Send us your construction workers, your care givers, your store clerks”•but for a limited time only.
That’s the message from Japan, where the number of foreign workers, though still relatively small, has nearly doubled over the past eight years, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party is considering policies to speed up arrivals.
Just don’t call it immigration. Japan will allow more unskilled workers to enter temporarily, as companies struggle to fill positions in a country with the lowest unemployment rate among Group of Seven nations. Abe has made it clear that opening the country to permanent immigration by unskilled labor isn’t an option, reflecting an historic fear among the Japanese people that foreigners would cause social unrest and erode national identity.
“In Japan, the word ‘immigrant’ is not used in policy making,” former economy minister Heizo Takenaka said in an interview Tuesday. “The prime minister often says it’s not immigration, it’s guest workers.”
Masahiko Shibayama, a lawmaker and adviser to Abe, is among those testing the boundaries as policy makers seek to meet the needs of a country with a shrinking population. He has called for a guest-worker program that would give five-year visas for sectors suffering from labor shortages. Yet he noted that even a recent tourism boom has raised questions among Japanese about how many foreigners should be here.
“For ordinary people, they see the rapid increase in foreign tourists and they see more foreigners downtown, so it’s not strange that some think, ‘Is it good that it’s increasing this much?’” Shibayama said in an interview. “I think it’s important to establish a culture that accepts foreign workers. However, in the case of Japan, it’ll be totally different from the large number of refugees that went to Europe, so I don’t think public opinion will be split on the issue.”
The cross-border flow of workers has animated politics across the world, including the US presidential election campaign and the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. In Japan, immigration is widely touted as one of the few obvious solutions to its demographic and economic challenges. Economists point to it as a source of growth as well as labor. The government projects Japan’s population of 127 million will shrink by 19 million people by 2040.
Central bank Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said in a speech last week in Tokyo that more foreign labor is essential for Japan to achieve sustainable long-term growth.
Japan needs the help now. A 2015 Manpower Survey found that 83 percent of Japanese hiring managers had difficulty filling jobs, compared with a global average of 38 percent.
The government has taken a more welcoming approach to highly skilled foreign workers who are the objects of a global war for talent. Abe this year vowed to provide them with the world’s fastest path to permanent residency. Currently, a person generally becomes eligible for permanent residency after living in Japan for 10 consecutive years.