The Liaison

“The Immigration Issue in Japan”

Yuhei Miyauchi

Since the immigration issue is one of the foremost issues in the US, Americans would be surprised to hear that people seldom discuss this issue in Japan – my home country. Of course, it is discussed in politics or academics in terms of the labor deficit – a result of the abrupt decrease in the number of children, but in their daily life the issue is something far way from the Japanese. One major reason is because there are very few immigrants in Japan.

Japan is known as one of the most difficult countries to immigrate to. The policy concerning immigration in Japan is as follows: there is a legal system which regulates entry and departure. However, in reality, it doesn’t so much as accept immigrants, as deny them. For example, Japan doesn’t accept immigrants the first time they enter Japan. Not until they stay there for a certain period, and qualify for many requirements that are extremely hard to achieve, are they granted permanent residency.

The problem is not only in the legal system. Since Japan does not have a history of high immigration, Japan has kept incredibly high ethnic purity. Low immigration makes the Japanese think conservatively and resist accepting immigrants willingly. The point is this: Japanese people are unaware that they think in this way. They think they are open to immigrants, but the reality is, they see immigrants as something different from themselves.

This makes some immigrants feel uncomfortable about living in Japan. This is different from discrimination. They are just reluctant to be friendly to outsiders of their community. This happens also among the Japanese. They are very friendly to people who are in the same community, such as student clubs, but not friendly to outsiders of their community.

This tendency, however, could be the solution to the immigration issue in Japan. This tendency of the Japanese demonstrates that once they recognize immigrants as members of their community, they will willingly accept immigrants. The only problem is that the degree of their ethnic purity is so high that if they see someone whose appearance is different from the, they regard him or her as an outsider. This would change as the number of immigrants increases and become more prevalent in Japan.

Then the problem is only in the legal system. The Japanese policy on immigration is notoriously strict. In fact, it is too out-of-date in the current trend of globalization. It doesn’t even reflect the current Japanese characteristics, because as previously stated, the Japanese have a potential to accept immigrants as part of their society.

Once the door is opened, the Japanese immigration issue should surely be resolved. Problems might ensue due to open immigration in Japan. For the human rights of immigrants, for the international community, and more than anything else for themselves, the Japanese must make the first step toward their immigration issue.

“Immigration & the Indigenous”

Jacob Galfano

As the details to Senate Bill 1348 – Congress’s latest bipartisan effort toward comprehensive immigration reform – are hashed out by Democrats and Republicans, its central tenets feature improving border security and earned citizenship for the skilled.

Human rights activists continue to bemoan the proposition, as the legislation favors using a merit-based pathway to citizenship.

Not only does this pose pragmatic challenges to the poor, it continues the colonial trend of forced assimilation; those that can naturalize risk losing cultural values in the proverbial pursuit of happiness.

Its impact on immigrants native to the Americas may be most poignant. When it comes to the indigenous, the xenophobic pathos of the melting pot combined with parochial policy solutions ought to sound familiar.

In the mid-19th Century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was created to address ‘what to do’ about a population that threatened colonial expansion.

Manifest destiny or not, the policies born from this governmental organization were painted in the economic condition: manage a growing American population or risk lucrative development opportunities.

Racial relations suffered, and once-flourishing tribal communities were relegated to the margins. Native Americans suffered at the hands of American hubris, enduring genocide, pervasive disease, and being stripped of their dignity.

As the debate over immigrants and their rights continues today, the focus shifts to Latin America.

The legal leverage that results from regional trade arrangements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – brokered by industrialized nations – inequitably apply economic pressure to lesser-developed countries in the South and arguably cause migration to the North.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that region supplies over half of the 21 million foreign-born labor force and of the 34 million total foreign-born population. The percentage of those attaining legal citizenship has dropped from 59% in 1970 to 27% in 2004.

The notion of citizenship stems from the rule of law, and in part gains its meaning from the delineation of national boundaries. Contrarians to border enforcement argue that they can discriminate and arbitrarily exclude human beings from the resources they need for survival.

“In the case of the southern U.S. border, the people living on either side have been residing in those regions far longer than the border has existed,” says Arzoo Osanloo, Assistant Professor for Law, Societies, & Justice and Anthropology at the University of Washington. “Where an individual falls on the border, whether in Mexico or the U.S., is largely the product of the annexation of Texas by the U.S. in 1845.”

The mistreatment of non-citizens today conjures shameful memories of that of American Indians in the 19th Century.

From the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to the Termination Act of 1953, the ‘problem’ was consistently transferred elsewhere – resulting in a lack of access to basic human needs such as housing, medicine, and education.

Local solutions to problems related to immigration are similarly capricious. Criminalizing landlords who rent to illegal immigrants, mandating the use of the English language, even the argument that America needs low-wage laborers to sustain economic productivity … these are policies that perpetuate the cycle of abuse of the Other.

It is only fitting then that an immigrant said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Text of legislation (type “S.1348” in search box): http://thomas.loc.gov/

"Sex Trafficking"

Janice Goh

It is ironic that with the medical and technological advances of today, HIV is still a growing epidemic. Out of the 42 million people infected with HIV in 2006, the epidemic took the lives of 2.9 million in the world. In the last year 4.3 million adults and children were newly infected. What then leads to the spread of this affliction? As it turns out, there exists a high correlation between HIV and the incidence of sex trafficking; most of these people are not just victims of HIV, and of sex trafficking.

Sex trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Many women are trafficked each year and are subject to commercial sex exploitation. Sex trafficking not only increases the risk of HIV to victims, trafficking is also a common means of spreading HIV. Due to the high incidence of unprotected sex, lack of proper sanitation and general health awareness, sex trafficking has been aiding the global dispersion of HIV.

In Bangladesh, for example, condom use among Bangladesh’s 36,000 sex workers varies between a mere 4% to 28% and over 95% of teenage Bangladeshis do not know a single method of HIV prevention.

In South Africa, 70% of the women in prostitution are infected with HIV, and 70% of the 20,000 Burmese prostitutes are HIV positive.

Although sex trafficking is a principle catalyst for HIV, the causal relationship between the two phenomena is actually mutual. The rise in HIV in Southeast Asia has since increased the demand for younger girls, based on the belief that younger, virgin girls are less likely to be infected with any form of disease.

Today, prostitutes as young as 5 years old can be found in countries like Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Consequently, this has further triggered the rise in HIV in Southeast Asia, especially amongst children. In 2006 UNICEF estimated that at least 1 million children in Southeast Asia suffer from HIV.

Given the high correlation between HIV and sex trafficking, why then is sex trafficking so prevalent in numerous areas in the world? Sadly, forces of supply and demand have been fuelling this global phenomenon. The lack of job and educational opportunities that plagues women in rural areas renders them vulnerable as victims of trafficking. Being illiterate and impoverished, women are easily misled or coerced into trafficking with false promises of job opportunities.

Further, sex tourism encourages the trafficking of women to fulfill the needs of clients. In return, the profitability from sex tourism promotes the development of sex establishments to attract tourists. Japan, for example, runs a $9 billion sex industry and is home to 10,000 commercial sex establishments. Japan’s flourishing sex industry is in turn a destination for the 150,000-200,000 women trafficked from Southeast Asia.

International action has been taken to combat sex trafficking by raising awareness of the issue. The International Labor Organization, Coalition Against Trafficking of Women, United States Agency for International Development and United Nations Development Fund for Women are some of the organization that play important roles in strengthening prostitution laws in many countries. The US government is also involved in many initiatives such as participating in the negotiation of the protocol on trafficking.