By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Japan’s Stalled Immigration Experiment

Among the many issues that helped propel Sanae Takaichi to power as Japan’s first female prime minister this fall, perhaps none is more politically charged or more important to Japan’s long-term future than immigration. During her campaign, Takaichi—a longtime member of the Japanese House of Representatives who won the leadership of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—took a stronger stance against immigration, appealing to conservative voters energized by a surge of nativist right-wing parties. Her position drew significant popular support.

In part stemming from efforts to prioritize ethnic homogeneity during Japan’s rebuilding efforts after the end of World War II, the country’s leaders have generally maintained a no-immigration stance. Today, immigrants make up only three percent of the population, less than in any other advanced economy. Even so, in the Japanese public imagination, immigrants seem to have a large presence. Since the summer of 2025, antiforeigner sentiment—fueled by false or exaggerated claims about migrant workers committing crimes, foreign residents draining welfare coffers, or international tourists debasing Japanese culture—has taken hold in Japanese politics. In an upper-house election in July, the LDP-led ruling coalition lost its majority largely due to the rise of populist parties, including the ultraconservative Sanseito party (StepUp.html), whose anti-immigrant, “Japanese First” platform drew widespread media attention. Takaichi, taking note of the political tide, campaigned on restricting immigration to capture conservative votes.

Yet Japan urgently needs foreign workers to fuel its economy, which has suffered from an aging population and declining labor force. Since 2018, the government has approved a series of immigration reforms that could provide a controlled way to bring in many more migrant workers and alleviate economic pressure. These culminated in the expanded pathways announced last year. If the reforms succeed, they would not only begin to right Japan’s economic woes, including high inflation and stagnating growth, but they could also provide a model for other advanced economies that are struggling to balance a demand for immigrant labor with nativist sociopolitical forces that make securing that labor difficult.

Nonetheless, Japan’s anti-immigrant backlash may tempt Takaichi to appease the country’s right wing and reverse the progress that previous governments have made on immigration. If Japan cannot protect its pragmatic migration model from populist political disruption—and from its own institutional fragilities, including its capacity to protect the rights of migrant workers—it may squander its best chance at securing the workforce it needs now and for decades to come.

 

Slow and Cautious

Japan today faces a paradox: the rise of anti-immigrant fervor comes at a time when the country needs migrant workers more than ever. Japan’s working-age population has been in constant decline for three decades. Even though they make up a small fraction of the overall population, foreign-born residents are on average much younger than native Japanese and thus contribute an outsized share to the economy and welfare system. Economists and industry figures now recognize that expanding the foreign-born workforce will be critical to sustaining both.

In 2024, the national legislature adopted ambitious immigration reforms to achieve this expansion. Through them, Japan aims to admit and then train nearly a million foreign workers in manual and service sectors by the end of the decade. This approach is novel. Rather than select skilled migrants based on their existing qualifications—the dominant model in developed Western countries since the late twentieth century—Japan seeks to bring in foreign workers based on their general aptitude and stated motivations and then train them on its own terms. This model, built on a legacy of on-the-job training in Japanese corporations, has evolved into a step-by-step pipeline that transforms temporary trainees into long-term contributors to Japan’s economy.

Admitting manual and service workers and then turning them into skilled ones represents Japan’s experiment in training-based immigration. In the past, foreign workers were imported through loophole schemes, such as the Technical Intern Training Program, from 1993, which was framed as promoting development aid. Under the program, hundreds of thousands of young workers from Asia took jobs in Japanese farms, factories, and long-term care facilities. Officially known as “trainees” or “interns,” these workers were paid minimum wage and barred from changing employers.

In the face of mounting criticism over abuses and labor rights violations, Japan began to reform these practices. In 2019, it stepped up its efforts by introducing the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) visa, which represented the first formal acknowledgment that Japan needed foreign labor in blue-collar sectors. Then came the 2024 legislation, which calls for the Employment for Skill Development Program (ESDP) to replace the Technical Intern Training Program. Scheduled to launch by 2027, the ESDP is a three-year arrangement designed not to send foreign workers back home with new skills but to prepare them for more long-term integration into Japan’s labor force.

ESDP trainees will receive structured training aligned with the first tier of SSW job categories, such as farming, food processing, and construction. After one or two years, they can switch employers within the same sector, a possibility that was denied under the previous system. Upon successful completion of the ESDP, these workers can then transition to a longer-term SSW visa, which offers up to five years of residency and broader employment rights. Those who pass industry-specific proficiency tests can then qualify for a second tier of SSW, which offers indefinite visa renewals, family-reunification rights, and a path to permanent residency.

As part of the 2024 legislation, the government announced plans to admit up to 820,000 foreign workers under the SSW system before the end of the decade—more than double the number of people that were admitted through the SSW system between 2019 and 2023. If successful, it could represent one of the most significant immigrant-labor expansions in the country’s modern history.

This training-based approach also underpins the Japanese framework for skilled-worker visas. An applicant for a skilled-worker visa must already have a job offer from a Japanese firm that has declared its willingness to train that person. This model reflects Japan’s long-standing corporate culture, which prioritizes new hires for their general potential—their aptitudes and aspirations, as opposed to their current skill sets or university majors—and then trains them on the job.

In recent years, this model has been extended to foreign-born graduates of Japanese universities. Because firms expect to employ new hires for a long time, industry players and the government have begun encouraging international students to stay and work in Japan after graduation by granting one-year job-searching visas and by relaxing criteria to qualify for specialist visas reserved for white-collar migrant workers in technical jobs. They view these students as ideal contributors: workers possessing novel language skills or cultural perspectives who are still able to be inculcated with Japanese business practices. In fact, most foreign skilled workers in Japan first came to the country as international students. They enter firms through the same job pipelines as Japanese graduates do and, if successful, undertake the same intensive on-the-job training rotations.

This route has been gaining momentum. International students are now a key focus of Japan’s talent-recruitment strategy, and their job prospects have improved amid labor shortages. In 2023, more than half of foreign graduates seeking jobs in Japan received at least one job offer, the highest rate in years. Japanese companies, including manufacturing giants and tech firms, are actively courting foreign graduates to secure skilled workers in fields in which Japanese workers alone cannot fulfill needs, including IT, engineering, and global marketing.

 

The Japanese Way

Japan’s training-based approach stands in contrast to most skill-immigration models, which select for expertise at the border. This can be partly explained by Japan’s self-image as a no-immigration country: training foreign workers and inculcating them with Japanese culture and values after they arrive helps assuage domestic forces that view open immigration as a threat to social cohesion. Programs like the SSW visas provide structure to the vetting process: only those who pass both skills tests in line with national vocational qualifications and years of behavioral observation in Japanese workplaces get to advance to longer stays and, potentially, long-term residency.

In essence, Japan has established a mechanism through which it can select and retain immigrants based in part on how well they learn and adapt to working in the country. In addition to aligning with Japan’s preference for cultural conformity, the approach also reflects political pragmatism. Rather than waiting for Japanese society to embrace immigration, the government can admit foreigners in a controlled way and ensure that they become—in the application of their skills and even in their cultural leanings—part of “Team Japan” over time.

There are some material benefits to this gradual approach. It lowers the threshold for migrants to enter Japan, practically expanding the labor pool. Also, by training immigrant workers in Japan, the program limits the kind of productivity loss that can occur when a skilled immigrant worker with a relevant degree and experience is placed in a job that doesn’t match their credentials or skills because of cultural or institutional hurdles.

But there are also shortcomings. First, this immigration model, especially when applied to blue-collar occupations, is slow. Unlike systems around the world that grant residency and working rights to migrants at entry based on their existing qualifications, Japan’s model requires years of job training and performance evaluations as well as rigid, incremental steps to progress visa statuses. Such an approach may not deliver workers fast enough to meet urgent needs, especially in Japan’s health-care, agriculture, and construction sectors, where labor shortages are severe.

The model is also vulnerable to voluntary repatriation. Migrants enduring the slow-moving nature of Japan’s residency pipeline may at some point choose to leave and apply their newly honed skills in another country offering higher pay or a clearer residency pathway. If Japan becomes a kind of training ground for talent that then goes elsewhere, the country’s new immigration system will fail to deliver the types of long-term workforce gains it was designed to remedy.

This will also depend on whether the Japanese government can actually implement and safeguard the new worker protections offered by the ESDP and SSW visas. Japan’s Ministry of Justice has designated government organizations to support foreign workers’ integration and bolster protections for them, but their functioning has yet to be thoroughly tested. A failure to eradicate the exploitative conditions that migrant workers routinely experienced in the past—underpayment, surveillance, employer abuse—will undermine public confidence in the program and push migrants away. Although the government offers a clear migration process and specifies each stakeholder’s rights and responsibilities, securing accountability across all the relevant actors involved, including recruitment agencies, support organizations, and thousands of small-to-medium-sized employers, will be a daunting task.

Perhaps the gravest threat to the new system is political. Even before the new admittance system kicked into gear, immigration had become a lightning rod in Japan. The sudden rise of Sanseito and other populist political forces, which have played to public anxieties about national identity, social security, economic competition, and mass tourism, made public an anti-immigration sentiment that had previously been simmering under the surface. And this is despite the fact that foreign residents make up only a tiny sliver of Japan’s population.

Crucially, such sentiment is based on misguided and simplistic comparisons between Japan and some European countries and the United States, which have much higher percentages of foreign-born residents. In contrast to many European countries, for instance, whose modern histories of immigration go back to the mid-twentieth century, Japan has not accepted generations of unskilled workers from poor, developing countries or adopted formal guest-worker programs. Rather, it has specifically targeted small numbers of middle-class workers from growing economies across Asia, and even then only since the 1990s.

False narratives around immigration harden public attitudes, deter migrants, and pressure policymakers to reverse course from the crucial reforms to increase foreign workers on which Japan’s economic health depends. As Japan’s leading party for the better part of 70 years, the LDP bears responsibility for such beliefs gaining traction, which further complicates the current picture. For decades, policymakers have deliberately avoided a national debate on immigration. They expanded labor inflows while insisting that the apparatus they used to do so had nothing to do with bringing migrant workers to Japan. It is this policy of strategic ambiguity that created a narrative vacuum. As the presence of foreign workers becomes more visible, the rhetoric of populist actors challenging the legitimacy of immigration is filling the void. Takaichi must now confront the immigration issue that her party has ignored for so long.

Workers in Tokyo, May 2025

 

A Potential Playbook

Japan’s labor-migration model, in which immigrants’ inclusion into society is based primarily on their postmigration performance, presents a novel solution to the immigration conundrum that many countries face. Not only might this experiment potentially rescue the world’s fourth-largest economy from a demographic crisis, it also challenges the dominant neoliberal migration policy that so many advanced countries have long pursued, which generally prioritizes skill selection over skill cultivation. As immigration becomes more of a flash point across the globe, Japan’s model could come to offer an immigration template for other nations—those that are culturally cautious, politically risk averse, or demographically desperate, or even those that, like the United States or many countries in western Europe, are simply experiencing strong anti-immigrant politics.

To yield real results, the Japanese approach requires time. It needs institutional capacity and long-term thinking. And it may never attract the kind of talent that wants immediate access to improved opportunities. Nonetheless, if it wins the acceptance of the Japanese public, it could do much to reduce hostility to foreign workers. It could also help cultivate more stable and cohesive societies—ones in which migrants are integrated not on the backs of their achievements in their countries of origin but through their contribution and adaptation to their countries of arrival.

In an age in which many nations face the dual, often competing imperatives of population decline and anti-immigrant populism, Japan’s approach is a case to watch. If it succeeds, it could offer a pragmatic blueprint for how to grow and integrate a migrant labor force without fracturing social trust. If it fails, it may reinforce the perception—both in and outside of Japan—that the promotion of even carefully managed immigration is politically unsustainable.

 

 

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