Japan is set to import 800,000 low-skill workers, allegedly to solve a labor shortage despite over 10 million working-age Japanese who are not working because wages are too low.
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) April 11, 2024
As in the US, voters are massively opposed. But, also as in the US, big business is pushing mass… https://t.co/GTrqY30gHb
After years of putting their own people first, the government of Japan is now embracing mass immigration. A few days ago, Bloomberg reported that the number of foreign workers in Japan hit a record 2 million, up a quarter million in just two years. That's in a country a third the size of the US so multiply everything by 3. The workers are overwhelmingly blue collar, working assembly lines at factories. That's half a million construction; retail at 600,000; and services and caregivers at 400,000. Already some towns in Japan are a fifth foreign blue collar, which is new in Japan. The Japanese government aims to rapidly accelerate this bringing in another $300,000 Blue Collar immigrants every year through 2040. One pilot program aims at 800,000 starting immediately. Incidentally, this is massively opposed by Japanese voters. Bloomberg sites a 2018 survey that found just 23% of Japanese want more immigration with voters worrying it could lead to rising crime and jeopardize security and harmony. Indeed just a few months ago, the Japanese government announced that crime had risen for the first time in 20 years, something Japanese might need to get used to.
So if voters oppose it, who is pushing mass immigration? As in the US, it's driven by companies who employ unskilled migrants who would like to pay peanuts and leave the social consequences to others. What Japan's voters do want is for their government to address the flood of Japanese fleeing to other countries because domestic jobs don't pay enough.
I've mentioned in recent videos how immigrants don't actually solve labor shortages because they bring their own labor shortage with them. They go to the dentist, they go to restaurants, they need plumbers; otherwise, America could just annex Canada and have 40 million left over workers. What mass immigrants do solve is shortages in specific industries, such as low skilled fruit pickers in the US, or taxi drivers in Japan. The twist, of course, is that there are plenty of underemployed low-skilled natives in both America and Japan. So fully 1 in 8 Japanese in their 20s and 30s are not working: it's about 5 million untapped workers. For those in their 50s it's 1 in 4, so that's another five million on top of that. As for Japanese who do have a job, one article last year profiled the typical experience for young Japanese trapped in low skill and low pay jobs 7-Eleven, for example, pays $5.71 an hour in Japan. As the article puts it, those working poor "are happy to just stay afloat while they rent until death." So forget starting a family or even saving up for retirement; they are living hand to mouth. Why are those jobs so low paid? Because there is not actually a shortage. And importing 2 million low-skilled foreigners, actually 7 million by 2040, will make them even lower wage.
The mass immigration industrial complex sadly has reached one of the last holdouts. As in Europe and America, voters do not want it but special interests write big political checks in Tokyo as much as in Washington. The media will tar any opposition as xenophobia, while the young keep losing hope looking with envy on the childhood they themselves enjoyed but are now unable to provide.
