Robert Dujarric tells David McNeill that Japan should welcome millions of Asian workers
Director of the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies at Temple University, Japan, Robert Dujarric was raised in France and the United States, then worked in the banking industry before academia.
You say mass immigration would be good for Japan. Can you explain why?
The benefits are considerable. When people have advanced degrees and professional experience, immigration brings advanced managerial, scientific and entrepreneurial talent. It helps Japanese companies internationalise, using people who are capable of handling foreign markets. It brings in people who have global networks. If a Malaysian who has worked for ten years in Japan is setting up a business back home and looking for a supplier, maybe his first instinct will be to email some guy he knows in Tokyo instead of in the US.
Where would Silicon Valley be without the immigrants? Half of Google (Russian-born Sergey Brin) is foreign. The guy who invented the Pentium chip (Vinod Dham) is from India. In the UK, the man who runs Prudential (Tidjane Thiam), one of the world’s largest insurance companies, is a French national who was born in black Africa. The top British universities are full of students and faculty who come from elsewhere, and so on.
This is particularly important for Japan?
Japan is running out of Japanese. Every year the population goes down, but the working-age population has been going down for even longer. What are the obstacles to the Japanese procreating? One is that it is even more difficult in Japan than in other societies to have children and two parents work at the same time. Another reason is that it is very difficult to find childcare here because there are so few immigrants.
Whether you go to New York, Frankfurt, Paris or London, if you ask a couple where both are working who is taking care of the children, it is immigrants or the children of immigrants. If you removed every foreigner from the Parisian labour market, all these high-powered French couples – where both are working and therefore contributing to the economy at the same time as having children – would have a big problem.
Japan thinks that it is competing with China in Asia and that China is eating its lunch. But if Japan had millions of Asian immigrants it would be listened to in Asia. If half a million Thais work in Japan, that means five million people back home getting remittances. It’s also a way to spread Japanese culture and ideas. That’s one of the reasons America, despite everything, is still the centre of the world.
A lot of the business and political elite appear to agree that Japan should bring in more foreign labour. Why hasn’t it happened?
Look, there isn’t any country in the world where you win votes selling immigration. John McCain has adopted a girl from Bangladesh. [Barack] Obama, whose father was a foreign student, has a sister who is half-Indonesian, a brother-in-law who is Chinese-Canadian, relatives in Kenya. Did any of them campaign for immigration? No. I can’t think of anywhere in the world where people campaign on immigration. It’s not uniquely Japanese, and it’s unfair to say Japanese are more racist. Japan has a different history.
In Europe and elsewhere it just happened: there you have a colonial past; here it is basically Korea and Taiwan. European colonialism lasted much longer. In France it lasted until the ’70s in some territories. You also had a period of very high economic growth in Europe in the ’50s and ’60s and a labour shortage, which you didn’t have in Japan because you could empty the countryside.
Everybody in Europe thought the immigrants were temporary workers, but they came in and settled, had kids, and so on. Nobody, except perhaps Australia and Canada, made a rationally defined policy decision.
Do you see this as a moral or an economic issue?
It’s an economic issue. The problem with the moral argument is that it becomes about charity: people are starving and you’ve got to give them money. There’s nothing wrong with giving money, but [with immigration] you’re actually helping yourself.
The British elite now is significantly non-European, including the richest man in the UK [Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi] Mittal. If you look at the US, immigrants have the highest rate of employment of any group because immigrants are often poor – and the poor want to work.
One of the reasons you can now eat well in London is because so many immigrants have opened restaurants. I grew up in Paris, which used to be dead at night – you couldn’t buy anything. Now you can because African immigrants have opened stores.
Immigration is one of those issues where the costs seem to outweigh the benefits and get more media coverage. Sometimes you have immigrants whose kids misbehave. People focus on crime and all the social problems, some of which would exist without immigration. Hispanics in the US have a very low crime rate.
What will change the debate?
Most of the Japanese establishment is male and married to a spouse who doesn’t have a job in the labour market. They’re not seeing the problem because they’re not experiencing it. If you had more people in the establishment who came from working couples, and who saw how incredibly difficult it is in Japan to find child minders and caregivers, change might happen sooner.
It’s not a priority now for the Keidanren or business. Japanese companies have replaced immigrants with factories in Asia. Immigration is not something politicians want to sell to the public.
What you need is for things to get worse. The key issue is demography. There are three ways to deal with the falling population: robots, foreigners or women. The establishment prefers robots. If robots don’t work, then foreigners. And if that doesn’t work, then women. Women are last because empowering them is sociologically much more transformational. Of all the things that have happened in the West, the entry of women into the labour market is the most revolutionary. When will it change? When this country becomes not Japan Inc but Geriatric Inc. Then someone will say “Houston: We’ve got a problem”. We’re not there yet.