Japan to Foreign Workers (Brazilians + Peruvians): "GTFO"
Hi TNL. I thought this story was neat but Mzo was offline so I couldn't link it to anyone. So: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/bu...agewanted=1&hp
Quote:
Under the emergency program, introduced this month, the country’s Brazilian and other Latin American guest workers are offered $3,000 toward air fare, plus $2,000 for each dependent — attractive lump sums for many immigrants here. Workers who leave have been told they can pocket any change.
But those who travel home on Japan’s dime will not be allowed to reapply for a special “Nikkei” work visa. Stripped of that status, most Japanese-Brazilian workers who left would find it all but impossible to return to work here under Japan’s strict immigration laws.
Quote:
Japan’s repatriation offer is limited to the country’s Latin American guest workers, whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and neighboring countries a century ago to work on coffee plantations.
In 1990, Japan — facing growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.
The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-adverse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — or hard, dirty and dangerous.)
Quote:
Japan’s population has been falling since 2005, and its working-age population could fall by a third by 2050. Though manufacturers have been laying off workers, sectors like farming and elderly care still face shortages.
But Mr. Kawasaki, the former health minister, said the economic slump was a good opportunity to overhaul Japan’s immigration policy as a whole.
“We should stop letting unskilled laborers into Japan. We should make sure that even the three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — or hard, dirty and dangerous) are paid well, and that they are filled by Japanese,” he said.
“I do not think that Japan should ever become a multi-ethnic society” like the United States, which “has been a failure on the immigration front,” Mr. Kawasaki added. That failure, he said, was demonstrated by extreme income inequalities between rich Americans and poor immigrants.
At the packed town hall meeting in Hamamatsu, immigrants voiced disbelief that they would be barred from returning. Angry members of the audience converged on town officials. Others walked out of the meeting room.
“Are you saying even our children will not be able to come back?” one participant shouted.
“That is correct, they will not be able to come back,” a local labor official, Masahiro Watai, answered calmly.
:chick::chick::chick:
What can I say, I love xenophobia.
