During a recent speech, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida outlined his primary policy priority in simple terms — ‘economy, economy, economy’. Notably absent was any mention of foreign workers and their role in sustaining Japan’s future economic development. This is surprising, given the well-documented need to further increase the foreign workforce, which has already reached record highs in 2023.

In 2022, the Japan International Cooperation Agency outlined that Japan would need over 6.7 million foreign workers by 2040 to maintain an economic output aligned with the government’s GDP growth targets. This represents a roughly four-fold increase from current levels. Kishida re-started the large-scale admission of foreign workers in Spring 2022, following a relaxation of pandemic-related border restrictions. Yet, he has been hesitant to outline a broader vision for the long-term admittance and potential integration of migrant workers.

The reluctance to implement a formal immigration policy has long precedence among Japanese policymakers. For example, when presenting the 2018 amendment to the Immigration Control Act, the late former prime minister Shinzo Abe stated that ‘Japan would not adopt a so-called immigration policy’. Instead, the amendments established the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) system, which aims to boost foreign worker admittance within 12 economic sectors suffering from acute labour shortages.

Japan has long relied on immigration ‘side doors’ — pathways to admit primarily lower skilled foreign workers while legally denying their presence. These channels have historically included the generous admittance of people of Japanese descent, with the Abe years seeing a rapid increase in the numbers of working international students and participants in the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). But these ‘side doors’ have also been subject to criticism for placing foreign workers in vulnerable labour environments.

While the SSW system requires that workers pass an industry aptitude test and imposes some language requirements, the industries which the system serves and the institutions which govern it strongly overlap with the TITP. Unsurprisingly, the SSW system essentially functions as a way for employers to retain technical interns, with roughly 70 per cent of specified skilled workers coming from the TITP.

As it pertains to foreign workers, Kishida has so far opted to maintain the status quo set by Abe, preferring to adjust Japan’s primary admittance policies instead of implementing major reform. In June 2023, his cabinet passed an expansion of the SSW Residence Status Two, which allows for unlimited renewals and family reunification. While this provides an effective path to long-term settlement for lower skilled workers, the expansion has been essentially non-functional, with only 12 SSW Two status holders as of June 2023.

While the Kishida government expanded the acceptable industries that foreign students graduating from vocational schools can find employment in, one of the most significant changes may lie in the future of the TITP, which is being reviewed by a Ministry of Justice appointed panel. Currently, the TITP works under the pretext of facilitating ‘skills transfer’ to developing countries, though analysts argue that it more closely resembles a rotational migrant worker system.

The TITP has also been criticised on human rights grounds, with many ‘interns’ incurring debt to access the program and facing heavy restrictions in changing employers. The panel has suggested that the TITP be renamed and formalised as an entry point to the SSW system, abandoning the pretext of ‘skills transfer’ and making it easier for workers to change employers. This proposal is yet to be adopted into policy.

The Kishida administration has opted for incrementalism on immigration. While Kishida has mentioned the need to ‘consider a society featuring co-existence with foreigners’, he has generally avoided the topic in major policy speeches, as there is simply no political necessity for him to do otherwise. If current systems are sufficient for Japan to address its labour shortages, it is unnecessary to open the potential can of worms that a national conversation on immigration would represent. Still, the absence of a formal immigration policy means that foreign workers will continue to suffer from subpar policy outcomes.

Japan has a structural demand for foreign workers, but one major question going forward is whether there is sufficient supply. The countries from which foreign workers migrate, such as Vietnam, have experienced strong post-pandemic economic growth while the Japanese yen has weakened and wages have stagnated. As such, Japan’s attractiveness as a destination country for foreign workers has diminished.

Broader regional trends suggest that foreign labour migration to Japan will not continue to increase indefinitely and the potential effects of this will be felt by a future administration. One way to address a potential bottleneck in foreign labour supply is to boost Japan’s attractiveness by improving labour conditions, expanding pathways to permanent residence and family reunification and integrating foreigners into Japanese society — considerations that a formal immigration policy could address. But despite recent calls to pass a national ‘Immigration Act’, it is unlikely that the Kishida administration will do so. Until such a time, Kishida’s incrementalism looks set to continue.

Source : East Asia Forum

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Covering hundreds of pages on how other governments have “jailed, tortured, or even killed” political opponents, human rights defenders, and journalists, the report kept silent on the thousands of Americans who have lost their lives due to mass shootings, police brutality, and racism discrimination, said the journal.

“America’s historical trajectory shows that it has always viewed human rights as a tool for hegemony and uses it selectively as an excuse to label countries as human rights violators. Under the pretext of defending human rights, the U.S. invaded Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, but all of these war-torn countries suffered the murder of innocent civilians and catastrophic infrastructure destruction,” it noted.

“Sadly, the U.S. does not uphold the common international standards or guarantee human rights from a fair and impartial standpoint when promoting human rights diplomacy and managing human rights matters. It always exercises double or even multiple standards,” it said.

“Critics argue that the annual report has nothing to do with human rights but is a tool to malign rivals and coerce other countries,” it added.

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“Deeply concerned about the news of rioting and vandalism against the State institutions in Brasilia. Democratic traditions must be respected by everyone. We extend our full support to the Brazilian authorities,” he wrote on Twitter.

On Sunday, the supporters of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro clashed with police in the country’s capital and broke into the National Congress (Parliament) and other state institutions. The few security guards at the empty sites on Sunday were unable to rebuff the protesters who did not recognize the results of the October presidential election.

According to preliminary estimates, about 5,000 people participated in the riots. To disperse the demonstrators, the security forces used smoke bombs and tear gas grenades, including dropping them from a helicopter. Law enforcement officers are successfully regaining control over the buildings attacked by vandals, the detainees are sent to police stations.

Socialist Lula da Silva took office as President of Brazil on January 1, defeating Bolsonaro in the second round of elections. The gap between them was 2.1 million votes. The conservative did not admit defeat, and his supporters massively took to the streets and to the garrisons of the armed forces demanding that Lula da Silva not take office. At the end of December 2022, Bolsonaro left for the United States.

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Most conversations about family-related public policy focus on the 1997-era Child Tax Credit (CTC), a rebate for tax-filers based on the number of children they have. But a bipartisan working group in the House is beginning to coalesce around something new—sort of. 

Led by Oklahoma Republican Stephanie Bice and Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan, the six-member group is intent on crafting a national program of paid family leave. It would provide funds to pay working parents for a set number of weeks following the birth of a child—something many employers choose to do but is far from universal. Such a policy could be less expensive and potentially more popular than expanding the CTC to $3,600/year: According to a recent poll, while 67 percent of voters support six weeks of federal paid leave for new mothers, only 49 percent support a CTC benefit of $3,600/year or more.

Proponents also say parental leave—and especially maternity leave—could solve a more specific problem by making it easier for parents to spend time with a newborn immediately after birth, which has been shown to improve child and maternal health outcomes. (A 2020 policy brief from the Institute for Family Studies argues that while there may be other benefits to paid parental leave—including stabler marriages and closer connection to employment for parents—policymakers should keep child and maternal health front of mind since that’s where the evidence is strongest.)

Paid leave has been talked about in D.C. for years by both parties at separate times, with scant agreement over how to structure or pay for a program. But Bice and Houlahan think starting with a “clean slate” and approaching the issue in a bipartisan manner could provide enough momentum to get something done.

Their shared interest in the issue stems from their time on the House Armed Services Committee last Congress, where they worked together on paid leave for military personnel. After a Democratic-only effort at a federal paid leave program stalled last year, Houlahan’s office reached out to the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and found that Bice was also interested in a broader paid family leave effort. They then recruited four other members—Democrats Colin Allred and Haley Stevens and Republicans Julia Letlow and Mariannette Miller-Meeks—and got to work.

The group’s ultimate goal is to draft bipartisan legislation that can pass both chambers of Congress. To that end, its members are meeting at least once a month—and their staff are in communication on a daily basis.

“I haven’t seen this level of intellectual rigor and exploration from members of Congress on two sides of the aisle on almost any issue,” said Adrienne Schweer, a former Senate and Pentagon staffer and fellow at BPC who has worked with the group.

In February, the group met with some of the members and staff who were involved in negotiating the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA)—which provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid job protection for family and medical leave—30 years ago. In March, they met with representatives from six of the 11 states with paid family leave laws to learn more about how those laws are funded and implemented. Last week, they sent a letter to both parties’ leadership asking for support. And on Tuesday, they met with leaders in the insurance industry.

They’ll need all the information they can get: While crafting their proposal, members of the group will need to decide who would be eligible, how many weeks of leave to pay for, how much money to provide leave-claimers during those weeks, how to pay for the program, and how the government should administer it.

For example, the Democratic-only FAMILY Act—which was cut from the reconciliation package the party passed last year—would have provided paid benefits for multiple types of leave, including family caregiving and personal medical leave, but it wouldn’t have addressed job protections for those not covered by FMLA, meaning beneficiaries could theoretically collect the equivalent of two-thirds of their typical wages for 12 weeks before losing their jobs. In contrast, a working group of policy analysts convened by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution in 2017 recommended job-protected benefits of 70 percent of wages for up to eight weeks—but only for parental leave. 

Administration is another question: While the FAMILY Act would have created a new office to administer the program, states have approached the issue in a variety of ways: New Hampshire even contracts with MetLife, a private insurance company.

As with any social spending, funding for a paid leave program—which would cost tens of billions of dollars each year—could become a third rail, with Democrats resistant to spending cuts and Republicans opposed to tax increases for new social spending. But “in terms of the federal budget, this is not a big lift,” policy consultant and former GOP Senate staffer Abby McCloskey argued: A program along the lines of the AEI/Brookings proposal (about $13 billion per year) would cost less than 1 percent of what the government spends on Social Security annually (about $1 trillion).

When it comes to paid maternity leave, the United States is an outlier among developed countries. And almost half of American workers are ineligible for FMLA because they don’t work enough hours, haven’t been working for their employer long enough, or their employer is too small to qualify.

“Traditionally, we’ve had much less regulation on our labor markets and companies, which is in part why the U.S. economy has grown and flourished at the rate it has,” McCloskey said.

But that dynamism isn’t cost-free. Although many American companies provide paid time off, McCloskey said she remains “unconvinced that a mother and father’s ability to bond with their infants should be hinged on the benevolence of the company they work for.” 

“We need an extra level of protection there for the sake of the child,” she added.

Members of both parties increasingly agree. Although paid leave has traditionally been a Democratic issue, that began to change in 2016, when Donald Trump, at the behest of his daughter Ivanka, became the first Republican candidate to roll out a paid leave plan—versions of which were included in each of his administration’s four budget proposals.

Republicans on the Hill took notice. Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Joni Ernst led efforts to allow workers to pay for parental leave by delaying or cutting into future Social Security benefits. Sens. Bill Cassidy and Kyrsten Sinema introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow parents to claim some of their CTC money early when a child is born. And Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer’s Strong Families Act, which offers a tax credit to employers that offer paid family leave to their employees, actually became law as a bipartisan amendment to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Republicans’ 2017 budget reconciliation package.

An emergency program of paid sick leave and family leave was included in a March 2020 COVID relief bill, but it expired at the end of that year. Meanwhile, Democrats’ dream of passing paid leave on their own died when the FAMILY Act—which would have been funded with payroll taxes—was cut from what became the Inflation Reduction Act.

Now, in a divided Congress, both parties are more interested in coming to the table. 

“There’s a real potential here,” McCloskey said. “Even for a country that prefers to keep a tax base low and regulatory burden light, it’s something that can be done in a pretty manageable way.”

Source: The Dispatch

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President Joe Biden’s immigration problem isn’t just about policy. It’s that he’s not talking about the issue enough, voters say in a new survey from a Democratic polling firm.

Fifty-eight percent of voters in seven key Electoral College battleground states disapprove of how the president is handling immigration, compared with 32 percent who approve, according to a new swing-state poll from Global Strategy Group first shared with POLITICO. And a majority of voters surveyed, at 52 percent, believe Biden is ignoring problems at the border, while 50 percent said the president is ignoring the situation around undocumented immigrants.

Republicans talk more about immigration than Democrats, and they are trusted more to handle the issue, according to the poll. Both parties get low marks for how they are handling immigration, but Democrats face greater criticism because voters don’t know where the party falls on the issue. Thirty-nine percent of voters trust Biden and Democrats in Congress more on the immigration issue, while 47 percent said they trust Republican lawmakers more.

The new poll — conducted on behalf of immigrant advocacy group Immigration Hub and Voto Latino, a political organization focused on Latino voter turnout — comes three weeks before the administration plans to end Title 42, the Trump-era policy that has allowed border agents to immediately expel millions of migrants on public health grounds for the past three years. Biden administration officials fear a surge at the border upon the policy’s expiration next month and have turned to more restrictive measures to tamp down a record number of migrants fleeing political and economic turmoil.

The White House should seize on the opportunity to get ahead of Republicans’ growing chatter leading up to the May 11 end date, said Beatriz Lopez, Immigration Hub’s chief political and communications officer.

“It’s comms 101. Get ahead of the narrative. Talk about what you’re doing. Talk about what you plan to do,” Lopez said. “But it’s talking about both — not just the border but also what they’re planning to do to protect Dreamers and others who are every bit a part of the American community. That balanced approach is what works with voters.”

The shift in border policy is expected to be a major political test for the Biden White House, which has rolled out a patchwork of solutions to combat a growing humanitarian crisis at the southern border. The Biden administration is also dealing with a gridlocked Congress, although lawmakers have long been unable to compromise on how to fix an outdated immigration system.

“The fact is that in the 820 days since he sent Congress a comprehensive immigration reform bill, President Biden has taken unprecedented action to expand lawful immigration pathways, limit unlawful immigration, protect Dreamers and farmworkers, and increase border security. Because of this administration’s work, unlawful immigration is down, legal immigration is up, we’ve got record funds for border security, and thousands of smugglers are now off the streets,” White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.

“Meanwhile, all that House Republicans have managed to ‘accomplish’ since taking their (slim) majority is voting to abruptly lift Title 42 overnight with no plan in place for what comes next, proposing draconian funding cuts to border security, and playing partisan political games that do nothing to actually fix our long-broken immigration system.”

House Republicans unveiled immigration legislation this week, with plans to further restrict asylum, expand family detention and crack down on the employment of undocumented workers. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark up the bill Wednesday, though the measure has little chance of making it through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) also unveiled a plan on Tuesday that relies on the White House taking executive action to address immigration. He shared his plan with the White House and other federal agencies, with ideas for creating new pathways to citizenship, increasing humanitarian aid for certain countries, increasing border security funding and expanding efforts to target human traffickers.

Menendez’s suggestions come as the Biden administration prepares for a spike in border crossings come May, already the busiest time of year for migration. In addition to relying on more stringent immigration proposals to restrict entry to asylum-seeking migrants, the administration has discussed reinstating the detention of migrant families — drawing great backlash from immigration advocates, lawyers and Democrats.

More than eight-in-10 voters in the poll — 82 percent — believe the immigration system is broken, and they want to see both enhanced border security and policies that provide a pathway to citizenship, such as work permits for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, and Temporary Protected Status for other migrants.

Sixty-five percent of respondents have a positive view of “modernizing and improving the physical infrastructure at high-volume ports of entry to enhance screening and processing,” while 76 percent want Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. to gain legal status if certain requirements are met, including background checks. Sixty-four percent of voters back the Biden administration using its TPS authority.

“Voters disapprove of the job both parties are doing on immigration because they see the system as deeply broken and in desperate need of a fix,” said Nick Gourevitch, partner and managing director at Global Strategy Group. “Recent polling shows voters clearly want Washington to act with solutions that are balanced — that include both border security and pathways to citizenship and legal status for Dreamers and other immigrants.”

The Biden administration announced plans last week to expand health care coverage to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but great concern remains about the fate of the popular Obama-era program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and deportation relief. After a flurry of court challenges, advocates and legal experts warn the program is headed to the Supreme Court, where the conservative bench seems likely to rule it illegal.

The online poll surveyed 1,201 likely 2024 general election voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin between April 4-11. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.8 points.

Source: Politico

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