Japan as a Country of Non-Immigration

Until 2019, Japan was the only mature democracy to maintain closed borders to unskilled foreign labor since the end of World War II. Despite facing significant labor shortages since the 1980s, plummeting fertility rates, and a rapidly aging population, Japan's foreign population has not exceeded 4 percent of the total population since the early 1950s. This talk takes stock of Japan's immigration policies since the 1990s to consider how Japan has maintained closed-door immigration policies despite labor shortages, what distinguishes Japan's migration regime from those of other wealthy democracies, and prospects for change. While recent reforms may signal a shift toward liberalization, I argue that Japan is not becoming a country of immigration similar to liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe. Rather, Japan's model of immigration control--characterized by partially open borders and discrete institutionalized rights for specific subcategories of migrants--is increasingly becoming the norm for migrant-receiving countries across the world.

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She previously served as founding co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program and director of the East Asian Studies Program at Hopkins. She is the award-winning author of Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge, 2010) and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies (Cambridge, 2020). She is currently serving as co-editor of the Politics and Society of East Asia Elements series at Cambridge University Press and co-P.I. for the Initiative on Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) at Hopkins. She specializes in East Asian political economy, migration and citizenship, and comparative racial politics.