Japan is Liberal, According to Martin Sandbu
Martin Sanbu of the FT claims that Japan is liberal; the numbers of migrants and refugees in Japan suggest that he might not be quite right
Martin Sandbu of the FT opens his recent column with an ominous declaration:
If 2016 was the year that opponents of the liberal, rules-based world order built up over 70 years won stunning national victories — in Britain and the US — then 2017 was the year in which the supporters of liberal openness scrambled to mobilise… 2018 is set to be the year they confront one another.
He continues by noting that:
EU institutions and many European governments, together with Canada and Japan, now make up an avowedly liberal internationalist camp working to defend a multilateral system of collaborative rules-based governance for economic openness to mutual advantage.
Martin Sandbu says that Japan is part of an “avowedly liberal internationalist camp”. Let see how Japan’s liberal internationalism is reflected in the country’s immigration policy.
First: refugee acceptances. Mr Sandbu must have missed the February 13th edition of his very own newspaper, which included the following chart:
Japan was so liberal in 2016 that it accepted 28 whole refugees. Compare this to stingy Donald Trump, who plans to cap refugee admittances to the United States for the coming year at 45,000. Indeed, there are only around 270,000 refugees living in the United States, compared to a whopping 2,500 in Japan.
Second: overall migrant populations. Here, again, Japan shines through as a bastion of liberal internationalism. The country’s foreign-born population amounts to roughly 1.9% of the total: that’s nearly 2 foreign-born people for every 100 residents! By contrast, in the backward United States, a mere 14.3% of the population is foreign-born.
The UN international migrant database allows us to zoom in a little closer. It indicates that, of the 2.3 million foreign-born people living in Japan in 2017, the vast majority were from four countries: China (740,000), South Korea (590,000), Philippines (240,000) and Brazil (210,000). Most of those from Brazil are persons of Japanese stock (the so-called Dekasegi), which means that Japan is about 98% ethnic Japanese, and more than 99% East Asian. Now that’s liberal.
Third: migrants from unstable countries in the Middle East. Recall that Donald Trump’s controversial Executive Order (the so-called travel ban) affected persons from seven countries: Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran. By consulting the UN database, we can see how many people from these countries are currently residing in Japan. And the figures are: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero and 4,500 (from Iran). Japan is so liberal that it has de facto travel ban for 6 of the 7 countries on Mr Trump’s list.
In fairness to Mr Sandbu, he doesn’t actually mention immigration policy in his article. (One generously assumes that if he had done, he might not have been so quick to place Japan in the liberal internationalist camp.) But it does seem a little odd to contrast Japan with “Brexit and Donald Trump” purely in reference to things like the “Trans-Pacific Partnership”. After all, plenty of people across the Western world are wary of multi-lateral trade agreements. What makes Brexit and Donald Trump stand out is the emphasis on cutting immigration.
