Overseas workers: visitors or citizens?
Post date: Aug 04, 2018 3:38:8 AM
Japan's labour shortage
TOKYO - Japan's move toward opening its doors to more foreign workers is widely seen as a must to better cope with an expected shrinkage in the working population.
But the challenges facing an aging Japan are manifold as observers call for a clear-cut, rather than makeshift, approach, and stress the need to create a society easier for foreign nationals to live and work in.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe instructed Cabinet ministers the same day to make preparations for Japan to accept more foreign workers by offering a new residential status starting next April.
The plan being considered would set a five-year limit on residence under the new status, a point the government uses to distinguish the step from encouraging immigration.
The government aims to realize a society in which both Japanese and non-Japanese people can coexist and plans to draw up measures to help foreign nationals learn Japanese and find housing.
==Kyodo
Assimilation or Integration
Assimilation is generally defined as adopting the ways of another culture and fully becoming part of a different society. Whereas integration is typically defined as incorporating individuals from different groups into a society as equals. The difference is subtle but significant.
When immigrants assimilate, they accept the ways of their host and become a full part of the community. Assimilation implies that immigrants, through education and experience, can earn their way into the host culture and be seamlessly accepted as full members of their new community.
By contrast, integration suggests boundaries. It is defined in terms of equality. But in this context equality indicates that a host is obligated to embrace foreign cultures as equal, even when they conflict with the values and traditions of the host.
Edited from: https://immigrationreform.com/2016/09/29/the-important-difference-between-assimilation-and-integration/
Who assimilates who?
Australian Aborigines can trace 50000 years of history on the island continent now called Australia.
Yet their attempts to have visitors to their country assimilate have been totally unsuccessful.
Are we going in Circles, Can Japanese society accept increased immigration...
One of the great givens regarding Japan’s aging population and declining birthrate is that an influx of immigrants, or “replacement migration,” is needed if the nation’s pension burden is not to become unmanageable, and the shrinking labor force harm the economy.
The introduction of foreign labor is an established and successful means of relieving labor shortages and, as has been the case in the U.S., a cause of increased productivity.
However, the promotion of large scale, long term immigration when applied to Japan at this time is flawed in several key respects.
Most crucially, assuming large numbers of immigrants were admitted, what kind of welcome would they receive?
If Japan is to seriously consider increasing immigration, then it must also be serious about creating a social and legal framework that allows for the successful long-term integration of immigrants into society. There is none at present.
These results reflect legislative attitudes here, which have seen the passage only of laws designed to control foreigners and absolutely none to protect them from discrimination.
In other words, while Japan is having trouble coping with the foreign population that’s already here, it should hardly be talking about increasing it substantially.
If unskilled foreign workers are brought in to fill the labor gap — and they would come — then the profile of these workers in Japan must change; from one of doing the jobs that Japanese won’t do themselves, to one of filling employment needs when and where they arise.
These workers must also be offered the rights, rewards and status enjoyed by Japanese workers, and steps taken to fully assimilate them.
At present, however, officialdom appears far happier to turn a blind eye to illegal — and essential — foreign labor and then target it as a source of social problems when political expediency dictates.
And the debate on immigration also ignores one basic demographic fact: immigrants also age.
A 2001 report by the U.N.’s population division on whether replacement migration is a solution to the problem of an aging society concluded that Japan will need to admit over 530 million immigrants by 2050 to maintain the current support ratio between pensioners and workers.
The report concluded that large-scale immigration was presently unsuitable for Japan since there is no precedent for admitting and assimilating large numbers of foreigners.
Edited from: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2004/09/14/issues/japan-and-the-immigration-issue/#.W2PewFAzY-c
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