Hacker News Reader

Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I wont pretend to know the full story of what's going on in Japan, but their government strikes me as rather xenophobic and terrified of change.

There was a period where I was strongly interested in going to Japan and potentially starting a life there, despite what I'd heard about their work culture and social issues, but even still found it almost impossible due to their prohibitive immigration restrictions. This put me off it entirely, and I doubt I'm the only one.

Not to be rude but it seems like the Japanese government would do well to be a little bit humbled by what's going on and start trying to appeal more to the people and to foreigners so they can start to restore their country. Instead they just seem to be subbornly plowing head first off the cliff. Not to say the USA is much different.

View on HN

Countries like Canada seem to think importing cheap labor from other countries is the way to keep growing and not have to make adult decisions about how to deal with a declining birth rate. That seems to be the prevailing wisdom for developed countries and everything else is called xenophobic. The main irony I see is that the biggest proponents are companies, but they frame it as a cultural issue, like how could people be against immigration, when they really just want population growth and wage suppression. It will be interesting to see which policy makes more sense in the long run.

Immigration makes sense as you tend to preferentially select the more capable/active people, which is generally the kind of populace you want.

Well the moron thats running Canada is gonna end up with the homeless kind at this rate, he sees immigration as an absolute good its just he hasnt given any thought as to where hes gonna put them all

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230322/dq230...

over 1 million in a single year, thats like if 8.5 million just showed up in the US creating a new New York.

As far as I know there is no way to increase birth rates. No formula, no payout, no policy that will guarantee that a country will have more births, except maybe a bump.

Abortion bans is one attempt.

Romania shows that it can only create a temporary effect. Also women start dying.

How can you say that when birth rates vary so widely with time and place? Even just in the modern developed world, couldn't we copy whatever Israel is doing [1]? It may not be easy or guaranteed, but we don't need to go as high as Israel's 3.1 - the replacement level of 2.1 would suffice.

[1] Israel has been in a constant baby boom since independence, with the highest fertility rate in the OECD at 3.1 children per woman. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#Israel

That commenter probably means that there is no known reliable way solution that generalizes to many diverse countries. Pointing out the existence of a country with high birth rates isn’t a dispute of that claim, since as far as I know “just become exactly like Israel” isn’t really an option.

It's a dispute of the implied claim that a developed nation with women's rights can't have high birth rates.

> known reliable way solution that generalizes

Why all these qualifiers? It doesn't have to be reliable or general - individual countries can each have their own approach, that only works after lots of tweaking, and even just intermittently, as long as it time-averages to replacement level. And it won't become known unless we look for it - more than the occasional sporadic attempt by a government that gets decried as racist and sexist for their efforts [1].

> exactly like Israel

Why "exactly"? If someone pointed to Japan when searching for solutions to reduce heart disease or medical costs in the US, would you also say "become exactly like Japan" isn't an option? Many countries similar to Israel have low fertility, while many very dissimilar ones have high fertility. Clearly, being exactly like Israel isn't necessary.

[1] 'Baby machines': eastern Europe's answer to depopulation - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...

>only works after lots of tweaking, and even just intermittently, as long as it time-averages to replacement level.

That sounds like an unending series of demographic shocks and may well be worse than the original problem.

They are only shocks if the fertility rate fluctuations have a high amplitude and period longer than ~20 years. For example, if the rate varies between 1.8 and 2.4, on a 20 year time-scale, then they won't be "shocks", but mere gentle waves.

>couldn't we copy whatever Israel is doing?

You think everyone should become a bunch of religious nuts? That's not something that's exactly easy to instill in a population; it takes generations. It also usually results in a lot of bad things: oppression of women and minorities, warmongering, etc.

That's assuming religious nuttery is an unavoidable prerequisite for whatever is lifting their birth rate. I don't think this assumption is merited - according to Pew surveys, Serbia has a similar rate of irreligion (3.3%) as Israel (3.1%), yet their fertility rate is only 1.4. On the other hand Mongolia is 36% irreligious but has a 2.9 fertility rate.

Religion and fertility may be correlated, but it's demonstrably not an unbreakable rule, and outliers abound, so we shouldn't just give up. Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

Israel is literally a theocracy. It's not a valid example for any kind of modern democracy, and the religion factor isn't something you can just ignore.

Irreligion rate isn't the reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism

I wasn't arguing for that, I meant accepting that population would fall.

What is the "adult decision" Canadians should be making? I'm not sure what the proposed solution is supposed to be here.

If anything, the xenophobic narrative is that the immigrants are too rich, driving up housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto.

To shrink as a society. To abandon a need for constant growth -- those stock prices gotta keep going up!

And they are driving up housing prices. New arrivals to Canada aren't moving to SK, or MB -- most of them aren't from cold countries and stay entirely in the southern most cities -- the GTA and VAN, and to a far lesser extent, Calgary and Edmonton.

I thought Canada imports wealthy people who pay taxes and buy all the houses.

What immigration restrictions? All it takes for you to get an Engineer visa is a diploma and a sponsored job offer. The sponsor doesn't have to pay anything for the sponsorship, and doesn't have to present any sort of labor market documentation. The Japanese immigration system is much more open than USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, and most EU countries.

Add in their points-based system for highly skilled professionals (that allows for permanent residence after just 1 year), and it becomes a very attractive option if the cultural, workplace and language requirements are workable for you.

> terrified of change

How can they be terrified of change, when their economy is at the cutting edge of several fields, and the dramatic changes of automation that they embraced and developed?

Or do you mean that there is one particular sort of change they don't want? The way that, say, environmentalists are "terrified of change" when they oppose climate change and deforestation?

> their government

Just their government? The Japanese people themselves demand mass immigration?

> How can they be terrified of change

It's obvious that there's a distinction between technological change and social/cultural change.

Japanese strike me as very conservative when it comes to social/cultural shifts. Compare it to Taiwan, for example, and there is a big difference (to be fair, Taiwan probably has less cultural history to begin with).

So we've moved from terrified of change, to embracing some changes and resisting others. Even in culture, Japanese fashion, art, architecture, music, entertainment, and cuisine have all seen recent changes.

Yet they refuse to change some social/cultural values. What makes this a phobia worth pathologizing, instead of a legitimate preference deserving of respect?

For example, when Kashmir decried being stripped of autonomy [1], were they also just being phobic and terrified of change?

[1] Kashmir’s new status could bring demographic change, drawing comparisons to the West Bank - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

You're fighting a strawman; no one has made any comments to this being "a phobia worth pathologizing".

As far as I can tell, folks are just commenting on how this affects their demographics and ability to scale social services in the coming decades as their tax base shrinks. That's a real problem.

I don't see how you read any other intent.

You didn't, but warent's comment I replied to did: "their government strikes me as rather xenophobic and terrified of change"

In general, "xenophobia" is a frequent accusation against those that don't want mass immigration.

Perfect response... you owned him.

"If you're scared, negative, or don't love something -- you're wrong!" NPC's are tiresome. It would be nice to peacefully separate from them into different states... they can do their nonsense over there in their own state.

Oh come on, the United States doesn't have even close to as restrictive an immigration policy as Japan.

No nuance.

The parent comment is ridiculously ignorant.

Nearly 45.3 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2021, the most since census records have been kept. In 2021, immigrants comprised 13.6 percent of the total U.S. population, a figure that remains short of the record high of 14.8 percent in 1890

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...

Japan is ~2%

In 2021, approximately 2.76 million residents of foreign nationality were registered in Japan, making up about 2.2 percent of the population.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/687809/japan-foreign-res...

I completely agree with your assessment and I was in the same boat where I wanted to live there despite all of that.

And while I do believe that having a more open immigration policy may be beneficial (it's practically the cheat code for declining populations), I genuinely believe they would do much more if they focused on strengthening their social safety net (unemployment, parental leaves), cracking down on the toxic work cultures (much more aggressively, not in the current way, where they favor employers over employees and use social shame for everything, although that's Japanese culture in a sense ...), and making family minded policies (massive tax breaks or direct aid for children)

Japan already has most of the things you're asking for. It's really hard to get fired from a salaried job in Japan, they have parental leave, there is direct aid for children plus tax breaks (and more coming soon). The main problem is the toxic work culture (too much overwork mainly), and that's easing up now as the dinosaurs age out and younger people take over, though they still have a long way to go.

Japan has the most open immigration policy in the world for skilled workers. But it's a hard place to immigrate to because of the language barrier.

I went to Japan a few years ago. Just tourism, I love the history and culture of the place, and can read and speak some Japanese.

Honestly, the place is doing great. No restoration necessary. I don't see how it would be any better by making immigration easier, it would only lower the cultural and social cohesion of a very insular place.

This is a bizarre consequence of capitalism, this expectation of infinite growth and an infinite supply of labor. Preferably cheap labor.

By the numbers, the USA is much different, even just counting legal and ignoring illegal migration.

How can you even compare that to US?

There's widespread rhetoric (not to say propaganda) that immigration is good and that immigration must be increased.

Not so. Countries and people are absolutely free to decide how much immigration they want to allow, if at all.

restore their country

A country is not a place on the map. It is the people themselves. If you replace the people with another people you have destroyed the country.

Anyway, long term, Japan would be better off with a smaller population.

> I'm fleeing the west and moving to beautiful Japan.

> Japan should become the west.

Leave people alone... let them live how they want. (You be liberal / tolerant).

> their government strikes me as rather xenophobic and terrified of change.

If you consider historical precedent I don't think you can blame them for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com