Japan simply is xenophobic. I lived there for 2 years. That’s just a fact.
I lived there for four years. Nice and friendly people. Never felt unsafe.
Unsafe doesn’t mean they liked or respected you as an equal
True. But I did mention that they were also friendly. I had no issue getting into all sorts of activities with them. From playing the Shamisen to practicing Sadō. I had lots of friends who would help me out in all sorts of things, such as the University entrance exam, moving stuff, and translation.
I’m speaking of my experiences of course. I come from a different cultural background (Arab). I lived in both the US and Japan, and in almost all aspects except employment and income, I prefer Japan. Your mileage may vary.
Never felt unsafe is a very low bar. Not feeling unsafe now
Welcome, though? They pretty famously don’t like foreigners around them, even if they’re not going to say it directly to you.
Have you lived there? Not my experience. I felt like I was welcomed. I was welcomed into their cultural activities, I was welcomed into their homes. I did put effort into learning the language and the culture, and followed their norms to the best I can.
No, but a lot of other people have and you’re a definite minority saying that, so, X to doubt basically.
It’s not just people who don’t bother trying, either. BBC’s long term Japan correspondent wrote an article about it when he finally left, and I’m pretty sure he’s fluent.
… BBC’s long term Japan correspondent wrote an article about it when he finally left, and I’m pretty sure he’s fluent.
I wouldn’y be too sure about being fluent part. I am an Indian and I have seen bulk of so called indologists (professors in American and European academia) unable to pronounce common sanskrit words - despite writing bestsellers on the subject.
I shared that experience. I also was actively excluded from all sorts of things (including essential services) because I was a foreigner. Whenever a group of expats got together, at some point in the night, the conversation would be about how everyone got discriminated against recently.
Did you put effort into learning Japanese? I didn’t experience any exclusion.
Mr. “Super-predators” and “kill their women and children”?
Ironic
deleted by creator
Lmfao
I mean he’s not wrong, but where does he expect China to get immigrants from? They’re 20% of the world.
He’s also cherry picking data. It’s a weird flex.
The proportion of immigrants in the US isn’t exactly high compared to somewhere like Canada.
I mean the US is 15% immigrants, or about 50 million people. I know we like to shit on the US but that’s a ridiculously big number.
In terms of raw numbers thee US has a huge population so it has more of everything, whether that’s immigrants or murderers or doctors or pedophiles.
In perms of the percentage of its population tho, 15% is somewhere in the middle of the pack, well behind countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland etc.
Boasting that you have more immigration than random countries like Japan is just odd.
For the same reason we can’t take 15min without the context of the US’s size, smaller countries having larger percentages also need to be contextualized. The raw number does have some meaning here. It’s also about annual rate of immigration.
The US has been wavering between 16% and 15% for about a decade which is when I started taking an interest in this stuff. It’s a fairly steady state.
My country has risen from 25% to 27% first generation migrants in that timeframe.
Per capita is a much more useful for comparing effects on total workforce etc.
It’s not necessarily good or bad per se. I think there are so many variables at play, everything from type of migration, underlying birth rate of host country through to effect on housing stock and whether taxes and infrastructure can keep pace.
But yeah Biden’s speech was just strange given that context.
It would be much more useful to look at it state-by-state as a few states are doing the heavy lifting. I say this as someone is decidedly pro-immigration. The logistics are no small matter
I live in Louisiana. Our only major experience with immigration was hurricane Katrina and they basically rebuilt our communities. I am eternally grateful.
Boasting that you have more immigration than random countries like Japan is just odd.
He’s not boasting; he’s saying that immigration would do a lot to solve their problems; and he’s correct. I hate Biden’s guts but he’s correct here. For context Japan is a notoriously xenophobic country and currently sits at a 2%. They’re not “a random country”.
In perms of the percentage of its population tho, 15% is somewhere in the middle of the pack, well behind countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland etc.
I mean people deciding to come to your country isn’t proportional to your population, or really related at all. It’d be like expecting China to have the same 15% as the US (for context that’d be about 250 million people). That’s just not how that works.
I agree he specifically called out Japan to contrast with the US because its immigration was weaker.
people deciding to come to your country isn’t proportional to your population
Are you saying fewer people decide to come to the US than to those other countries?
Seems unlikely. Pretty sure the US could let in a lot more immigrants if it wanted to.
Pretty sure the US could let in a lot more immigrants if it wanted to.
I mean yes that’s the case for everyone. I’m saying the number of people applying to immigration to the US isn’t four times that of Germany, for example, so even if they accept people according to the exact same criteria Germany will have a bigger percentage.
Are you sure? I’d expect the number applying to the US would be hundreds of times higher than the number applying to New Zealand.
I don’t especially love or hate Biden btw, I mean I can’t stand US foriegn policy on the Gaza Genocide but it’s not like their other mainstream politicians wouldn’t have done more or less the same. It’s a real pity the US hadn’t been able to elect someone like Bernie Sanders.
There are also different immigration rates for different states, some of which are as big as major countries. There are many states in the US driving the national average down because they have such a low percentage.
Edit: added some stats.
Why am I seeing multiple news reports today about Joe Biden where they remove context to polarize his comments further? This feels, to me, like a new media trend
Propaganda?
It doesn’t need to be propaganda, just maximizing clicks will do that for you organically.
Yes. Foreign or domestic. Who knows?
CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, an American company.
The post, not the site.
Every news article posted here and across all platforms is public relations, or propaganda. You need / must understand this. There are 1200 stories, graphics, and videos posted per day, just from the Wash. Post. source
the number includes both staff-produced articles and wire stories, written elsewhere. The *Post *editorial staff itself produces about 500 stories per day, she said.
Every story is curated in some way as it filters here. Users decide what they deem worthy of posting.
It’s all propaganda, unless it’s my side. /s
This is on .ml
Oh man, I almost never check. It sure is.
Partly true about inviting foreigners. Japan has a trainee visa system that is abusive, as they always are, and is designed so that those employees (victims) never get citizenship. And it’s a single citizenship country, because of course it is. But hey, employers are very willing to bring in those laborers, since it’s cheaper than paying what the law requires.
And you can’t fix demographics with people who only stay for a year or two.
Who cares what this genocidal fascist has to say. The sooner he kicks it the better it will be for everyone else.
He’s not wrong but also I believe there’s a saying in English about stones and glass houses.
Don’t let your stones hang out if you live in a glass house? /s
I swear I’ve heard balls referred to as stones likely by a British person, but I don’t know if I’m making that up.
Even the most bigoted parts of the US are nowhere near as xenophobic as Japan. Housing discrimination based on race is still perfectly acceptable over there, many people will refuse to rent to foreigners.
Do you think there isn’t housing discrimination happening in the US?
Black families often have their homes appraised for less than white family homes.
Housing applications often get denied if the person has a non white last name.
Hell, the last time I was looking around for a room to rent I got asked multiple times over the phone. “You’re white right?”
perfectly acceptable
At least some governments in Japan appear to disagree:
Japan signed the “International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)” in 1996
Tokyo Metropolitan Government educates real estate agents on the illegality of nationality-based rental refusals, considering them discriminatory
And the article itself seems to contradict with those statements…
Xeno Biden doesn’t care.
As neat as Japan sounds and as much as I’d like to be there, I mean, he’s not wrong
I watch YouTubers who moved to and live there talk about how they’re just indefinitely treated like a tourist
Wait Biden actually said something true?
Broken clocks and all that - but this one only has one hand working at this point. We’re always counting down to midnight, for some reason.
The president made the remark while arguing that Japan, along with Russia and China, would perform better economically if the countries embraced immigration more.
Oh, well that’s true enough. Japan is crazy anti immigration despite that being a solution to their low birth rate.
Pretty much every country in the world where citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity are the same thing you find xenophobia.
Immigration absolutely helps the US economy, because it parasitically siphons all the skilled workers out of other countries that it underdevelops and hoards their labor for itself.
People think remittances help underdeveloped countries, but labor is the superior of capital, losing that skilled labor is never worth the paltry sums that get sent back home. It’s just another shape that imperialism takes.
In Canada we heavily base immigration on education. So we’re siphoning off the best educated of other countries. I mean this is just fucking those countries.
I mean that’s the whole point of the US higher education system, excepting the Republicans (with the help of Democrats) broke the parts of our immigration system that is supposed to take advantage of educating the world.
That’s truly one of the worst things about brain drain / educated people moving to the imperial core countries for the high salaries. Global south countries really need educated young people helping to solve their own problems, and Canada and the US rip out their heart and soul.
At least in tech / programming, a good chunk of us are devoting most of our labor time to not just wasteful things, but actively harmful things, like trying to get people to click on ads, or increasing viral engagement.
I mean tbf (at least in my case as an Egyptian) it’s not just the high salaries. Maybe Egypt is an extreme case but this country just has no future. The regime isn’t just dictatorial; it’s also dumb. There’s almost no money going to scientific research, the system as a whole was outdated 50 years ago, the military is monopolizing everything and undercutting the market because they can use
slaveconscript labor and don’t pay taxes, etc etc. I’m firmly of the opinion that this is at least partially caused by Britain’s unwillingness to fully decolonize in the 1920s and their godawful decolonization in the 1950s, but the fact remains that these countries have a duty to their people that they’re not fulfilling, and that’s why brain drain happens.As a living example of said brain drain, salaries were near the bottom of my priority list when I made the decision. I was more concerned about living somewhere where I don’t need to worry about being arrested because I said my opinion on the internet (or even just complained about prices) or because I do my prayers at the mosque (I was actually told by my mother to not go to the mosque all the time because I might get arrested. It’s that bad). Below that were things like a sane administration that actually cares about things being even just barely functional, a decent education system and academia and the ability to have confidence that the country will actually exist in 20 years. Living in a wildly different country (especially as a Muslim in Japan as is my case (halal food is a pain to get here)) is such a pain you couldn’t pay me to do it, but it’s hard to turn down actually getting to have a future.
What I wanna say is that it’s not just the Global South being undercut by the West; many Global South countries are failing at fulfilling their responsibility towards their constituents, and that’s why they’re leaving. Now how much the West was involved in creating this situation is another story, but you can’t reduce it to just high salaries. Global South governments, as a rule, aren’t interesting in solving their own problems. That’s why the problem solvers go solve Western rich people’s problems.
Egypt is also a useful case study, because the US props up its shitty government. That’s also part of how the Global South is underdeveloped, it’s a multifaceted machine that sucks out everyone who can help make the country better and gives support and resources to the people making it worse. It’s not just legacy from the 20’s and 50’s, this is an ongoing problem that is created by imperialism.
Also when a Global South government tries to solve its problems, such as through nationalizing resources or land reform, the US buries them under sanctions and attempts to make a regime change. This, too, is part of how imperialism underdevelops the Global South.
I get what you two are saying, but this kind of removes agency from the people doing the moving.
Also: Should people not be allowed to move to another country if they’re “too useful” or “skilled”?
There’s no agency in the market. That’s the entire point of markets - being independent of a single human’s whims and being an equalizing force, the “invisible hand”.
And the entire point of communism is getting that agency, having production for the sake of humans rather than humans for the sake of production.
I think you have lost the thread here tbh
No, migration is caused by economics, so it only makes sense to use economics to talk about it. In capitalism, migration follows the market laws, i.e. people migrating to where they expect to be paid more.
I took basic Econ. My point is decisions are multi-faceted. We are not all slaves of the invisible hand 24/7 as it guides our every single decision.
Idk about everyone else, but I think the issue is something like the “oh so you hate capitalism but participate in it?” meme.
An argument for agency can be made either for or against, but for most it boils down to the reality of the society you’re trying to exist in. It’s just a huge distraction that you’ve created along with others for anecdotal conversations. This is a US sitting democratic president calling insults to allies during a time-period where conflict is on the rise, while completely negating any resolutions that could impede the death being caused.
We could talk about Biden’s own xenophobia with the immigration and border response. His past with the crime bill and other negative legislation. The fact that the entire Democratic Party is xenophobic to anyone outside of their party including the “poor” or progressive strangers they fear so much, like we saw with the recent condemnation of the protests against Palestinian genocide.
Instead you’ve made 10+ comments bringing up other countries to blame, links back to other comments in this thread, boasting about taking a basic Econ class and proclaiming you’ve won because a couple of people upvoted you. I understand your argument, it’s just not valid at this time or during this discussion and you’re trying to force it with hostility till people “get it”.
It also has a chicken-egg problem. What if the indicators of talent or skill aren’t apparent because of abysmally poor living and educational conditions? The lack of opportunity in many developing countries is such that people will be less successful and appear less talented simply because their country has limited ways for them to demonstrate it.
Hi, one of the people that did the move: they are absolutely right. I got through uni and masters for free at federal universities, my education is amazing. My country gets nothing back because there is no industry there that’d take me and university positions are limited.
I made the bese choice for myself and am aware of how bad my choice is for home
But I agree with you? I’m not sure what we disagree on?
People don’t have free agency to move to any country they want. In my view the free agency which you say is being removed never actually existed in the first place.
But I do find it funny that “give me your poor” (yes I’m borrowing from the US) turned into “give me your elite”.
I didn’t say people had free agency to go to any country they want. You are presenting a false dichotomy. There are different people with different access to different places with different senses of urgency and for different reasons. Many people make choices on whether or not to immigrate, as well as where to immigrate if they choose to. They have agency, they are not just pawns in this discussion to be shuffled around.
People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Our material conditions limit our agency. We go where the jobs are, where the money is, where the possibilities for a better future are. Those are all choices.
But you can’t ignore the material conditions that lead to those choices. We aren’t just free floating agents in a sea of possibilities.
People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
Never said they or we do
Our material conditions limit our agency.
Totally agree
I think you may have misspoke. You said I’m removing their agency. I did no such thing.
Your phrasing of your first comment certainly read that way to me. I didn’t misspeak. If I did not understand your meaning/intention that’s a fair claim.
That’s not it, but in many cases Western imperialism is involved in the conditions that made these people want to leave in the first place.
I’m not blaming them I am saying they still often make a decision. They are humans who have some control of their lives. That’s not mutually exclusive with saying they are also pressured externally.
The way they were originally described made it sound like they are just pieces on a board incapable of deciding what they want and acting on it.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say anymore. What’s the point you’re trying to make here?
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/1000729/-/comment/6477868
Yeah and nobody is saying they don’t have agency. You’re preaching to… no one?
Did you just say people moving to the US for a better life are a part of imperialism?
Don’t misunderstand, the people moving to the US are blameless. Imperialism works by siphoning up all of the skilled labor around the world for itself in order to make life better for people within the imperial core, and this is part of how the imperial nations underdevelop other countries. People get educations in their home countries (often at the government’s expense) and then they take that education out of the country to put it to use in the US (or France or Canada etc). They’re just going where the jobs are, though, that’s not their fault at all.
Except where there’s little opportunity to utilize the highly skilled labor. They are going abroad anyway to find job opportunities befitting of their skill set and the highest bidder. Doesn’t matter if the US or EU took them, they’re leaving because the local opportunity doesn’t exist.
Yes, and the people who could develop that local opportunity aren’t there. They all leave as soon as they can.
That’s why I said they’re underdeveloped countries. They’re not “developing” in truth, but are being kept from becoming developed. How do you think that happens? In part it happens because of the IMF giving predatory loans and then imposing austerity on the people when the government can’t pay their loans back, but it also happens because labor is the superior of capital and these countries are losing skilled labor.
I am not blaming them for leaving their countries. I am blaming underdevelopment, which is a product of imperialism.
I think “extremely ethnocentric” is a more fair description/criticism of Japan. Close to 98% of their population is ethnically homogeneous, so it kinda makes sense.
You’d be wrong
