Transnational Trajectories in East Asia: Nation, Citizenship, and Region by Yasemin Nuho?lu Soysal

Author:Yasemin Nuho?lu Soysal [Soysal, Yasemin Nuho?lu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138646285
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 30689561
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sources: Immigration Bureau of Japan 2010a, Korea Immigration Service 2010, National Immigration Agency, Taiwan, Republic of China 2010.

Although Japan has always had multiple ethnic groups as a result of its colonial practices (Lie 2001) and also hosts growing numbers of foreigners, it resembles South Korea and not European states in not allowing family reunification and migrant settlement, particularly for low-skilled foreigners (Peach 2003). South

Korea has adopted some of Japan’s immigration control policies; for example, Korea’s initiation of its “5-year plan against illegal immigration” in 2008 followed a similar plan implemented in Japan from 2003 to 2008 (Korea Immigration Service 2009: 75–6, Shipper 2008: 50). However, unlike South Korea, Japan has maintained its formal policy stance of not admitting low-skilled migrants despite continuing pressure from civil society and major industrial groups (also see Yamanaka 2010).

Japan offers no work permits or visas to low-skilled workers. Foreigners who take up manufacturing, agricultural, or service jobs in Japan come on special visas as industrial “trainees” to work in the Technical Intern Training Program and are not officially workers. Ostensibly, they are in Japan to learn skills valuable to multinational companies that also operate in their homelands. While Japan’s admission of trainees as de facto “guest workers” may be traced to the Technical Development Plan that the Ministry of Labor adopted in 1971, policy-makers expanded this source of labor in terms of the number of trainees allowed per firm and the number of eligible firms and industries in the early 1990s (Bartram 2005: 115, Shimada 1994: 70). Foreigners on student visas also do low-skilled work in Japan (Liu-Farrer 2011, Shipper 2008).

Furthermore, Japan reserves settlement and family visas for professionals and specialty occupations only (with the exception of family members of ethnic Japanese who had previously emigrated, as discussed in the following section).4 Not surprisingly, there has been relatively little research published in English on migrant settlement or permanent migrant communities in Japan; scholarship has focused instead on various short-term or isolated migrants such as entertainers, migrant wives, and international students (see, for example, Faier 2009, Liu-Farrer 2011, Parreñas 2010, 2011, Shipper 2002, 2008). One study of “migrants and their children” discusses only the children of migrants who had children with Japanese nationals (Terasawa 2000).

These legal constraints on migrant settlement for low-skilled migrant workers are backed up by a state that has the capacity to enforce its immigration laws. As Shipper (2002) argued, illegal Asian workers “cannot form a permanent community” due to their fear of immigration raids. For instance, he observed that:

When a close-knit community of several thousand Thais was formed in Tsuchiura-shi in the Ibaraki Prefecture in the early 1990s, the Immigration Office conducted several raids that effectively dissolved the local Thai community. Thereafter, Thais were afraid to come together in large numbers, fearing that they would again be an easy target for raids.

(Shipper 2002: 46)

Similarly, as Seol and Skrentny (2009a: 609) discuss, evidence from field research on international migrants in East Asia reveals how Chinese migrants’ awareness of such punitive measures in Japan

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