Japan is desperate for foreign workers – but it cracks down on uninvited asylum-seekers who are desperate for work
Afshin had hoped he’d be spending the final decades of his career contributing to a Japanese economy desperate for workers.
Mask-wearing commuters make their way through Shinagawa Station in Tokyo. To boost the waning labor force, Japan’s government is expanding a foreign skilled-worker systemOne sign of South Korea’s population crisis: Rural elementary schools are running out of children “Refugees for Japan mean difficult people,” said Gracia Liu-Farrer, a sociologist at Tokyo’s Waseda University who studies the plight of the country’s immigrants. “So ‘refugee’ does not have a good reputation — it has a social stigma to it.”Amid protests in Tokyo and tumult in parliament, lawmakers in June voted to make it easier to forcibly deport unsuccessful asylum applicants. Under the new rules, anyone who has applied more than twice for asylum — such as Afshin — can be sent home.
“The system makes it so difficult to live in Japan that people just want to go home,” said Atsuko Nishiyama, an immigration lawyer.detention centers, where inmates can be held indefinitely while their cases are adjudicated. Former detainees say at best they are treated like criminals; at worst, they can be denied critical medical care and subject to physical and emotional abuse. Since 2007, 17 detainees have died in custody, including several by suicide. Hunger strikes are not uncommon.
The total of 202 people granted asylum last year was a record high spurred by an influx of former Japanese Embassy employees who fled Afghanistan amid the Taliban takeover. The countries with the most applicants were Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Myanmar. When he went in for an interview at Immigration, he told officials he had been threatened at gunpoint in Iran. The officer, he said, asked for a photo. “I laughed,” Afshin said. “Who is going to take a photo at that moment?”Advertisement
Not all asylum seekers are denied a work visa. Myo Kyaw Kyaw, 38, a member of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority from Myanmar, arrived in Japan in 2006 with a visa. He said he’d been targeted for his pro-democracy activism. Nishiyama, the attorney, said some employers come to rely on such workers to do punishing labor most Japanese are unwilling to perform.“It would be much better for Japan to give those people special permission to stay here,” she said. “Immigration makes them out to be criminals, but from my experience, most of those people would live stable lives here if they had visas.”
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