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If the goal is to preserve their culture I doubt that insisting that everyone who moves there have "fuck you" money is going to help as much as they think it will. At least some percentage of those who meet that bar will be people who are selfish and very accustomed to just doing whatever they want. The more money people have, the greater their ability to reshape the environment and culture around them to suit their individual preferences. Rich people aren't moving to remote villages in bumblefuku nowhere either. Having a bunch of rich foreigners concentrated in the major (and culturally influential) cities will only make it worse.

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They have a rapidly aging society and a high national debt load (which also means a more shallow economic growth curve into the future), it’s reasonable to exclude anyone who might even have a chance of being a burden. High value immigrants always have value, either in wealth or economic potential, anyone else is charity if they cannot provide surplus economic value once their own needs have been met or support themselves off of wealth or income they bring with them.

It’s unfortunate when we don’t get picked for the dodgeball team. Life is inherently unfair and mostly a lottery.

(not against foreign aid charity by any means, but delivering it distinct from immigration policy is potentially more efficient and optimal in many ways)

I'm not certain. In an aging society, the thing they'd need are young laborers. People with 30 years of savings are unlikely to be either young, nor laborers.

Maybe those wealthy immigrants are very talented people who are very good at, say, managing an insurance company or researching pharmaceuticals, but Japan has a glut of 55-year-olds who can do that stuff very well. They're running short of young people who can be nurses, junior machinists, and construction workers.

In a macroeconomic sense, wealthy people might be able to pay for the services they need from their own pockets, but functionally it's not that different than being unemployed (unless they choose to work). They would be almost purely adding demand to the economy. The wealth they are bringing represents supply that they added into the economy in the past and abroad, and now they have a wallet full of paper with which they can buy services for the next 30 years in Japan without having to do any further productive work.

I don’t disagree, and a lot of this discussion is about the future of automation and having sufficient nation state capacity to meet an aging populations’ needs. With that said, you want to attract the right young immigrants to come and stay: willing to integrate, supportive of their adoptive culture, and a net positive to the economy and community. They are a guest until chosen to become a fellow citizen.

They have issues so they had better import people who won’t share their culture and beliefs?

Sweet deal.

High value immigrants always have value

No they don't. Such a person might use their existing wealth to import goods or commodities, undercutting domestic competitors, extract wealth from the local economy, and then decamp. I'm not arguing that people with high net worth necessarily behave like this, but economic benefit to the host is by no means a given.

For example, the market for vaping-type products in Japan (technically 'heated tobacco') is dominated by American companies (legally) and SE Asian criminal syndicates (illegally). The legal products generate high tax revenue for the government (but not for Japanese tobacco companies) but it's foreseeable that much of the tax benefit will be offset by higher future healthcare costs, while the net profits of the business operation disappear overseas rather than remaining within the economy.

yea really. The reality is that people who want to move to Japan, learn Japanese, devote their life to this are probably very interested in Japanese culture. There is no risk to Japanese culture from these people.

It's absolutely more likely that the very wealthy that aren't taking as many risks in moving to Japan are not going to care about Japanese culture.

The percentage of the global population with fuck you money is so vanishingly small that a nation of 100 million such as Japan, could import them all with almost zero impact on their culture.

Furthermore, it’s deeply disingenuous to suggest that inconsiderate people only exist on the upper end of the income distribution. Assholes who want to take over and control others are found at every income level. If you want to keep your country from descending into Marxist dystopia then making fuck you money a requirement for immigration is not a terrible idea.

Well stated

50th percentile + 30 years subsistence is not "fuck you" money, but regardless, income has multiple effects, not only cultural. They don't want to be financially supporting foreigners, of course.

30 years of money banked is quite a bit no matter which way you slice it.

"Quite a bit", yes, I agree with that location for the goalposts.

It’s pretty much the definition of fuck you money

30 years of living expenses banked is absolutely "fuck you" money. 50th percentile income is not.

Having enough money to not lift a finger until the year 2056 is absolutely in the "fuck you" zone.

That's fine, it's just a semantic argument about how people use the term, which doesn't affect my actual assertion, which is that it's not an unreasonable bar.

A rough calculation suggests the floor for '30 years subsistence' is about ¥120m/$800k, a sum that's pretty much impossible to accumulate at the 50th percentile of wages.

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