Through immigration control, a nation-state draws the border between citizens and non-citizens. The state may also differentiate internal populations in welfare provision, excluding “marginals”—including some immigrants—from its protective regime. The “Borders and Margins” framework lies at the heart of this paper on politics of Japan’s immigration policy in the post-WWII era. Despite the apparent structural urgency of aging, depopulation, and labor shortage, why has the Japanese state opposed a liberal immigration policy? I identify three explanatory factors of Japan’s long-lasting restrictive attitude against immigration: (1) neoliberal concern about welfare costs for immigration; (2) historical path dependence (i.e., lasting repercussions of the unsolved compensation issue to former colonial subjects; and (3) the type of political regime (i.e., Japan’s liberal democracy embracing egalitarianism and multiculturalism compels the government not to take a draconian “labor inclusion but welfare exclusion" policy). I then demonstrate how these factors are compounded to foist a political constraint on policymakers to defer immigration. As a result, only short-sighted, piecemeal (and often distorted) institutional changes have been made.
The paper employs a qualitative, process-tracing approach, analyzing mostly government documents, legislative records, and court rulings from Japanese archives and libraries. Quantitative data analysis of immigration-related statistics is also done, when adequate. This single case study, treating Japan's immigration policy as a unit of analysis, also places the case into a larger regional context, comparing it with other Asian immigrant-receiver nations such as Singapore and Thailand whose authoritarian states feel freer to opt for a more outright self-serving immigration policies.
Drawing on the path-dependence perspective of historical institutionalism, this study provides a more complicated, nuanced, and history-sensitive account of the continuity of Japan’s illiberal immigration policy than the predominant narratives by cultural determinism (e.g., xenophobia and nativism) or economic protectionism (against foreign labor).
