Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Asia learns to cope with a rise in the flow of immigrants
By David Pilling and Kathrin Hille
Published: July 8 2007, FT
Japan has the reputation of being a closed culture, a mono-ethnic society unwelcoming to foreigners. In the past quarter-century it has accepted a grand total of 412 refugees, making it one of the world’s least hospitable countries. News broadcasts sometimes mention “suspicious foreigners” spotted at the scene of a crime. Shintaro Ishihara, the three times elected mayor of Tokyo, once caused a (very minor) stir by suggesting that, if there were an earthquake, the capital’s Korean population was likely to loot and riot.
Yet in reality, even fortress Japan is not as closed as this caricature suggests. Of its 125m population, about 2m are non-Japanese, compared with 1.6m foreigners in Spain and 2.9m in the UK, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. True, in percentage terms Japan is still relatively closed, with foreigners making up just 1.5 per cent of the population against 4.8 per cent in Spain and 8.9 per cent in the UK.
Moreover, about half of Japan’s so-called foreigners are the Koreans mentioned by Mr Ishihara, most of whom were born and brought up in Japan, the descendants of those who came between 1910 and 1945 when Korea was a Japanese colony.
Even so, that leaves 1m other registered foreigners – and well over 200,000 illegal residents, who have somehow found their way to Japan. Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo, says: “Underneath the official radar screen, there’s a lot of immigrants coming in. Japan is a multi-ethnic, multicultural society in denial.”
That may be overstating the case. But the fact that even Japan has opened a crack to immigrants, many of whom are Asian, points to a much bigger, if largely unacknowledged, trend throughout the region. Once considered almost exclusively a source of immigrants to more prosperous regions outside Asia, many Asian countries have become net recipients of people seeking improved job prospects or a better place to make a life.
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Asia’s richest large economies, are big magnets for both migrant workers and women marrying into economic security. But there are many other well-trodden paths of intra-Asian migration, for example between Burma and Thailand, from the Philippines and Indonesia to Malaysia, and from Bangladesh to India.
Statistics are notoriously unreliable, particularly since many borders are porous, allowing immigrants to come and go without much documentation. (That may be less true since the global security clampdown that followed the attacks on the US on September 11 2001, says Mr Kingston.) Yet by some measures, at least, flows of Asian immigrants have been steadily increasing. According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation, in the five years to 2000 about 40 per cent of Asian migrant workers went to other Asian countries, compared with just 10 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, when their destination was overwhelmingly the US or Europe. By 2000, says the ILO, Asian migrants made up 40-70 per cent of the workforce in Gulf countries, 28 per cent in Singapore and 12 per cent in Malaysia.
Ifzal Ali, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, acknowledges that economic disparities within the region are encouraging migration. The little data that do exist severely underestimate the true size of migrant flows, he says. Yet he is wary of drawing exaggerated conclusions about the importance of the phenomenon.
First, he says, it is important to delineate different kinds of migration, much of which is temporary and unlikely to alter the nature of the host country. He is not convinced, for example, that a Vietnamese bride living in Taiwan, an Indonesian working temporarily on a Malaysian building site or an Indian information technology engineer on a two-year contract in Tokyo or Dubai add up to a meaningful trend. Second, he argues, one must factor in many Asian societies’ resistance to multiculturalism, an attitude that will, he predicts, “prevent today’s trickle from becoming a flood”.
Mr Ali counts at least five broad patterns of intra-Asian human flows:
●Migration of workers between countries of roughly similar development, for example between Bangladesh and India.
●Migration between poor or middle-income countries to far richer ones, such as Japan or the Gulf states.
●Mail-order brides, a phenomenon he characterises as “the exploitation of women from non-performing economies”.
●Professionals moving to financial centres such as Hong Kong and Singapore.
●Internal migration (as opposed to immigration) between the countryside and cities. Such mass urbanisation helped fuel Japan’s industrial miracle in the 1960s and is transforming China and India today.
But when it comes to the first three categories, Mr Ali sees little sign of governments or societies becoming more tolerant. “The one theme that runs through all of this is that the receiving population tolerates this as an irritant – nothing more than that,” he says. Mr Kingston calls it the Kleenex approach to immigrants. “You use them and then throw them away.”
“The most dramatic example that these people are tolerated but not liked, and kept because of some economic compulsion, was when the Indonesians were thrown out of Malaysia,” says Mr Ali, referring to a crackdown since 2000 by Kuala Lumpur. “The Malaysian construction industry almost ground to a halt because Malaysians were not willing to do that kind of work.”
Yet it is precisely those economic factors that will eventually force Asian governments to deal with flows of people more formally, say experts. As more countries become wealthier, leaving poor and so-called fragile states behind, the forces encouraging people to uproot and seek a better life elsewhere in Asia are likely to intensify, they say. That will be exacerbated by demographics, which will see rich countries age and shrink in population while poorer ones, such as the Philippines, Burma and Cambodia, struggle to find employment for their young and expanding populace.
Mr Kingston says: “What [host] countries should be doing, rather than erecting a fortress, is to say: ‘Who are we going to accept, how are we going to accept them and under what terms?’”
Asian governments are starting to do that. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, told the Financial Times last month that he wanted to increase the city’s population from 7m to 10m to match the power of New York and London. Last year Hong Kong introduced a “quality migrants scheme”, using a points system to attract high-flying professionals.
Singapore is also trying to distinguish between “desirable” permanent residents and those it wants to come, perform low-paid work and then leave. The city-state has a goal of increasing its population by 2m to reach 6.5m within 20 years, mainly by attracting skilled workers from India and China. At the same time, it maintains a strict visa policy for lower-paid labourers, limiting work permits to one or two years and deporting women who become pregnant.
Taiwan is also proposing changes to immigration laws that would make it easier for white-collar workers to obtain visas and, possibly, liberalise regulations for foreign contract labour. “We need to form a consensus on what form and what amount of labour immigration we want to allow,” says Lee Lai-his, chief planner at the island’s Council of Labour Affairs.
The Thai government has moved some way towards recognising its dependence on migrant labour, particularly Burmese. A few years ago it began to register migrant workers, allowing them, in theory at least, to access healthcare. Yet at least half the Burmese migrants, put off by the costs involved and fears of political reprisals back home, have not registered, leaving them vulnerable to abuse by employers.
Japan, too, has slowly but reluctantly adapted its immigration laws. Jessie Wilson, a researcher who prepared a report on Japanese immigration for CLSA, an independent stockbroker, says the process started in the 1980s when big Japanese companies shifted some of their factories to south-east Asia and China in search of cheaper labour. Smaller businesses, including construction companies, that could not relocate had to bring the workers to them. Since there were few, if any, legal means for this, many re-sorted to illegal Chinese labour.
By 1990, the Japanese government recognised the growing needs of business in the face of intensifying global competition by amending the 1951 immigration law. This broadened admission categories for migrant labour and made it easier for foreigners of Japanese descent to “move back” to Japan. Today there are about 250,000 Brazilian, Peruvian and other so-called Nikkeijin working in Japan, some in factories of famous companies such as Sony and Toyota. But hopes that second- and third-generation South American Japanese would more easily adapt to life in Japan have largely proved an illusion.
As a result, says Ms Wilson, Japan has initiated unofficial “side-door mechanisms” for channelling mainly Asian unskilled workers into Japanese industry. These include a programme that allows foreigners to work in designated “special activities” for a maximum three years. Of the 75,000 admitted each year, many end up overstaying their visas and drifting into other jobs, augmenting the pool of unofficial cheap labour. “The trainee schemes that Japan has are essentially a cover for employing cheap workers,” says Mr Kingston.
In addition, three-quarters of the 130,000 foreign students in Japan work, many in convenience stores and restaurants. Another 65,000 foreigners received “entertainment visas” in 2004, mainly to work as hostesses or exotic dancers and in Japan’s sex industry. A number end up marrying Japanese men and staying. There are an estimated 220,000 illegal workers, most of whom arrived on short-term visas.
Yet most experts agree that the economic rationale for more immigrants does not necessarily mean that Japan, or other rich Asian countries, will open their doors very wide. In Japan’s case, there is even an increasing emphasis on the potential of robots as an immigrant-free approach to labour shortages. The government is encouraging companies to develop robots capable, for example, of lifting elderly people in and out of bed or acting as companions to those living alone.
No robot has yet been invented, however, that would make a suitable wife. The second significant flow of intra-Asian migration is related to marriage. Here, many of the same economic factors are at play, with young women in poorer countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and China seeking to improve their lot – and that of their family – by marrying men from richer societies. The pull factor is social: women in Asia’s affluent, urbanised countries, particularly Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, are refusing to marry men in the countryside, creating a gap readily filled by Asian brides.
Taiwan provides a case study of how this phenomenon is affecting conservative societies and provoking tensions with which governments and communities have proved ill-equipped to deal. Of Taiwan’s 23m population, 388,000 are foreign-born spouses, mainly women from south-east Asia and mainland China. (There are also 346,000 foreign workers from south-east Asia, but they must leave after five years.)
Chen Kuo-yu, a 40-year-old banana farmer in mountainous Nantou, married one of those women, a young Vietnamese, two years ago. “She is well-behaved and works hard,” he boasts.
Mistreatment of foreign wives is common, says Kathy Ke, executive director of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in Taipei, an organisation that offers counselling and help to foreign spouses. “Many south-east Asian spouses are being held more like slaves than free human beings.”
Lynn Nguyen, a Vietnamese who met her Taiwanese husband at a Japanese university in 2004, says it is difficult to convince her new compatriots to respect outsiders. “I am always regarded with deep suspicion once people notice that I’m from Vietnam,” she says. “In the market, the old women will ask me whether I send money home to my family and, if I say I do, they act disapprovingly.”
The Taiwanese government, uncomfortable with the trend, has tried to stem the arrival of brides. In 2003 it introduced an interview system for prospective spouses. That brought the percentage of marriages involving one foreign spouse, which had peaked at an astonishing 31 per cent in 2003, back down to 17 per cent, near its 1998 level. The long-term effects, however, are beginning to emerge only as couples from the “bride rush” are starting to have children at a rate of 1.7 per woman – above the Taiwanese average of 1.2, which is among the lowest in the world.
“I think we should try and make this an asset,” says Huang Hsin-tsai, headmaster at Jong Jen, an elementary school with a high concentration of children of foreign brides. “Taiwan is a big investor in Vietnam and we should try to develop language capabilities around our Vietnamese brides and their children.”
That is not happening. The social pressures to assimilate are strong. Most “new resident” children grow up without speaking their mother tongue and know little about their cultural heritage. Scholars and social workers argue that the state’s attempts to deal with immigration have been deeply flawed. “The government keeps claiming that they want to build a multicultural society, but they are not acting,” says Chen Pi-Yun, an education expert and sociologist with a degree from York University in the UK.
Mr Ali at the ADB says the experience of brides in Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere suggests that the cultural impact on host countries will be minimal. “The people who go as mail-order brides will completely subsume their culture and their own personalities,” he says.
When it comes to migrant labour, he predicts that, if anything, governments are more likely to crack down on flows than to surrender to economic reality by embracing immigrants. “I think social values play a very important role in this. While it might seem to be economically rational, if it is considered socially unacceptable, it is simply not going to happen.”
Data, as the ADB says, are very sketchy. But it is worth comparing some of the numbers that are available. The Philippines, for example, is Asia’s single biggest source of migrant labour, with some 8m people – no less than 10 per cent of the population – working abroad. But of those, by far the biggest number, 2.3m, live not in Asia but in the US. Japan hosts a far more modest 300,000.
More telling still is to compare the foreign population of North America with that of Japan, by far Asia’s richest large economy. If about 2m, or 1.5 per cent, of Japan’s population is classified as foreign, that according to the OECD figures, compares with 35m – or 12.2 per cent – in the US and 5.6m – or 18 per cent – in Canada. Economic forces may be driving change in Asia. But the age of multiculturalism is clearly not yet upon it.
Additional reporting by Amy Kazmin ¶ 3:25 AM
Published: July 8 2007, FT
We asked for workers, and human beings came.– Max Frisch, Swiss author, cited by stockbroker CLSA in Reluctant Hosts, its report on Japanese immigration.
Japan has the reputation of being a closed culture, a mono-ethnic society unwelcoming to foreigners. In the past quarter-century it has accepted a grand total of 412 refugees, making it one of the world’s least hospitable countries. News broadcasts sometimes mention “suspicious foreigners” spotted at the scene of a crime. Shintaro Ishihara, the three times elected mayor of Tokyo, once caused a (very minor) stir by suggesting that, if there were an earthquake, the capital’s Korean population was likely to loot and riot.
Yet in reality, even fortress Japan is not as closed as this caricature suggests. Of its 125m population, about 2m are non-Japanese, compared with 1.6m foreigners in Spain and 2.9m in the UK, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. True, in percentage terms Japan is still relatively closed, with foreigners making up just 1.5 per cent of the population against 4.8 per cent in Spain and 8.9 per cent in the UK.
Moreover, about half of Japan’s so-called foreigners are the Koreans mentioned by Mr Ishihara, most of whom were born and brought up in Japan, the descendants of those who came between 1910 and 1945 when Korea was a Japanese colony.
Even so, that leaves 1m other registered foreigners – and well over 200,000 illegal residents, who have somehow found their way to Japan. Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo, says: “Underneath the official radar screen, there’s a lot of immigrants coming in. Japan is a multi-ethnic, multicultural society in denial.”
That may be overstating the case. But the fact that even Japan has opened a crack to immigrants, many of whom are Asian, points to a much bigger, if largely unacknowledged, trend throughout the region. Once considered almost exclusively a source of immigrants to more prosperous regions outside Asia, many Asian countries have become net recipients of people seeking improved job prospects or a better place to make a life.
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Asia’s richest large economies, are big magnets for both migrant workers and women marrying into economic security. But there are many other well-trodden paths of intra-Asian migration, for example between Burma and Thailand, from the Philippines and Indonesia to Malaysia, and from Bangladesh to India.
Statistics are notoriously unreliable, particularly since many borders are porous, allowing immigrants to come and go without much documentation. (That may be less true since the global security clampdown that followed the attacks on the US on September 11 2001, says Mr Kingston.) Yet by some measures, at least, flows of Asian immigrants have been steadily increasing. According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation, in the five years to 2000 about 40 per cent of Asian migrant workers went to other Asian countries, compared with just 10 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, when their destination was overwhelmingly the US or Europe. By 2000, says the ILO, Asian migrants made up 40-70 per cent of the workforce in Gulf countries, 28 per cent in Singapore and 12 per cent in Malaysia.
Ifzal Ali, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, acknowledges that economic disparities within the region are encouraging migration. The little data that do exist severely underestimate the true size of migrant flows, he says. Yet he is wary of drawing exaggerated conclusions about the importance of the phenomenon.
First, he says, it is important to delineate different kinds of migration, much of which is temporary and unlikely to alter the nature of the host country. He is not convinced, for example, that a Vietnamese bride living in Taiwan, an Indonesian working temporarily on a Malaysian building site or an Indian information technology engineer on a two-year contract in Tokyo or Dubai add up to a meaningful trend. Second, he argues, one must factor in many Asian societies’ resistance to multiculturalism, an attitude that will, he predicts, “prevent today’s trickle from becoming a flood”.
Mr Ali counts at least five broad patterns of intra-Asian human flows:
●Migration of workers between countries of roughly similar development, for example between Bangladesh and India.
●Migration between poor or middle-income countries to far richer ones, such as Japan or the Gulf states.
●Mail-order brides, a phenomenon he characterises as “the exploitation of women from non-performing economies”.
●Professionals moving to financial centres such as Hong Kong and Singapore.
●Internal migration (as opposed to immigration) between the countryside and cities. Such mass urbanisation helped fuel Japan’s industrial miracle in the 1960s and is transforming China and India today.
But when it comes to the first three categories, Mr Ali sees little sign of governments or societies becoming more tolerant. “The one theme that runs through all of this is that the receiving population tolerates this as an irritant – nothing more than that,” he says. Mr Kingston calls it the Kleenex approach to immigrants. “You use them and then throw them away.”
“The most dramatic example that these people are tolerated but not liked, and kept because of some economic compulsion, was when the Indonesians were thrown out of Malaysia,” says Mr Ali, referring to a crackdown since 2000 by Kuala Lumpur. “The Malaysian construction industry almost ground to a halt because Malaysians were not willing to do that kind of work.”
Yet it is precisely those economic factors that will eventually force Asian governments to deal with flows of people more formally, say experts. As more countries become wealthier, leaving poor and so-called fragile states behind, the forces encouraging people to uproot and seek a better life elsewhere in Asia are likely to intensify, they say. That will be exacerbated by demographics, which will see rich countries age and shrink in population while poorer ones, such as the Philippines, Burma and Cambodia, struggle to find employment for their young and expanding populace.
Mr Kingston says: “What [host] countries should be doing, rather than erecting a fortress, is to say: ‘Who are we going to accept, how are we going to accept them and under what terms?’”
Asian governments are starting to do that. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, told the Financial Times last month that he wanted to increase the city’s population from 7m to 10m to match the power of New York and London. Last year Hong Kong introduced a “quality migrants scheme”, using a points system to attract high-flying professionals.
Singapore is also trying to distinguish between “desirable” permanent residents and those it wants to come, perform low-paid work and then leave. The city-state has a goal of increasing its population by 2m to reach 6.5m within 20 years, mainly by attracting skilled workers from India and China. At the same time, it maintains a strict visa policy for lower-paid labourers, limiting work permits to one or two years and deporting women who become pregnant.
Taiwan is also proposing changes to immigration laws that would make it easier for white-collar workers to obtain visas and, possibly, liberalise regulations for foreign contract labour. “We need to form a consensus on what form and what amount of labour immigration we want to allow,” says Lee Lai-his, chief planner at the island’s Council of Labour Affairs.
The Thai government has moved some way towards recognising its dependence on migrant labour, particularly Burmese. A few years ago it began to register migrant workers, allowing them, in theory at least, to access healthcare. Yet at least half the Burmese migrants, put off by the costs involved and fears of political reprisals back home, have not registered, leaving them vulnerable to abuse by employers.
Japan, too, has slowly but reluctantly adapted its immigration laws. Jessie Wilson, a researcher who prepared a report on Japanese immigration for CLSA, an independent stockbroker, says the process started in the 1980s when big Japanese companies shifted some of their factories to south-east Asia and China in search of cheaper labour. Smaller businesses, including construction companies, that could not relocate had to bring the workers to them. Since there were few, if any, legal means for this, many re-sorted to illegal Chinese labour.
By 1990, the Japanese government recognised the growing needs of business in the face of intensifying global competition by amending the 1951 immigration law. This broadened admission categories for migrant labour and made it easier for foreigners of Japanese descent to “move back” to Japan. Today there are about 250,000 Brazilian, Peruvian and other so-called Nikkeijin working in Japan, some in factories of famous companies such as Sony and Toyota. But hopes that second- and third-generation South American Japanese would more easily adapt to life in Japan have largely proved an illusion.
As a result, says Ms Wilson, Japan has initiated unofficial “side-door mechanisms” for channelling mainly Asian unskilled workers into Japanese industry. These include a programme that allows foreigners to work in designated “special activities” for a maximum three years. Of the 75,000 admitted each year, many end up overstaying their visas and drifting into other jobs, augmenting the pool of unofficial cheap labour. “The trainee schemes that Japan has are essentially a cover for employing cheap workers,” says Mr Kingston.
In addition, three-quarters of the 130,000 foreign students in Japan work, many in convenience stores and restaurants. Another 65,000 foreigners received “entertainment visas” in 2004, mainly to work as hostesses or exotic dancers and in Japan’s sex industry. A number end up marrying Japanese men and staying. There are an estimated 220,000 illegal workers, most of whom arrived on short-term visas.
Yet most experts agree that the economic rationale for more immigrants does not necessarily mean that Japan, or other rich Asian countries, will open their doors very wide. In Japan’s case, there is even an increasing emphasis on the potential of robots as an immigrant-free approach to labour shortages. The government is encouraging companies to develop robots capable, for example, of lifting elderly people in and out of bed or acting as companions to those living alone.
No robot has yet been invented, however, that would make a suitable wife. The second significant flow of intra-Asian migration is related to marriage. Here, many of the same economic factors are at play, with young women in poorer countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and China seeking to improve their lot – and that of their family – by marrying men from richer societies. The pull factor is social: women in Asia’s affluent, urbanised countries, particularly Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, are refusing to marry men in the countryside, creating a gap readily filled by Asian brides.
Taiwan provides a case study of how this phenomenon is affecting conservative societies and provoking tensions with which governments and communities have proved ill-equipped to deal. Of Taiwan’s 23m population, 388,000 are foreign-born spouses, mainly women from south-east Asia and mainland China. (There are also 346,000 foreign workers from south-east Asia, but they must leave after five years.)
Chen Kuo-yu, a 40-year-old banana farmer in mountainous Nantou, married one of those women, a young Vietnamese, two years ago. “She is well-behaved and works hard,” he boasts.
Mistreatment of foreign wives is common, says Kathy Ke, executive director of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in Taipei, an organisation that offers counselling and help to foreign spouses. “Many south-east Asian spouses are being held more like slaves than free human beings.”
Lynn Nguyen, a Vietnamese who met her Taiwanese husband at a Japanese university in 2004, says it is difficult to convince her new compatriots to respect outsiders. “I am always regarded with deep suspicion once people notice that I’m from Vietnam,” she says. “In the market, the old women will ask me whether I send money home to my family and, if I say I do, they act disapprovingly.”
The Taiwanese government, uncomfortable with the trend, has tried to stem the arrival of brides. In 2003 it introduced an interview system for prospective spouses. That brought the percentage of marriages involving one foreign spouse, which had peaked at an astonishing 31 per cent in 2003, back down to 17 per cent, near its 1998 level. The long-term effects, however, are beginning to emerge only as couples from the “bride rush” are starting to have children at a rate of 1.7 per woman – above the Taiwanese average of 1.2, which is among the lowest in the world.
“I think we should try and make this an asset,” says Huang Hsin-tsai, headmaster at Jong Jen, an elementary school with a high concentration of children of foreign brides. “Taiwan is a big investor in Vietnam and we should try to develop language capabilities around our Vietnamese brides and their children.”
That is not happening. The social pressures to assimilate are strong. Most “new resident” children grow up without speaking their mother tongue and know little about their cultural heritage. Scholars and social workers argue that the state’s attempts to deal with immigration have been deeply flawed. “The government keeps claiming that they want to build a multicultural society, but they are not acting,” says Chen Pi-Yun, an education expert and sociologist with a degree from York University in the UK.
Mr Ali at the ADB says the experience of brides in Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere suggests that the cultural impact on host countries will be minimal. “The people who go as mail-order brides will completely subsume their culture and their own personalities,” he says.
When it comes to migrant labour, he predicts that, if anything, governments are more likely to crack down on flows than to surrender to economic reality by embracing immigrants. “I think social values play a very important role in this. While it might seem to be economically rational, if it is considered socially unacceptable, it is simply not going to happen.”
Data, as the ADB says, are very sketchy. But it is worth comparing some of the numbers that are available. The Philippines, for example, is Asia’s single biggest source of migrant labour, with some 8m people – no less than 10 per cent of the population – working abroad. But of those, by far the biggest number, 2.3m, live not in Asia but in the US. Japan hosts a far more modest 300,000.
More telling still is to compare the foreign population of North America with that of Japan, by far Asia’s richest large economy. If about 2m, or 1.5 per cent, of Japan’s population is classified as foreign, that according to the OECD figures, compares with 35m – or 12.2 per cent – in the US and 5.6m – or 18 per cent – in Canada. Economic forces may be driving change in Asia. But the age of multiculturalism is clearly not yet upon it.
Additional reporting by Amy Kazmin ¶ 3:25 AM
