Japan is an enigma in the sense that they have an extremely talented labor force. They also do not have to deal with brain drain. They’d benefit if they open up to more lax immigration policies. Contrast Japan to S.Korea where they have been more receptive to addressing labor shortage with seasonal and permanent migrant workers.
I fail to see your argument. How would opening up immigration benefit Japan, other than depressing wages? Japan is an island already overpopulated relative to it's native energy and agricultural resources. Importing more low-value workers will only lower the quality of living for existing inhabitants of Japan.
Japan should focus instead on better utilizing the high-skill labor force that they already have.
Immigrants would not be able to assimilate into Japan and mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society.
Nearly the whole developed world, from Sweden to Japan, countries became rich in the first place without immigrants. What’s changed that they need immigrants now?
OK, here's a controversial statement: Maybe Japanese culture is in need of some change. And I don't even mean, what you think I am referring to. I mean, maybe the Japanese don't have the right entrepreneurial attitude to develop modern 21st century businesses and maybe foreigners can bring some fresh perspectives. I believe that is one of the factors that makes the US so successful.
Maybe Japanese culture needs changing, but it doesn’t follow that immigration would produce the right kind of chance. You can replace order with disorder, but why would that be a positive change?
I don't follow your logic. The parent comment suggested immigration would inject entrepreneurialism into an otherwise staid society. That doesn't imply disorder, it implies entrepreneurialism.
Order arises from (1) everyone following the same rules; and (2) everyone being subject to a shared system of informal social reinforcement. Immigration injects a foreign population that was socialized according to different rules, and isn’t part of the system of shared social reinforcement, and so creates disorder. There is no orderly society that has a significant share of immigrants.
You mean besides ours, the most successful society on the planet, proprietors of a global hegemony something rapidly approaching an entire century. And I'm sure others, I'm just saying this one is a pretty obvious counterexample.
The U.S. isn’t an orderly country, especially the immigrant-heavy parts. Importing U.S. levels of disorder to Japan would be a huge downgrade in standard of living.
Cheap immigrant labor and skimming the cream off the top from other countries makes American companies more competitive, yes. That doesn’t make a place orderly and well-run, with a high quality of life for the average person.
New York’s GDP per capita is double that of Japan and significantly higher than the Tokyo region. I doubt most Japanese would be happy living in New York. Indeed, if Americans could even conceive that a city could be like Tokyo—clean, orderly, polite, with effective transit and public services—most wouldn’t want to live in New York either.
You started out with a clear statement, which felt easy to rebut with similarly clear statements, and we've now reached a point where I'm not even sure what it is you're saying.
I said immigration creates disorder. Your points about America prove rather than rebut my point. America is rich, but it’s not orderly. Everything from individual social interactions to the operation of every level of government is characterized by disorder resulting from heterogeneity.
Japan is considering more immigration to deal with its population problems, but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
My neighbors are great. I have an Italian neighbor. He’s great too. But for two generations, American democracy was upended as Italians voting as an ethnic bloc fueled corrupt machine politics. New York and New Jersey never recovered.
Your neighbors might be great as individuals as well. That’s irrelevant to my point. Chicago might be the poster child of a city that could’ve been orderly and well run. Except for the last century it’s been riven by ethnic conflict and immigration-fueled machine politics that has sapped the government’s ability to actually serve its people.
Contrast New England. A large number of people from New England retire in the Annapolis area because of the sailing and warmer weather. The cultural difference is undeniable. Many have said to me that, growing up, they learned food was for surviving, not enjoying. They cut donuts in half at events so people aren’t tempted to eat too much, and regularly run out of food (because better to run out of food than to waste it). As a Bangladeshi, I find them totally unrelatable and frankly kind of scary in how little they seem to care about having grandchildren. But it’s impossible to deny that the little New England towns they created are extremely orderly places.
We've only recently started mass immigration and it's not going as well as previous decades when immigration was more controlled. Giving small amounts of immigrants time to assimilate instead of bringing in so many at once they start building their own enclaves is what works.
For one the premise is shaky, a lot of developed countries depended strongly on migrant labor, German Gastarbeiters, the Anglosphere in general etc, but what's actually changed is that the average Japanese person is 50 years old.
If you have any interest in maintaining a growing economy you need more capital flowing to the young rather than the young paying for the old, in particular in a democracy where a geriatric population threatens to just vote in more benefits for itself. This is pretty much the sole reason for America's absurd economic strength among developed countries.
In 1990 Japan's GDP was 60% of Americas. Today it's 20%. The astonishing thing is when you adjust for working age population and purchasing power, real productivity grew at similar rates, it's not as often assumed the fax machines. The demographics have simply obliterated Japan.
Gastarbeiters were introduced after 1945 when Germany was already rich, so mentioning them is not a refutation of grandparent's "Nearly the whole developed world . . . became rich in the first place without immigrants".
It wasn't intended as a refutation but a qualification, the Gastarbeiters contributed significantly to accelerate the enormous reconstruction and the Wirtschafswunder of the 60s and 70s, so the story is more complicated in a lot of places.
But to refute the actual point even though it hasn't much to do with Japan today, early industrialization was also a story of immigration. It just happened to be internal migration, i.e. urbanization. The story of getting rich in places like Manchester isn't particularly pretty, and it's a story of huge churn of uneducated rural workers and surplus labor being funneled into emerging economic centers. As it is in China or India today. For the habitual culture warrior nowadays internal migration isn't very exciting, but it is economically the exact same thing. And if you're Japan and you don't happen to have 20 million young rural folks sitting around, but you want growth, you're going to have to look for people somewhere else.
>It wasn't intended as a refutation but a qualification
I don't know what animates you in the conversation, but for me it is question of whether immigration of people with very different cultural backgrounds into a country has harmful effect that in the long term might cancel out the positive economic effects.
You have not explained (and I have failed to guess) how your "was also a story of immigration" sheds any light on that question.
Sometimes I wonder who wants growth (leadership obviously). I feel like most east asian cultures would gladly take less ridiculous/involuted work culture where you waste half your waking like appeasing to hierarchy. How many would take slightly less growth for much more free time. Assuming that's how that scales, and it does feel that's how it scales with how many people doing shit all in the office or doing work activities just to keep up face time. There are some strategic industries where I understand the need to grind people to work 200% harder to have 10% competitive advantage, but there are tons of less essential work where salary man culture does returns relative ot effort.
> mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society.
Meh, in the same sense the country being forced to open up to European merchants, the Meiji Restoration, or the two atomic bombs and the Emperor's fall from a godlike being to a symbolic leader "destroyed" Japan.
It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. Women leading men? People getting married in Christian churches? Unthinkable!
> It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway.
In 2003 I read an essay that said in part, "It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting [Chinatown in] San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'"
The Anglicans Online site wasn't captured often enough for the week you referenced to be directly accessible. While looking at the nearest capture I noticed that the Anglicans Online site itself retained past essays on a "morgue" subdomain. I was then able to use an early 2004 snapshot to find the essay from December 2003.
Related phenomenon to this would be immigrant "time bubble", when immigrant's mental conception of their original country is frozen in time, when after decades, their origin country has moved on. Especially true in older generations that don't travel back often and fallback to what they knew.
Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing. Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order?
Sweden is the bellwether for this. They have a negative immigration rate now. They tried immigration, realized it didn’t work, and stopped it. Just like they tried social democracy in the 1960s, realized it didn’t work, and moved back to a more market economy in the 1980s.
> Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing.
As I just said, Japan suffered a brutal defeat in a World War, with two atomic bombs, losing sovereignty for ~7 years, military leaders getting executed for war crimes, foreign military bases sprouting everywhere (which still exist), and the monarch reduced to a symbolic role.
And arguably Japan is better for that and I doubt most Japanese people would want to go back to the glorious days of Japanese Empire even if they could.
So I don't really get this phobia of how Japan allowing a few million immigrant workers at almost the lowest level of the societal ladder would ruin its culture. Like, exactly what concrete part of Japanese culture do you expect to be ruined? Light novels?
> Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order?
OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world.
Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall.
I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years.
EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
I limited the time horizon to 70 years because Japan’s experience with immigration is much more likely to be like Sweden’s or France’s than America’s.
But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts.
The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California.
It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.
If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you should go back a thousand years or so and have a talk with King Cnut — he of the legend of showing his courtiers just how much control he had over the tide [0] — about your views on immigration.
Immigration comes because migrants are dissatisfied enough with the status quo to take risks to do something about it. That ingrained tendency is a major part of human progress.
The accompanying disruption can be uncomfortable. But it plays a big role in how humanity's learning things we didn't know about reality — and in figuring out how to deal with it. Some familiar examples: The amount of life-improving technology that came from WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Advances in vaccine research instigated by the global spread of covid-19. And so on, and so forth.
(Back in the 1980s, Jared Diamond argued that humanity was better off millennia ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, and that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history [1]. Shockingly, his argument didn't seem to get any traction.)
I'm not sure anyone knows. The total absolute working-age population will still likely be higher in 2060 than it was in 1950, and complemented by a great many productivity-enhancing machines. It's just that the number of elderly will be much larger, and the number of young children much smaller. But that's also a trend that could reverse; the absolute number of children in Japan will still be higher at that point than it was during, say, the Meiji era. Perhaps large families will come back into fashion for whatever reason.
The number of young people is thinning out AND the fertility rate remains low, and these have a multiplicative effect. Compounded, they are an oncoming freight train. There are very real, very serious reasons that the fertility rate is low. For a vast majority of the population, the decision to have children and provide for them is a decision to sentence yourself to a very hard life. Society is set up this way and most people see no issue. I think that suggesting large families "may come back for whatever reason" completely ignores this reality. You reap what you sow.
This is true, but the future is hard to see and there are multiple possible roads. It's not guaranteed to be an extrapolation of the present.
One possibility is a pivot towards immigration, but I think equally likely would be a pivot towards ever-larger financial incentives for parenthood, the kind that would make being a stay-at-home parent start to make financial sense.
A lot of young people put off parenthood not by preference, or because they're so passionate about being a corporate tax accountant, but just because they don't feel they have a choice; only one route offers financial security. That's been the reality in many developed countries since perhaps the 1970s-80s, but it won't necessarily remain true in the years ahead.
This would require that elderly people (who are an ever-growing voting bloc) support this shift of government support towards young people. It might not happen without some kind of external stimulus. But elderly people also tend not to be pro-immigration either, and presumably also don't love the idea of empty schools and playgrounds and dying towns. It's hard to say what will happen.
I agree with everything about what you said. I agree with you that the elderly are unlikely to support young people, unlikely to support immigration, and probably don't like empty schools and dying towns. What I guess they will do is: absolutely nothing. Hold on to power and live out the rest of their days. And that scenario is an extrapolation of the present.
Assuming Japan and Korea's fertility issues don't self correct (they appear culturally incapable of addressing the root problems that cause them), don't they _have_ to significantly relax immigration policies at some point to avoid their societies imploding?
