Interesting article, but this part is off the mark (sorry, Noah):
“Its evolution on immigration hasn’t resembled the U.S., Canada, or Australia, but it has been roughly similar to that of many European countries.”
Pretty much every Western European country has been taking in way more immigrants way before Japan, and most Central and Eastern European countries have started to do so at a far earlier stage of economic development than Japan as well.
You're very knowledgeable about Japan and that's great! But some of your casual remarks about Europe are just off the mark.
Yes, Australia and Canada are special. Net migration rates to the US, however, are actually closer to those of many European countries than the rates of those are to Japan (and it's been like that for a while).
And I emphasize that this is the data for extra-EU immigrants in the EU (just the same for the US & Japan).
If you add intra-EU migration - which is quite different from moving within the US or within Japan due differences in language, culture, laws etc. - the European rates would be much higher still.
So the three types of speed in this are pretty much:
- very fast: Australia & Canada
- middling: US & EU
- slow (but accelerating): Japan
Note also how the US has had the lowest relative increase of any of these places since 2010 and the second-lowest absolute increase as well, only slightly behind Japan (1.4 percentage points vs 1.3).
So if anything, immigration to all rich countries has been increasing a lot lately while the US has fallen behind, relatively speaking.
Great post and it got me to pay for a subscription! But I do have one quibble. You say, "It needs to focus more on high-skilled immigrants, since people with good jobs are less likely to turn to crime." It may be true that college graduates in white-collar work are less likely to turn to crime. But if there's a glaring shortage of convenience store clerks and elder care aides, asking for lots of diplomas--which is what "skills" inevitably means in the context of immigration--seems the wrong way to go about preventing immigrant crime. If you're going to discriminate on the basis of probabilities, it would make more sense to exclude men under, say, 35.
A big difference between Japan and Europe is that immigrants in Japan are virtually all workers, whilst asylum-seekers and refugees comprise a large proportion of the total in Europe. If or when someone does commit a serious crime, if they come from an unsafe country it makes deporting them a lot more legally complicated than if they are a worker from a safe country. Sending someone back to the Philippines will be a lot less complicated than sending someone back to Syria or Eritrea, if it’s possible at all in the first place.
I think that when people hear about immigrants who did commit serious crimes but just cannot be sent back to wherever they came from, it leads to perceptions souring a lot. It’s then unfortunate that the majority of otherwise law-abiding immigrants become tarnished with this brush.
I was in Tokyo yesterday, and most of the people working at 7-11s are either Desi or SE Asian. It's a bit strange that automation doesn't seem as widespread in Japan as it is in Korea despite Japan being a more aged society. Perhaps it's because I live in Songdo, which may be abnormally high in automation.
I don't think every country's going to embrace immigration. I foresee poor countries with low TFR being unable to attract immigrants and hence being trapped in poverty as their populations age.
They have the large screen payment machines to speed throughput, but retain the cashiers anyway. I guess their purpose is to provide a human face, and ask whether you want to buy a bag, or whether you will eat your purchased snacks in the store, since that changes the sales tax rate.
They have self service drink machines, and this led to an incident in Hyogoken where a 59 year old teacher was fired because another teacher saw him push the button for a large coffee after paying for a small. He admitted he did this regularly and was forced to resign, loosing his pension.
Convenience store coffee also caused a man to be charged with murder, after he poured latte in a regular coffee cup, was warned by the 74 year old store owner and then ran out to his car, followed by the owner who tried to grab him in his car. The culprit then drove away dragged the owner for 250 meters resulting in his death, and a subsequent robbery and murder charge all because of a latte. Check out the NipponTV NewsZero video report with animated reenactment.
"a 59 year old teacher was fired because another teacher saw him push the button for a large coffee after paying for a small."
"after he poured latte in a regular coffee cup, was warned by the 74 year old store owner and then ran out to his car, followed by the owner who tried to grab him in his car. The culprit then drove away dragged the owner for 250 meters resulting in his death, and a subsequent robbery and murder charge all because of a latte."
They take their petty coffee "crimes" seriously ...
According to both the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia, ethnic Japanese make up 97%+ of Japan today. I suspect your experiences with Japan "opening itself to massive immigration" may be specific to the major cities where you lived, since the overall data does not bear that out.
For comparison, in 1960, America's ethnic composition was 88% white, 11% black, and 1% other.
"Simply copy-pasting America’s libertarian approach will not be optimal. Japan needs to focus on high-skilled immigrants, since people with good jobs are less likely to turn to crime. It needs to implement active assimilation policies, like making sure that everyone learns to speak Japanese. And it should try to bias its immigration system toward countries that are already culturally not too distinct from Japan, such as Vietnam."
Do you even realize that this is nearly verbatim what the Right advocates for America: points/skills based immigration, mandatory English, weighting by cultural compatibility? So it's good for Japan, but nearly every member of your party says its racist for America. Why?
"Do you even realize that this is nearly verbatim what the Right advocates for America: points/skills based immigration, mandatory English, weighting by cultural compatibility?"
Who, specifically, do you know who advocates this?
When OP says "the right" he might be referring to the electorate. This poll (link below) found that 86% of Republicans favour a points-based system, compared with only 50% of Democrats. (I'm not sure how good PRRI polls are).
As regards concrete policy proposals, closest might be the RAISE Act. On the one hand, it is true that RAISE sought to introduce a points-based system to increase the percentage of immigration which is high-skilled. On the other hand, it would have cut the total number of green cards in half, and most of the (perfectly reasonable and bipartisan) opposition to it was due to this.
So Republicans will put points-based reform on the table, but only at the cost of decreased overall levels and removal of a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And of course not all Republicans like high-skilled immigration – see the recent drama on X. That being said, the Democrats don't seem to want a points-based system at all. Half their voters oppose it, and prominent members of the party never talk about it, except to criticise it as being cruel.
Pat Buchanan advocated almost precisely this agenda 30 years ago. TAC (The American Conservative) has advocated essentially the same thing since its founding.
"Immigration policy is a national security issue, for which we have one test: Does it serve the national interest? ... we must empower employers so they can know with confidence that those they hire are permitted to work. ... In our multiethnic nation, everyone — immigrants and nativeborn alike — must embrace our core values of liberty, equality, meritocracy,and respect for human dignity and the rights of women."
"...a policy of strategic immigration, granting more work visas to holders of advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math from other nations. Highly educated immigrants can assist in creating new services and products. The greatest asset of the American economy is the American worker. Just as immigrant labor helped build our country in the past, today’s legal immigrants are making vital contributions in every aspect of our national life."
There are some more isolationist voices recently (the right-wing corollary to "borders are racist" crowd on the Left), but "enforce the border but welcome legal immigrants based on American needs" has been the dominant strand of right wing thought for decades.
"It often goes unremarked that the number of workers from overseas has more than doubled in the last decade alone, while the broader foreign community (including students and families) has risen 50%…Based on population projections, conversation has already been shifting to a future where foreigners will make up more than 10% of people in the country 50 years from now — similar to the current levels of the US, UK or France…"
That's not today. And a lot can happen in 2 generations. Projecting to 2075 for either Japan or America is foolish. Japan today is essentially a mono-ethnic and monocultural society.
Note that if a majority of convenience store clerks in big cities in Japan are now immigrants, that makes the phenomenon of immigration high visibility in Japan, even if the actual numbers are small. Similarly, if the majority of news anchors in Japan were immigrants, it would be a high visibility phenomenon. That is why such a high visibility event as a mixed race beauty queen caused such a stir.
> According to both the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia, ethnic Japanese make up 97%+ of Japan today.
I am not at all sure that's correct. For one thing the government doesn't actually track this, though private surveys might - your secondary sources are likely misreading the % of people who are Japanese citizens.
For another thing it changes rapidly and is different in Tokyo in particular, where all the young people live.
I think you could also mention in this post why GDP still matters in this case, to address arguments that "elites only want mass migration to boost GDP and living standards could go to hell". Adding this part would make your arguments about immigration much more convincing, since you probably already know about the current "vibecession" though.
Also, from your point of view when did we start to have "vibecession" (i.e. people don't have same perception about economic growth compared to real data) in the world? I think that might happen for many years (and not just from Biden's era: a good example is when an anti-Brexit advocate told voters that leaving EU would lead to decline in GDP, a British woman yelled that "But how does the GDP matter to me anyway?")
We started to have vibe cession in CA when housing costs became unaffordable, child care expenses unsustainable , and ROI of a large number of undergraduate and advanced degrees declined relative to their expense.
There are simply more young adults, many of them raised middle class, now struggling to achieve middle class lives themselves in places like CA. An increase in GDP isn’t commensurate with an increase in standard of living evenly throughout the workforce. It rewarded people like me, Engineers paid in RSUs, with 401k holdings more than anyone else while leaving my friends and family behind.
OCED countries are not having enough sex and children. We can certainly blame the pill as the single thing that has changed, but we would be fooling ourselves.
To many of our youth, children are a burden. They cost too much and prevent me from having fun and living however I want. It seems to couple, and relationships are not as attractive as they once were.
My daughters tell me boys and young men are only interested in getting laid. Not relationships. There is a crisis among our young men. Women are surpassing them in accomplishments. More women in Medical School for example. Sperm counts are down and I hear so is testosterone.
Women have changed, and being pregnant for 20 years is no longer tolerable. They also want careers and fulfillment. We are in trouble. Immigration will save us, but only for a while.
Not gonna lie, as someone who grew up in Muslim Malaysia, as a member of the non Muslim minority, while I want the west to accept more immigrants, even if they are Muslims, I don't blame your friend for being upset at mosque calls to prayer.
Well in Japan it’s kind of a strange complaint, given the noise pollution, even in rural areas; from politicians driving around speechifying in sound trucks, yakiimo and takoyaki trucks with loud jingles, pachinko parlors with deafening bells and music, early morning civic announcements over large speakers, and bosuzoku gangs of youths riding around in the early morning on small motorcycles with the mufflers removed just to annoy society. There’s more litter around in rural areas than tourists expect, but the constant noise is even more surprising to those who expect zen quiet.
> There have been a few minor tensions with Vietnamese immigrants — one Japanese person I know complained of them catching and eating doves
I laughed at this because this is SUCH a Vietnamese thing to do, too.
We recently moved from Vietnam to Australia and my wife pointed out that in Vietnam someone would have caught and eaten all the beautiful native birds like galahs and cockatoos that you see all over.
Interesting point about how Japan wants to send racially Japanese immigrants from Brazil back to Brazil. You mentioned how this example illustrates the difference between race and culture. I’m not sure. First, I don’t know what you mean by “culture.” Do they not speak Japanese well? Which norms don’t they conform to? How can Japanese Japanese tell that they are different? Are they segregated and oppositional to the mainstream? People tend to use “culture” as a stand-in for “undetermined non-genetic influences,” thereby implicitly shifting the normal burden of proof in argument or implying that they’re saying something more than, “I don’t know why these people are different.”
Second, the Brazilian Japanese could differ due to reasons related to ancestry if not race as such. They were selected twice. First, only a fraction of Japanese left to Brazil during the 19th century. How were these people different from general Japanese? Second, another fraction came back. So it’s not a representative Japanese vs Japanese sample.
According to the impression I got from Noah's podcast, they basically acted the same way other Brazilian immigrants would have. There's nothing especially wrong with Brazilian culture that I know of, but I don't think it has much in common with Japanese culture.
I don't think you can take Japan off the hook for not wanting certain immigrants without also letting Americans off the hook, because I don't think it's really "cultural compatibiliy" that matters, so much as more objective cultural measures of what makes a good neighbor.
People in countries want more orderly, more law-abiding people immigrating. If I'm Japanese or Swiss, I want that. If I'm American, I also want that. Importantly, the reverse is not true. People in low-order societies won't mind much if they get high-order immigrants.
So regardless of the current orderly-ness of a place, we all want and don't want the same types of immigrants (outside of true racists/xenophobes - which all countries have a lot of.)
It might even be *more* important to favor high-trust, law-abiding cultures for immigration into the US. In Japan, they're probably more likely to assimilate into Japanese culture than the they are in the US, which has less of a strong national culture to assimilate to.
The US is culturally highly assimilational culture; we already see this with the first and especially second generation Hispanic Americans. The immigrant generation themselves have varying degrees of success, but their children (IME) are as American (USian) as the children of previous immigrant waves from our past.
I would expect the same, I was simply arguing that your assertion that people are MORE likely to assimilate in Japan than the US doesn’t hold water to me.
One thing to note though: you end up on the note that immigration is what the rest of the century will look like… however all this must be only a temporary period, mathematically, no? The brutal decline of fertility is worldwide and by the end of the century we are likely to be well into a new age in term of demographics, with virtually no country on earth growing anymore.
At some point on this way I expect things to turn more nasty, as attracting young, fertile and productive people will turn into an existential zero sum game.
To attract those people, countries will have to remove the burden of its aging population on the working population. With strong economic growth, this could be done without hard compromises, but in countries like Western Europe that started stagnating, it’s likely going to involve large changes in social redistribution schemes, or the countries will start to hollow out as young people abandon them, as it started playing out in Italy.
Does this all makes sense? Would love to read an article of yours that would explore how this could play out over the medium term Noah!
Could increased productivity bw a way for Japan to deal with labor shortages? There are at least some jobs done here manually that could be automated (eg petrol pump attendants).
Of course, but to say the words "increased productivity" is incredibly easy, and to boost productivity above and beyond what it would otherwise be is incredibly hard...this is kind of another magic wand...
Self service gasoline is getting more common in Japan, as is self service checkout at grocery stores. Productivity at convenience stores is increased by the automated machines that handle all kinds of payment (cash, credit card, Suica, PayPay, ApplePay, etc) and automate age verification for tobacco or alcohol (it really just asks you), these aren’t self service, and a cashier (usually young immigrant, fluent enough in Japanese) but they speed transactions and handle a large flow of customers during rush hour in train stations where a Seven Eleven might have 10 of these in a row.
Many low productivity jobs seem to be mostly job programs for the elderly, like the traffic guards at even minor road construction sites who just stand there waving a red light, or parking lot assistants and crossing guards, who there are much more of than in other countries and often are very old, like over 80. And at Narita, Haneda and KanKu the immigration checks have dozens of fingerprint/photo machines each with a usually elderly attendant who knows English.
Productivity for small restaurants and ramen shops is often increased by having a vending machine for the customers to buy tickets for what they want, which means no cashier or checks are needed, and since tipping is non existent, the restaurants can have much higher turnover and less workers, keeping prices down (you can find some shops that sell a large bowl of ramen with a pork slice for less than $3). One chain, Ichiran, is famous for, in addition to having ticket vending machines, you sit at a one person booth, with a curtained service window from which your ramen is served without speaking or eye contact necessary.
Not only for Japan though, but automation only partially solve the problem, while the labor shortage would still persist (if we can infer from the past, since despite thousands of years developing labor-saving machines, labor participation rate remains high in the world, and general mass unemployment from technology do not exist!)
Of course, if AGI or ASI are developed and meet their promises, then not only Japan but any country in the world could solve this problem, but they could not be customers anyway.
I mean "automation" in this case, and not just about productivity. Probably I should reword my comments (especially with current knowledge that aging might reduce TFP!)
Happy New Year Noah!
Happy New Year! New Year Essay coming soon...
Interesting article, but this part is off the mark (sorry, Noah):
“Its evolution on immigration hasn’t resembled the U.S., Canada, or Australia, but it has been roughly similar to that of many European countries.”
Pretty much every Western European country has been taking in way more immigrants way before Japan, and most Central and Eastern European countries have started to do so at a far earlier stage of economic development than Japan as well.
You're very knowledgeable about Japan and that's great! But some of your casual remarks about Europe are just off the mark.
Yes, Australia and Canada are special. Net migration rates to the US, however, are actually closer to those of many European countries than the rates of those are to Japan (and it's been like that for a while).
Let's have a look at the data. Which two areas / countries look most similar to you here?
# Share of Immigrants as Percentage of Population (1990-2023)
| Country | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2020 | 2023 |
|---------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|
| **US** | 7.9% | 11.1% | 12.9% | 13.7% | 14.3% |
| **EU** | 5.0% | 6.0% | 7.0% | 9.0% | 10.0% |
| **Japan**| 0.8% | 1.2% | 1.7% | 2.2% | 3.0% |
And I emphasize that this is the data for extra-EU immigrants in the EU (just the same for the US & Japan).
If you add intra-EU migration - which is quite different from moving within the US or within Japan due differences in language, culture, laws etc. - the European rates would be much higher still.
And for good measure, here's Canada and Australia as well:
# Share of Immigrants as Percentage of Population (1990-2023)
| Country | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2020 | 2023 |
|------------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|
| **US** | 7.9% | 11.1% | 12.9% | 13.7% | 14.3% |
| **EU** | 5.0% | 6.0% | 7.0% | 9.0% | 10.0% |
| **Japan** | 0.8% | 1.2% | 1.7% | 2.2% | 3.0% |
| **Australia**|23.1%|22.9% |26.5% |28.2% |30.7%
| **Canada** |16.0% |18.0% |20.0% |22.0% |23.0%
So the three types of speed in this are pretty much:
- very fast: Australia & Canada
- middling: US & EU
- slow (but accelerating): Japan
Note also how the US has had the lowest relative increase of any of these places since 2010 and the second-lowest absolute increase as well, only slightly behind Japan (1.4 percentage points vs 1.3).
So if anything, immigration to all rich countries has been increasing a lot lately while the US has fallen behind, relatively speaking.
Great post and it got me to pay for a subscription! But I do have one quibble. You say, "It needs to focus more on high-skilled immigrants, since people with good jobs are less likely to turn to crime." It may be true that college graduates in white-collar work are less likely to turn to crime. But if there's a glaring shortage of convenience store clerks and elder care aides, asking for lots of diplomas--which is what "skills" inevitably means in the context of immigration--seems the wrong way to go about preventing immigrant crime. If you're going to discriminate on the basis of probabilities, it would make more sense to exclude men under, say, 35.
A big difference between Japan and Europe is that immigrants in Japan are virtually all workers, whilst asylum-seekers and refugees comprise a large proportion of the total in Europe. If or when someone does commit a serious crime, if they come from an unsafe country it makes deporting them a lot more legally complicated than if they are a worker from a safe country. Sending someone back to the Philippines will be a lot less complicated than sending someone back to Syria or Eritrea, if it’s possible at all in the first place.
I think that when people hear about immigrants who did commit serious crimes but just cannot be sent back to wherever they came from, it leads to perceptions souring a lot. It’s then unfortunate that the majority of otherwise law-abiding immigrants become tarnished with this brush.
I was in Tokyo yesterday, and most of the people working at 7-11s are either Desi or SE Asian. It's a bit strange that automation doesn't seem as widespread in Japan as it is in Korea despite Japan being a more aged society. Perhaps it's because I live in Songdo, which may be abnormally high in automation.
I don't think every country's going to embrace immigration. I foresee poor countries with low TFR being unable to attract immigrants and hence being trapped in poverty as their populations age.
They have the large screen payment machines to speed throughput, but retain the cashiers anyway. I guess their purpose is to provide a human face, and ask whether you want to buy a bag, or whether you will eat your purchased snacks in the store, since that changes the sales tax rate.
They have self service drink machines, and this led to an incident in Hyogoken where a 59 year old teacher was fired because another teacher saw him push the button for a large coffee after paying for a small. He admitted he did this regularly and was forced to resign, loosing his pension.
Convenience store coffee also caused a man to be charged with murder, after he poured latte in a regular coffee cup, was warned by the 74 year old store owner and then ran out to his car, followed by the owner who tried to grab him in his car. The culprit then drove away dragged the owner for 250 meters resulting in his death, and a subsequent robbery and murder charge all because of a latte. Check out the NipponTV NewsZero video report with animated reenactment.
https://x.com/ntvnewszero/status/1585295828280700928?s=61
"a 59 year old teacher was fired because another teacher saw him push the button for a large coffee after paying for a small."
"after he poured latte in a regular coffee cup, was warned by the 74 year old store owner and then ran out to his car, followed by the owner who tried to grab him in his car. The culprit then drove away dragged the owner for 250 meters resulting in his death, and a subsequent robbery and murder charge all because of a latte."
They take their petty coffee "crimes" seriously ...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeriousBusiness
Exactly!
According to both the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia, ethnic Japanese make up 97%+ of Japan today. I suspect your experiences with Japan "opening itself to massive immigration" may be specific to the major cities where you lived, since the overall data does not bear that out.
For comparison, in 1960, America's ethnic composition was 88% white, 11% black, and 1% other.
"Simply copy-pasting America’s libertarian approach will not be optimal. Japan needs to focus on high-skilled immigrants, since people with good jobs are less likely to turn to crime. It needs to implement active assimilation policies, like making sure that everyone learns to speak Japanese. And it should try to bias its immigration system toward countries that are already culturally not too distinct from Japan, such as Vietnam."
Do you even realize that this is nearly verbatim what the Right advocates for America: points/skills based immigration, mandatory English, weighting by cultural compatibility? So it's good for Japan, but nearly every member of your party says its racist for America. Why?
"Do you even realize that this is nearly verbatim what the Right advocates for America: points/skills based immigration, mandatory English, weighting by cultural compatibility?"
Who, specifically, do you know who advocates this?
When OP says "the right" he might be referring to the electorate. This poll (link below) found that 86% of Republicans favour a points-based system, compared with only 50% of Democrats. (I'm not sure how good PRRI polls are).
As regards concrete policy proposals, closest might be the RAISE Act. On the one hand, it is true that RAISE sought to introduce a points-based system to increase the percentage of immigration which is high-skilled. On the other hand, it would have cut the total number of green cards in half, and most of the (perfectly reasonable and bipartisan) opposition to it was due to this.
So Republicans will put points-based reform on the table, but only at the cost of decreased overall levels and removal of a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And of course not all Republicans like high-skilled immigration – see the recent drama on X. That being said, the Democrats don't seem to want a points-based system at all. Half their voters oppose it, and prominent members of the party never talk about it, except to criticise it as being cruel.
https://immigrationforum.org/article/american-attitudes-on-immigration-steady-but-showing-more-partisan-divides/
Pat Buchanan advocated almost precisely this agenda 30 years ago. TAC (The American Conservative) has advocated essentially the same thing since its founding.
2008 Republican party Platform: https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2008
"Immigration policy is a national security issue, for which we have one test: Does it serve the national interest? ... we must empower employers so they can know with confidence that those they hire are permitted to work. ... In our multiethnic nation, everyone — immigrants and nativeborn alike — must embrace our core values of liberty, equality, meritocracy,and respect for human dignity and the rights of women."
2012 GOP Platform: https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2012
"...a policy of strategic immigration, granting more work visas to holders of advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math from other nations. Highly educated immigrants can assist in creating new services and products. The greatest asset of the American economy is the American worker. Just as immigrant labor helped build our country in the past, today’s legal immigrants are making vital contributions in every aspect of our national life."
The 2016 Republican platform contained very similar language: https://www.immigrationreform.com/2016/07/19/immigration-in-the-2016-gop-platform/
There are some more isolationist voices recently (the right-wing corollary to "borders are racist" crowd on the Left), but "enforce the border but welcome legal immigrants based on American needs" has been the dominant strand of right wing thought for decades.
"It often goes unremarked that the number of workers from overseas has more than doubled in the last decade alone, while the broader foreign community (including students and families) has risen 50%…Based on population projections, conversation has already been shifting to a future where foreigners will make up more than 10% of people in the country 50 years from now — similar to the current levels of the US, UK or France…"
-- Gearoid Reidy
That's not today. And a lot can happen in 2 generations. Projecting to 2075 for either Japan or America is foolish. Japan today is essentially a mono-ethnic and monocultural society.
Note that if a majority of convenience store clerks in big cities in Japan are now immigrants, that makes the phenomenon of immigration high visibility in Japan, even if the actual numbers are small. Similarly, if the majority of news anchors in Japan were immigrants, it would be a high visibility phenomenon. That is why such a high visibility event as a mixed race beauty queen caused such a stir.
> According to both the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia, ethnic Japanese make up 97%+ of Japan today.
I am not at all sure that's correct. For one thing the government doesn't actually track this, though private surveys might - your secondary sources are likely misreading the % of people who are Japanese citizens.
For another thing it changes rapidly and is different in Tokyo in particular, where all the young people live.
I think you could also mention in this post why GDP still matters in this case, to address arguments that "elites only want mass migration to boost GDP and living standards could go to hell". Adding this part would make your arguments about immigration much more convincing, since you probably already know about the current "vibecession" though.
Also, from your point of view when did we start to have "vibecession" (i.e. people don't have same perception about economic growth compared to real data) in the world? I think that might happen for many years (and not just from Biden's era: a good example is when an anti-Brexit advocate told voters that leaving EU would lead to decline in GDP, a British woman yelled that "But how does the GDP matter to me anyway?")
We started to have vibe cession in CA when housing costs became unaffordable, child care expenses unsustainable , and ROI of a large number of undergraduate and advanced degrees declined relative to their expense.
There are simply more young adults, many of them raised middle class, now struggling to achieve middle class lives themselves in places like CA. An increase in GDP isn’t commensurate with an increase in standard of living evenly throughout the workforce. It rewarded people like me, Engineers paid in RSUs, with 401k holdings more than anyone else while leaving my friends and family behind.
OCED countries are not having enough sex and children. We can certainly blame the pill as the single thing that has changed, but we would be fooling ourselves.
To many of our youth, children are a burden. They cost too much and prevent me from having fun and living however I want. It seems to couple, and relationships are not as attractive as they once were.
My daughters tell me boys and young men are only interested in getting laid. Not relationships. There is a crisis among our young men. Women are surpassing them in accomplishments. More women in Medical School for example. Sperm counts are down and I hear so is testosterone.
Women have changed, and being pregnant for 20 years is no longer tolerable. They also want careers and fulfillment. We are in trouble. Immigration will save us, but only for a while.
> My daughters tell me boys and young men are only interested in getting laid. Not relationships.
This conflicts with the idea that testosterone is lower - high testosterone behavior doesn't include committed relationships.
I can only go by results. Sometimes both things can be true.
Not gonna lie, as someone who grew up in Muslim Malaysia, as a member of the non Muslim minority, while I want the west to accept more immigrants, even if they are Muslims, I don't blame your friend for being upset at mosque calls to prayer.
Well in Japan it’s kind of a strange complaint, given the noise pollution, even in rural areas; from politicians driving around speechifying in sound trucks, yakiimo and takoyaki trucks with loud jingles, pachinko parlors with deafening bells and music, early morning civic announcements over large speakers, and bosuzoku gangs of youths riding around in the early morning on small motorcycles with the mufflers removed just to annoy society. There’s more litter around in rural areas than tourists expect, but the constant noise is even more surprising to those who expect zen quiet.
I never would have imagined Japan as that much of a noisy place, good point.
Noah knows A LOT more than the average Westerner, not slightly more.
In Tokyo they’re eating the doves!!!! They’re eating the cats of the people that live there!
Sorry, couldn’t resist after I read the eating the doves line
> There have been a few minor tensions with Vietnamese immigrants — one Japanese person I know complained of them catching and eating doves
I laughed at this because this is SUCH a Vietnamese thing to do, too.
We recently moved from Vietnam to Australia and my wife pointed out that in Vietnam someone would have caught and eaten all the beautiful native birds like galahs and cockatoos that you see all over.
Interesting point about how Japan wants to send racially Japanese immigrants from Brazil back to Brazil. You mentioned how this example illustrates the difference between race and culture. I’m not sure. First, I don’t know what you mean by “culture.” Do they not speak Japanese well? Which norms don’t they conform to? How can Japanese Japanese tell that they are different? Are they segregated and oppositional to the mainstream? People tend to use “culture” as a stand-in for “undetermined non-genetic influences,” thereby implicitly shifting the normal burden of proof in argument or implying that they’re saying something more than, “I don’t know why these people are different.”
Second, the Brazilian Japanese could differ due to reasons related to ancestry if not race as such. They were selected twice. First, only a fraction of Japanese left to Brazil during the 19th century. How were these people different from general Japanese? Second, another fraction came back. So it’s not a representative Japanese vs Japanese sample.
According to the impression I got from Noah's podcast, they basically acted the same way other Brazilian immigrants would have. There's nothing especially wrong with Brazilian culture that I know of, but I don't think it has much in common with Japanese culture.
You say Arigatō, I say Obrigado. Let's call the whole thing off.
I don't think you can take Japan off the hook for not wanting certain immigrants without also letting Americans off the hook, because I don't think it's really "cultural compatibiliy" that matters, so much as more objective cultural measures of what makes a good neighbor.
People in countries want more orderly, more law-abiding people immigrating. If I'm Japanese or Swiss, I want that. If I'm American, I also want that. Importantly, the reverse is not true. People in low-order societies won't mind much if they get high-order immigrants.
So regardless of the current orderly-ness of a place, we all want and don't want the same types of immigrants (outside of true racists/xenophobes - which all countries have a lot of.)
It might even be *more* important to favor high-trust, law-abiding cultures for immigration into the US. In Japan, they're probably more likely to assimilate into Japanese culture than the they are in the US, which has less of a strong national culture to assimilate to.
The US is culturally highly assimilational culture; we already see this with the first and especially second generation Hispanic Americans. The immigrant generation themselves have varying degrees of success, but their children (IME) are as American (USian) as the children of previous immigrant waves from our past.
I’m not sure why we wouldn’t expect to see the same thing in Japan
I would expect the same, I was simply arguing that your assertion that people are MORE likely to assimilate in Japan than the US doesn’t hold water to me.
Awesome and comprehensive article!
One thing to note though: you end up on the note that immigration is what the rest of the century will look like… however all this must be only a temporary period, mathematically, no? The brutal decline of fertility is worldwide and by the end of the century we are likely to be well into a new age in term of demographics, with virtually no country on earth growing anymore.
At some point on this way I expect things to turn more nasty, as attracting young, fertile and productive people will turn into an existential zero sum game.
To attract those people, countries will have to remove the burden of its aging population on the working population. With strong economic growth, this could be done without hard compromises, but in countries like Western Europe that started stagnating, it’s likely going to involve large changes in social redistribution schemes, or the countries will start to hollow out as young people abandon them, as it started playing out in Italy.
Does this all makes sense? Would love to read an article of yours that would explore how this could play out over the medium term Noah!
And Happy New Year!
Could increased productivity bw a way for Japan to deal with labor shortages? There are at least some jobs done here manually that could be automated (eg petrol pump attendants).
Of course, but to say the words "increased productivity" is incredibly easy, and to boost productivity above and beyond what it would otherwise be is incredibly hard...this is kind of another magic wand...
Self service gasoline is getting more common in Japan, as is self service checkout at grocery stores. Productivity at convenience stores is increased by the automated machines that handle all kinds of payment (cash, credit card, Suica, PayPay, ApplePay, etc) and automate age verification for tobacco or alcohol (it really just asks you), these aren’t self service, and a cashier (usually young immigrant, fluent enough in Japanese) but they speed transactions and handle a large flow of customers during rush hour in train stations where a Seven Eleven might have 10 of these in a row.
Many low productivity jobs seem to be mostly job programs for the elderly, like the traffic guards at even minor road construction sites who just stand there waving a red light, or parking lot assistants and crossing guards, who there are much more of than in other countries and often are very old, like over 80. And at Narita, Haneda and KanKu the immigration checks have dozens of fingerprint/photo machines each with a usually elderly attendant who knows English.
Productivity for small restaurants and ramen shops is often increased by having a vending machine for the customers to buy tickets for what they want, which means no cashier or checks are needed, and since tipping is non existent, the restaurants can have much higher turnover and less workers, keeping prices down (you can find some shops that sell a large bowl of ramen with a pork slice for less than $3). One chain, Ichiran, is famous for, in addition to having ticket vending machines, you sit at a one person booth, with a curtained service window from which your ramen is served without speaking or eye contact necessary.
The US converted to self-serve gasoline twenty-five years ago.
Not only for Japan though, but automation only partially solve the problem, while the labor shortage would still persist (if we can infer from the past, since despite thousands of years developing labor-saving machines, labor participation rate remains high in the world, and general mass unemployment from technology do not exist!)
Of course, if AGI or ASI are developed and meet their promises, then not only Japan but any country in the world could solve this problem, but they could not be customers anyway.
How do you wave a wand and increase productivity, though? The whole world would love to know!!
I mean "automation" in this case, and not just about productivity. Probably I should reword my comments (especially with current knowledge that aging might reduce TFP!)