Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates.
Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
As in, a huge majority of blacks in jails (jail population being disproportionally black).
Blacks are about 40% of the jail population and 14% of the general population.
Even if this is because blacks indeed commit more crimes, this points to the conditions blacks are forced to live (discrimination, poorly funded school districts, redlining, trouble getting loans, etc.) that force them to do so. But we also know that traditionally courts treat blacks harsher (to the point of there being special laws against blacks for most of the 20th century, from Jim Crow to seggregation laws, and of course, seemingly neutral laws used covertly with much more force against blacks, like drug laws, three strikes, and so on).
It didn't for the natives of the islands they call Nippon, either.
> They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
So did the Ainu.
(And Ainu had it better, despite the strong discrimination against them, than native americans and blacks in the US).
Even the UN says Japan is racist!! https://web.archive.org/web/20070329065052/http://www.unic.o...
People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.
People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.
Do this, be more like (supposedly virtuous) X and don't be Y & Z is clear paternalism and, in my opinion, highly arrogant paternalism to boot.
It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.
What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.
Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: I'll take a stab and hopefully someone will correct me. Do you mean a return to Mercantilism? If we can't have immigration because that is 'taking another nations resources,' then we must end up with some kind of Protectionism or Mercantilism? Or are you proposing a World Government?
That the person above didn’t bring a solution does not invalidate their statement. Immigration is only a solution for those getting the immigrants. It’s not so nice for the countries that raise and educate them without any ROI.
If somethings broken and you can't fix it, then you either learn how to fix it or you need to accept that it is broken and move onto something you can fix.
P.s. I really like the engineering analogy, but remember when discussing politics: other people have probably already defined the problem and come up with solutions. As a citizen, we need to choose which solution is best; or promote our own solution.
That's what 'export led growth' is. It just works by hoarding money as 'foreign reserves', rather than using protectionism.
The entire world can't be using 'export led growth'. There has to be net importers to balance it out. Which currently are the US and the UK - the current and previous imperial nations.
We cannot deny that there is a brain drain in many third world countries that desperately need well trained workers that is accelerated by acceptance of immigrants into developed nations like the US. Who’s going to lead these countries into better governance and economic improvement if all the talent is incentivized to leave their home countries for greener pastures?
In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
For example, many third-world countries had tax-free regimes for tech/services export in order to boost these industries. This made sense to them. If you made $100K contracting for a US company, you'd pay $0. But you'd also get to spend/transfer that much needed money into the economy. You'd probably also not use any of the government services because they are sub-par to what you can get privately.
Now, if you are required to pay an income tax at par to what you pay in developed countries, the whole scheme will no longer make sense. No one will agree to pay $50k and get no services in return. So you end moving to some other destination (ie: Dubai, or a western country where you pay $50k but relatively get your money's worth).
This is as close to war as it can get.
This isn't hypothetical, of course. This is how places like the Soviet Union and East Germany worked. It was policy to literally shoot people trying to leave the country without permission. On the other hand, while certainly not justifying this atrocity, there certainly has been a "brain drain" as engineers, physicians, and scientists from the former Eastern Bloc have moved West for better employment opportunities.
What portion of this is non-voluntary?
Perpetuating economic inequality across the world is not.
Millions have to choose between working for meager salaries in one place or move to be exploited elsewhere. They are getting the short stick both ways.
Nice strawman there.
What do you mean by this? Tokyo seems like a pretty successful case to me: relatively affordable housing even with net migration into the city, along with good public transit.
In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.
This is not sustainable. This is a Ponzi scheme. Continually kicking the can down the road.
> immigration is just colonial appropriation
Thank you America for colonially appropriating me from starvation under communism.
Oh, I didn't realize I was a slave to a country. And the act of immigration which I willfully do, and the host country is pretty much hostile about, is "stealing" me. If Western countries wanted to steal me, they should not have put up such roadblocks to immigration
There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
It is a problem for a nation-state whether you assume that nation-state owns the brains of their citizens or not.
> There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
Nobody said anything like that. You should respond to what was written and not to what is in your head.
No one is denying that it’s your right to move around. It doesn’t make it any less of a bad deal for your home country. They invested in you and you left. Do this a few million times and you feel the effect.
No one is blaming you. The person above just pointed out that immigration isn’t a free lunch.
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.
I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up.
Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas.
And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
Of course then nothing stops those that have the vote because they work to disenfranchise those pensioners and other unemployed (the children will be theirs as well so are likely going to be protected).
Laws are indirectly made by those who vote!
A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of fraud. Ever-increasing immigration to sustain a >1 worker-to-retiree ratio is more like a pyramid scheme, but one that will take decades or maybe a century to really stop working.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
This is about social welfare and policy as opposed to "let the market sort it out".
> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.