Japan is not Xenophobic, but Seems Poised to Repeat our Mistakes
On Wednesday President Biden chastised America’s most important Pacific ally, Japan, as xenophobic. He smeared India with the same insult, conflating both democracies with China and Russia — suggesting tight borders as the primary driver of economic woes in all four.
“Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants,” Biden insisted.
This man has clearly mastered the talking points of the open-borders ideologues he has appointed to his administration. He then doubled down on confusing his open borders bedlam with economic dynamism.
“Our economy is growing is because of you and many others. Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden argued.
Never mind that at the start of 2023, FAIR’s researchers determined the annual net cost of illegal immigration alone at the federal, state and local levels was a combined $150.7 billion. But to the President’s point, Japan does have a well-earned reputation for the strictest immigration policies in the developed world. Amid the economic struggles of 2009, the government made headlines by paying laid off South American auto workers of Japanese descent to leave.
Last summer an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal praised Japan for its “second economic miracle,” growing the labor force by 4.2 million workers since 2012 without dramatically boosting immigration (until very recently), despite population falling by 3 million over that period. This was accomplished primarily by recruiting more women and older workers into part-time positions.
Here in America, one hackneyed talking point among open borders advocates is that we need more immigrants to “fill jobs Americans won’t do.” Perhaps it’s the wages, not the jobs themselves, these potential workers find unacceptable. Last year Walmart CEO Bill Simon called for more legal immigration to dampen inflation because the increased labor supply would suppress wages. Suppression of wages should not be a goal of U.S. immigration policy. In fact, one of the stated reasons for setting limits on immigration is to protect American workers from having their wages eroded.
Simon also ignored the impact of immigration on inflation: increased demand for housing, food and everything else. Foreigners who are brought in to satisfy industry’s demands for low wage workers inevitably require large public subsidies because, as previously mentioned, they are being paid a depressed wage rate. German Labor Minister Hubertus Heil lamented the results from waves of immigration to his country in decades past.
“We asked for workers. We got people instead,” Heil said, referencing a prominent Swiss writer.
Now back to the Far East. Japan’s shift toward looser immigration policies has accelerated under the tenure of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who took office in October 2021. For example, in 2019 Tokyo announced it would offer 345,000 new worker visas over the next five years. That figure was more than doubled this year to 800,000. Government data shows the number of foreign nationals in Japan grew by 11% from 2022 to 2023. Kishida also changed a visa program that permits foreign workers to bring their families — indefinitely expanding the number of eligible industries from two to 11.
The proof that mass immigration is a net drain on the economy transcends borders and decades. Data from the University College of London showed that between 1995 – 2011 immigrants to the U.K. took at least £95 billion more than they contributed. British taxpayers have spent £36 billion subsidizing foreign students and “economically inactive” migrants since 2020.
The lesson to all Western leaders is that sacrificing national harmony for cheap labor and cheaper platitudes is a foolish tradeoff. Any economic benefits from mass immigration are overshadowed by the economic disorder that inevitably follows. Prioritizing the living standards of your citizenry over the demands of special interest groups seeking limitless immigration is not xenophobia. The correct term is statesmanship.