, 999 out of 1000.
However, the demographic decline and aging of Japanese society forces concessions. Although Tokyo continues to pilot the process and is committed to gradual and relatively digestible changes. The first beneficiaries, in the nineties, were the Brazilians and Peruvians descended from the waves of Japanese immigration – especially from Okinawa – prior to the Second World War.
Tokyo has no choice but to step forward to stimulate skilled immigration, since the country has lost a certain attractiveness. The least important thing is that Germany has replaced – at least temporarily – Japan as the world’s third largest economy. Much more important is that yen wages have lost a third of their dollar value in the last three years.
Since the 1990s, Japan has had a program to recruit unskilled immigrants from developing countries, interested in work apprenticeships, for a limited period of years. In practice, this is cheap labor destined for the fishing industry or other activities, in rural prefectures, at the demand of local business organizations.
Some union organizations have criticized the program, calling it “disguised exploitation”, favored by the impossibility of changing companies. In 2019, an investigation brought to light 171 deaths among these “apprentices” throughout that decade. An issue that has strained the relationship with Vietnam, the most frequent country of origin of this type of workers. Although those from China also stand out – first of all, the Philippines, Nepal or Indonesia.
This same year, the Japanese government has promised reforms in the program, with the possibility that, at the end of the apprenticeship, these workers can access the program for qualified employees, thus being able to add five more years of experience. However, none of these programs provide that the beneficiary can bring his family with him during his contract, subject to annual renewal, up to four times (and even for shorter periods of four or six months). The trainees, at the end of their maximum stay, would be free to pass the elementary Japanese test that candidates for the visa program for qualified professionals must pass, which in turn has other exams to determine the suitability of the candidate.
Draconian conditions, but they do not clash with the Japanese work ethic. According to the most recent surveys, three out of four university students believe that you should go to work even when you feel unwell. Likewise, 42.5% of Japanese would like to be able to work beyond the age of 66.
A dwindling excellent workforce. Not in vain, the fertility rate, after decades of decline, reached its historic low of 1.3 children per woman last year. As a consequence, the average age in Japan is now close to 50 years. Double that in Nepal.
In a society as codified and disciplined as Japan’s, immigration is not left to chance, nor to the whim of traffickers. In fact, even in much poorer Asian countries, the illegal residence of a foreigner is practically inconceivable. But in the case of Japan, in addition, the insularity in the Far East acts as a barrier.
Even so, violating visa conditions leads to fines, detention (there are three large detention centers) and deportation. After all these filters, the Japanese authorities consider that the resulting pool – some three thousand illegal immigrants who do not comply with the deportation order and multiply completely chimerical asylum requests – is relatively manageable.
From the perspective of foreign workers, the question is whether Japan truly wants them or takes them in because it has no choice. In this case, the numbers sing. Among the hundreds of thousands of workers enrolled in the aforementioned programs, one could almost count on one’s fingers those who have achieved permanent residence and permission to bring their family.
