A Closed Immigration Country: Revisiting Japan as a Negative Case
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12383 |
| Author | Ayako Komine |
A Closed Immigration Country: Revisiting
Japan as a Negative Case
Ayako Komine*
ABSTRACT
The Japanese government maintains that the country admits only skilled economic migrants.
Its statistics tell a different story. Skilled and low-skilled economic migrants are admitted in
equal measure. The aim of this article is to explain the dissonance between the government’s
policy rhetoric and policy outcome by turning to policy output. To this end, I quantitatively
analyse immigration admission channels for economic migrants, using Ruhs’Openness and
Rights Indicators (2013). The main findings not only go against much of what we believe
about Japan but helps us reach a more nuanced understanding of its immigration policies. I
demonstrate that Japanese immigration admission policies have become more open towards de
facto low-skilled economic migrants over time and are more open to de facto low-skilled eco-
nomic migrants than to de jure skilled economic migrants. Instead of openness, the gains made
by certain groups of de jure skilled economic migrants have been exclusive immigration privi-
leges related to permanent residence and family sponsorship.
INTRODUCTION
In Anglophone scholarship on Japanese immigration policy, Bartram was the first to challenge what
he calls the “domestic reserve labour thesis”(Bartram, 2000, p. 7). Unlike western European coun-
tries, Japan did not recruit migrant workers during the post-war economic boom in the 1960s and
the 1970s. Methodologically speaking, Japan was a “negative case”. It had been understood that the
Japanese economy coped without a labour migration programme because the domestic labour market
was flexible. That is, Japanese workers internally migrated from rural to urban areas. In contrast,
Bartram argues that the institutional structure of Japanese political economy explains the absence of
international labour migration. In the post-war period, the Japanese bureaucracy and business actors
maintained a cosy relationship. However, the state-business dyad was in fact a state-big-business
dyad. Big businesses could automate production or relocate it offshore. Small and medium busi-
nesses, on the other hand, lacked such resources and would have been the beneficiary of immigra-
tion reforms. Their policy demand was effectively ignored due to their outsider status.
Fast-forwarding the clock, the Japanese government maintains that legally admitted economic
migrants must be skilled workers. The statistics on migrant workers, however, published by the
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare tell a different story (Ministry of Health, Labour and Wel-
fare, 2016). Out of 907,896 people registered by employers as non-nationals in 2015, only 18.4
had one of the skilled work visas. At the same time, 18.5 percent of them had the technical intern
trainee visa, an immigration channel widely known to be used by small and medium businesses to
recruit low-skilled workers. How can the numbers of skilled and low-skilled migrant workers be
*Free University of Berlin
doi: 10.1111/imig.12383
©2018 The Author
International Migration ©2018 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (5) 2018
ISS N 00 20- 7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
virtually the same given the government’s policy principle to forego low-skilled labour migration?
Is Japan still a negative case?
The aim of this article is to explain the dissonance between the government’s policy rhetoric and
policy outcome by turning to policy output. To this end, I quantitatively analyse immigration
admission channels for economic migrants using Ruhs’Openness and Rights Indicators (2013). To
my knowledge, this kind of stock-taking exercise has not been undertaken despite the growth of
scholarship on Japanese immigration policy. The main findings not only go against much of what
we believe about Japan but also helps us reach a more nuanced understanding of its immigration
policies. I demonstrate that Japanese immigration admission policies have become more open
towards de facto low-skilled economic migrants over time and are more open to de facto low-
skilled economic migrants than to de jure skilled economic migrants. Instead of openness, the gains
made by certain groups of de jure skilled economic migrants have been exclusive immigration priv-
ileges related to permanent residency and family sponsorship.
These findings, in turn, raise two further questions. First, why does Japan deviate from an inter-
nationally-observed policy pattern in which high-income nations grant greater immigration open-
ness to skilled migrants than to low-skilled migrants? Second, why does the country continue to
insist on barring low-skilled economic migration when apparently it has been happening on a sig-
nificant scale? Although it is beyond the scope of this article to address these questions systemati-
cally, I make a provisional attempt by following Bartram’s footsteps, that is, by exploring evidence
of lobbying activities by organized interest groups.
The article is organized into four substantive sections. First, I provide an overview of Japanese
immigration policies. I discuss the small size of the migrant population, the absence of an admis-
sion channel for permanent migration, gradual expansion of unofficial admission channels for low-
skilled economic migrants, and continued openness towards skilled economic migrants. Second, I
give a methodological clarification of Ruhs’Openness and Rights Indicators and how I have modi-
fied the indicators’application to take into consideration idiosyncratic factors of the Japanese case.
It is also in this section that I elucidate the distinction between de facto low-skilled economic
migrants and de jure skilled economic migrants. Third, I present the openness and rights scores of
five admission channels. Fourth, I discuss the findings and further questions raised by the latter.
JAPAN, THE CLOSED IMMIGRATION COUNTRY
In some ways, Japan faithfully lives up to a widely-held stereotype that it is a staunch non-immigration
country. Strictly speaking, the Japanese government does not even have an official immigration policy.
As has been kindly pointed out to me time and time again by didactic Japanese bureaucrats, Japan only
has foreigners for whom there is a foreigner policy. Immigration policy, in other words, is understood
to be an artefact of Western countries where there are real immigrants. What exactly constitutes
Japan’s immigration closure though? For one thing, immigration is a long-drawn process whereby
non-citizens first enter the host country, and those who want to and are allowed to stay permanently
become integrated into the host society. Closure can occur at the point of admission and/or at the point
of integration. Moreover, there are different kinds of migrants: economic, educational, spousal, co-eth-
nic, undocumented, and forced. To be sure, these categories are artificial because the purpose of migra-
tion, in reality, has for many a combination of multiple motivations. At the same time, immigration
policies in most countries, including Japan, are designed to selectively target migrants based on these
very categories. It is therefore worth examining policies in greater detail rather than making an all too
general observation that a given country is closed to immigration at large.
There are many ways in which Japan has been characterized as a closed immigration country.
The first, and perhaps most common, point made is that the size of the foreign population is
A Closed Immigration Country 107
©2018 The Author. International Migration ©2018 IOM
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