Japan is overcrowded and has famously long and lengthening lifespans. The result is that families have little space to raise children and retirees accumulate so the retiree to worker ratio grows to great heights.
It's pretty straightforward to deal with the trend, though.
You could mitigate the cost of a high ratio by investing in automation so that a smaller workforce can provide more goods and services to the population, and Japan is, in fact, the world leader in robotics and automation.
You could make child bearing and rearing cheaper so that the necessary generational decline in population is smoother. Japan is failing badly at promoting births, though. The economy is dominated by cartels that have been liberalizing their employment practices by reserving the high paying lifetime employment jobs to older incumbent employees and taking on younger workers as low-paid temps without benefits. Real estate taxes calcify the market and banking policy makes it even harder for young people to own homes. Social and government policy makes life very hard on working mothers. The result is young Japanese people that want babies find them difficult to afford. Japan has among the lowest birth rates in the world.
It's easy enough to stop providing government support to the industrial and banking cartels and liberalize real estate and school policies but the voters so far prefer national decline and bankruptcy to liberalization.
You could raise retirement ages or cut benefits so more people continue working longer. That's not popular either, for good reason.
You could promote immigration of younger workers, but then you stop being a Japanese nation and inflict an underclass on all your posterity. A wise nation would not do that.
As an Asian in the United States, yes. In most places in the US being Asian is certainly being part of the underclass, though (fortunately?) we have it a lot better than most other minorities.
All of the ethnicities you mentioned were, for decades, if not an entire century, the underclass. Racism against the Irish, Italians, and Jews was extremely commonplace until relatively recent history.
An when they stopped being demonized as minorities society find more, newer immigrants to vilify instead. Hispanics for one, and in our industry, Indians.
I'm all for immigration and diversity, but let's call a spade a spade. Immigrants are an underclass, and it takes generations for the stigma to fade - if ever! Jews are still frequently discriminated against.
Not to mention, politically, Japan is very high on the xenophobia scale. I'd be interested to see the effects of large-scale immigration on their society, though I suspect it won't be pretty. At all.
So your argument is what, exactly? That the Jews, Asians, etc. shouldn't have been allowed to come because they wound up spending some time in the "underclass"? That's the original poster's argument, as near as I can tell. Is it also yours?
Personally, I'm very happy that all those groups came.
P.S. 49% of Asian-Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 28% of the general population, and the median household income for Asian-Americans is $66,000, compared to $49,800 for the general population.
Pardon the aggressiveness, but are you Asian? I live with my skin color and my last name every single day - are you seriously going to whip out a bunch of numbers and telling me that my experience, on the ground, as well as the experiences of my family and every other Asian around me, is null and void?
Note that I specifically disclaimed in my post that I support immigration. But you're idealizing immigration to an absurd extreme. Immigrants are treated as second-class in near every facet of life in the USA. That we don't have lynchings and head taxes anymore doesn't mean this class separation doesn't exist.
But let's get at your numbers:
> "49% of Asian-Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 28% of the general population"
True, until you realize that despite consisting of 5% of the population[0], and being extremely over-educated compared to the general population, Asians represent only 2% of corporate leadership positions[1][2].
Let's not forget also that despite years of Whites being dramatically over-represented in top universities and colleges, no quota'ing was ever put in place until Asians started to threaten White dominance in schools[3]. This isn't a sob story about Asians in particular - if you replace Asian with Black, or Hispanic, the result would be the same.
Minorities in America were never meant to take center stage and assume influence - we were supposed to stick to the sidelines and provide color to society and little more.
Your claim for median income is meaningless in this context. Asians fare very well in the job market, so long as they stick to individual contributor positions. Want to move into management? Not impossible, but you now have to work harder than your White colleagues to overcome the stereotype that Asians are timid and indecisive. There is a gigantic glass ceiling in place for all Asian-Americans which few have successfully broken.
So let's talk about what we mean by "underclass". An underclass is not solely defined by income or education - an underclass is defined by how its members are treated in common society. We have a demographic here that, despite proving their merit, are besieged at all levels of education for being "too smart" (imagine for one moment that claim being leveled against Whites). They are, in popular culture and the media, portrayed as sidekicks and cultural curiosities rather than humans of depth. They are, in higher levels of society (both in income and in influence) dramatically under-represented.
And all of the above isn't unique to Asians. South Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, all face similar issues.
Is the situation getting better? Hell yeah. The Italians and Irish who were the butt of this sort of discrimination decades ago are largely free from it now - but it took decades upon decades of fighting discrimination, and gritting their teeth to get there, and it will take the same for the current whipping-boy minorities to do the same. So let's not pretend that we live in some kind of utopian society where immigrants are welcomed with open arms and treated equally.
Japan doesn't have the same melting pot background as the U.S. It would take significant culture change for the Japanese to adopt an immigrant-inclusive culture.
Within living memory, Japan has been transformed from (paraphrasing a line from Neal Stephenson here) just about the fiercest culture on Earth to a nation of nerds obsessed with cute anime characters.
It's pretty straightforward to deal with the trend, though.
You could mitigate the cost of a high ratio by investing in automation so that a smaller workforce can provide more goods and services to the population, and Japan is, in fact, the world leader in robotics and automation.
You could make child bearing and rearing cheaper so that the necessary generational decline in population is smoother. Japan is failing badly at promoting births, though. The economy is dominated by cartels that have been liberalizing their employment practices by reserving the high paying lifetime employment jobs to older incumbent employees and taking on younger workers as low-paid temps without benefits. Real estate taxes calcify the market and banking policy makes it even harder for young people to own homes. Social and government policy makes life very hard on working mothers. The result is young Japanese people that want babies find them difficult to afford. Japan has among the lowest birth rates in the world.
It's easy enough to stop providing government support to the industrial and banking cartels and liberalize real estate and school policies but the voters so far prefer national decline and bankruptcy to liberalization.
You could raise retirement ages or cut benefits so more people continue working longer. That's not popular either, for good reason.
You could promote immigration of younger workers, but then you stop being a Japanese nation and inflict an underclass on all your posterity. A wise nation would not do that.