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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

Permanent immigration is still closed off for the vast majority, except for IT workers and the articles quotes companies that hired mostly Chinese/Indian engineers for those positions. Every other career is limited to 5-10 years stay in Japan with restrictions on staying with an employer and difficulties in bringing a spouse and how much that spouse can work once there - it's much more of a temporary thing as described in the article versus paths available to immigrants to the USA. The employers describe the immigrants in entry level jobs in the same way one hears USA farmers describing migrant farmworkers in comparison to the native population here - harder working and more dependable than natives, the similarity is striking.

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> Every other career is limited to 5-10 years stay in Japan with restrictions on staying with an employer and difficulties in bringing a spouse and how much that spouse can work once there - it's much more of a temporary thing as described in the article versus paths available to immigrants to the USA.

I know people in Tokyo with working visas who are architects, waiters, dish washers, cooks, English teachers, academics, programmers, International school teachers, translators, and business people. All have working (not spousal/relative visas) and none of them have a visa tied to an employer. I have never heard of a visa in Japan tied to an employer (and none of my working visas ever were), with exception of the intra-company transfers.

I also think the path to permanent residency is relatively straight forward for all groups. Stay on a working visa 10+ years with no hiccups or long periods of unemployment, then apply. I have known plenty of non-IT workers to get it.

That figure of 10 years for a probably successful permanent residency application is out of date. It's apparently more like 5 years these days.

Interesting. I know a guy that got it in 6 but he was married to a Japanese, so I wasn’t sure if that figured in somehow.

My understanding is only based on hearsay. Anybody for whom this matters should probably consult an immigration lawyer.

If you have a highskilled visa with 80 points, it is 1 year (however, it takes 10 months after application to get it).

High-skilled visas are not connected to an employer and there is no lottery system.beats the hell out of US policies...

FWIW I got it in less than a month.

I find High Skilled visa to be more useful than a PR. Your parents/Spouse parents can stay with you for longer time ( provided you have a kid less than 7(?) year old)

Processing time for highskilled visa is 5 days guaranteed. It is a refreshing change compared to US h1b lottery.

That's weird that the article gets those basic facts wrong because it talks about the abuse of the employer thing and recent reforms for it and the lack of a path for permanent status. I was wondering why some of the people they interviewed wanted to have their spouses move there or invested so much in learning Japanese based on the facts listed in the article. It makes more sense with what you wrote.

Sorry, to clarify: I don't mean to dispute the article. But I think the article is focusing on a specific government trainee program that's been spun up to bring constructions workers for the Olympics.

I just think you were mistaken about the "every other [non-IT] career" part. There is plenty of immigration outside of the discussed trainee program and outside IT, so I just wanted to highlight that. Because otherwise it sounds like Japan has some kind of totally crazy locked down immigration system, but that is really not the case.

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