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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

I think immigration is the best solution. There's no shortage of babies and young people in the world. The article notes that liberal immigration policies are not popular. Well, maybe that's the problem. I suspect that immigration will gain popularity when the problems caused by the ageing population become sufficiently severe. The problem will solve itself at the right time.

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Immigration "would be" the best solution but we are talking about Japan in here. Not an "immigrant friendly" country like Canada, Australia or the US. Simply put... Japan is "allergic" to foreigners.

Surprisingly the process to get a work/student visa in Japan is much more easier than in Australia or the US (I've applied to one or another in all these countries and it's such a breeze to do in Japan).

Despite that, immigration remains low. For the foreigners here, last time I checked it was basically composed of about 80% of foreigners from China, 15% from Korea and the remaining 5% from the rest of the world.

I suppose the difficulty of the language and geographic location has something to do. Racism as known in the West is rare, but the truth is, Japan has consistently failed to assimilate any foreign population and it is really difficult to explain how it is like. I guess it's definitely more like a Canadian "cultural mosaic" more than an American "melting pot". But the cultural mosaic has some sense of equilibrium. For the case of Japan it would look more like "patching the kimono with pieces of fabrics of different patterns".

The thing is, under the hood, legally speaking, Japan is very open and welcoming to foreigners, but it fails to keep them in or assimilate them.

Hi, when you say "open", you mean also for workers? Do you have any potential advice for somebody looking for a job over there?

Yes, quite open for -skilled- workers and even more open to students. I emphasize the "skilled" part because trust me, you don't want to come all the way here to engage in low-skilled labor. Highly skilled work is already too life-consuming enough. However I don't know how the construction sector would be, it is the equivalent of the American military industry (i.e. that's where they will throw ridiculous amounts of money whenever they want to "stimulate the economy") and with the LDP winning the elections yesterday the pouring of concrete all over Japan will go back to usual.

If it is skilled work, I recall any undergraduate degree overseas plus a job offer are the main requirements you need to get a work visa. Yes, no need to wait for a space to open as is the case with the H1 visa in the US. And I think this year the process got even easier.

To get a contract, well, if you can speak Japanese then you are halfway there. If you can't, I can suggest:

1. The companies that seem to be hungry for IT/software engineers (judging from the amount of spam I get from recruiters), may take your from whenever you are, and where probably Japanese language skills are not important are: GREE, Rakuten, Amazon Japan. I think you can apply to those through their websites.

2. Message me so I give you a list of recruiting companies that seem to specialize in foreigners in Japan.

3. Some people recommend checking out www.gaijinpot.com from time to time.

Japan has always been very insular and has very strong anti-immigration policies.

Also, their politics is probably more screwed up and dysfunctional than this article suggests, so any change seems unlikely.

The Japanese are quite xenophobic and consider immigration to be a last resort. For this reason, they have invested (and continue to invest) large sums of money into robotics research, in an attempt to replace their working population without allowing mass immigration.

That might be the best solution to maintaining head-counts in a more immediate manner.

But it gets a bit more complicated.

How would you solve the issue of no-go zones, crime and violence, incompatibility and intolerance, and lack of unity?

Because those are all the things that increase in a non-marginal way when you mass immigrate a society and start replacing its identity, culture, and people with another.

Would you build more prisons? Would you make excuses for the new people? What would you do exactly when that same society starts breaking apart?

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