COVID-19 Has Not Stopped Japan from Officially Recognizing Itself as a Country Newly Open to Immigrants

For decades, Japan has been living a convenient fiction. The country accepted hundreds of thousands of low- and semi-skilled workers, giving them fixed contracts renewable only for a set number of times and prohibiting them from bringing with them family members from their home countries, in a bid to convince a mostly ethnically homogenous general public that they are only temporary guest workers who will leave when their work is finished. The policy marks them as "separate and unequal" from more skilled white-collar workers, who can bring dependents and eventually become permanent residents or citizens.

The dichotomy is based on a questionable belief that highly skilled workers are a rarity in Japan and only these "good" immigrants are needed for the country. Because they are few, they cannot demographically affect the country's cultural composition, and because they are well-educated, they are not expected to become sources of crime and delinquency, whereas low-skilled workers are expected to misbehave in a way that systematically upends social order. Such a behavior ensured that plenty of low-skilled immigrants risk going "dark" (i.e. completely illegal) when they can no longer legally renew their visas.

That convenient fiction of a country relying only on very few highly skilled immigrants died last month when the Japanese government formally announced that a new class of "specified skilled" workers in 14 categories of menial work like farming and construction are now allowed to renew five-year visas infinitely and bring their family members to Japan. In essence, workers in the 14 categories are now treated equally in policies as highly skilled workers, suddenly boosting the number of permanent resident track foreigners in Japan by hundreds of thousands. 

Unsurprisingly, the announcement has only been covered tersely by mainstream media outlets. Understandably, all attention now is being devoted to border closures about keeping the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus out of the country, with stories about flight cancellations, who are the foreigners actually eligible to enter the country, and Japanese nationals stranded abroad. In a country that is temporarily not seeing a new influx of foreign workers, interest in what visas new entrants will get and how long they will stay in Japan seem to draw scant interest.

But where there is interest, there seems to be a palpable sense of hostility. In social media post after social media post, usually meek and apolitical Japanese general public has spoken out directly and bluntly against the new policy, remarking that it is bound to transform the country in a way that is less culturally Japanese. It may have been wise for the Japanese government to choose a fortunate time to announce the reality that more foreigners will live in Japan permanently, but when the COVID-19 pandemic blows by and the country opens to more inbound arrivals again, the issue of permanent immigration will again rile the public.

Angry or not the Japanese general public may be, though, it does not change the reality that, more often than not, low-skilled workers are more in need to run the Japanese economy and they are more likely to show up to Japan anyways. Whereas tech executives would spurn Japan's low compensation compared to the likes of Silicon Valley, not to mention the extra cost of having to learn a brand-new language and culture, menial workers would see their wages bid up as industries as varied as nursing, manufacturing, construction, and logistics can no longer secure enough young Japanese workers to keep operating.

For these highly demanded workers, the new visa regime will protect them from a hostile general public and sometimes hostile employers. Their mental help will be strengthened by having family members by their side and their ability to eventually get to permanent residency means employers can no longer mistreat them with the assumption that they have no way of simply switching to new jobs. With more permanent ties to Japan, the workers themselves will also have greater means and incentives to find out about and defend their labor rights at the expense of abusive employers.

Perhaps the inclusion of 14 categories under the "specified skills" definition represents a larger trend for Japanese immigration policies. While these categories are already broadly defined to encompass hundreds of thousands, many more workers still fall outside of it. It is very much possible that, as demand from other industries for workers becomes even more urgent, the number of categories under the definition will further increase, to the point that all low- and semi-skilled workers entering Japan will be on the visa soon. When that day comes, Japan's transition to a full immigrant-accepting country will be complete.