New Policies for New Residents: Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance in Japan and Beyond

By Deborah J. Milly

In recent decades, many countries have experienced both a rapid increase of in-migration of foreign nationals and a large-scale devolution of governance to the local level. The result has been new government policies to promote the social inclusion of recently arrived residents. In New Policies for New Residents, Deborah J. Milly focuses on the intersection of these trends in Japan. Despite the country’s history of restrictive immigration policies, some Japanese favor a more accepting approach to immigrants. Policies supportive of foreign residents could help attract immigrants as the country adjusts to labor market conditions and a looming demographic crisis. As well, local citizen engagement is producing more inclusive approaches to community.

Milly compares the policy discussions and outcomes in Japan with those in South Korea and in two similarly challenged Mediterranean nations, Italy and Spain. All four are recent countries of immigration, and all undertook major policy innovations for immigrants by the 2000s. In Japan and Spain, local NGO–local government collaboration has influenced national policy through the advocacy of local governments. South Korea and Italy included NGO advocates as policy actors and partners at the national level far earlier as they responded to new immigration, producing policy changes that fueled local networks of governance and advocacy. In all these cases, Milly finds, nongovernmental advocacy groups have the power to shape local governance and affect national policy, though in different ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780801470783

Book preview

NEW POLICIES

FOR NEW

RESIDENTS

Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance

in Japan and Beyond

Deborah J. Milly

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For Bob

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction: Advocacy and Governance for Immigrants

1.  Trajectories of the Advocacy-Governance Linkage

2.  National Policy Change Compared

3.  Changing Japan’s Policies—Slowly

4.  Local Governance and National Policy Advocacy in Japan

5.  Japan’s Webs of Nongovernmental Advocacy and Governance

6.  Landscapes of Multilevel Governance

7.  Shocks to the System

Conclusion: Advocacy toward Inclusion?

Notes

Bibliography

Figures and Tables

Figures

I.1.  Willingness to accept immigrants in Spain and Italy

I.2a and I.2b.  Willingness of Koreans and Japanese to accept immigrants of specified nationalities

7.1.  Responses to the statement, We should restrict and control entry of people into our country more than we do now

7.2.  Responses to the question, Are you for or against an increase in the number of foreigners in your community?

Tables

I.1.  Basic indicators for Japan, Korea, Italy, and Spain

1.1.  Modes of advocacy over national policies for immigrants

1.2.  Characteristics of devolved governance in four countries

1.3.  The advocacy-governance relationship in terms of national policy processes

1.4.  Three advocacy-governance relationships and the role of humanitarian civil society groups

4.1.  Foreign populations of Japanese prefectures with large foreign populations

5.1.  Trend of topics covered by Ijūren’s monthly newsletter

5.2.  Number of trainee-receiving organizations identified as violating regulations

7.1.  Results from Shizuoka Prefecture survey

7.2.  Results from Aichi Prefecture surveys

Acknowledgments

The generosity, warmth, and insights of many people have enabled me to write this book. I am grateful to all of those who have helped in large ways and small, responded to my ideas, tolerated my questions, supported me financially, and given me the space to move onward, collectively buoying me to the end. Some I am able to thank here, but others, because of space limitations, I must thank privately.

Professional colleagues in Japan have contributed a wealth of knowledge and practical help. Fujiwara Kiichi and Ishida Hiroshi sponsored my year at the Institute for Social Science at the University of Tokyo, and Masuyama Mikitaka (now at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies) sponsored my stay in 2001 at Seikei University in Tokyo. Colleagues at both institutions were generous in discussing my work and introducing me to others. Chitose Yoshimi of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research has been a colleague, friend, and supporter, introducing me to scholars working on immigration, sending me materials, and providing encouragement. Tsukasaki Yūko of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has been a generous friend in offering her understanding of current immigrants’ employment issues and in arranging appointments with government offices. Okamoto Takiko of Meiji Gakuin University, a friend for decades, always manages to see me when I visit Japan despite her forever busy schedule. Yoshimura Tōru, the first president and now special consultant for the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, has been gracious over the many years as I worked on this book. I owe a special debt to Iguchi Yasushi of Kwansei Gakuin University for making time for me on many occasions and to Ikegami Shigehiro for including me as a speaker in 2009 at a day-long symposium held by the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture. I also benefited from participants’ comments on early presentations I made at Kwansei Gakuin University and Seikei University, as well as the comments of Yamawaki Keizō at a presentation at the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo. Other scholars and experts in Japan who have shared time and insights include Higuchi Naoto, Kashiwazaki Chikako, Katō Junko, Kitawaki Yasuyuki, Kojima Hiroshi, Terry MacDougall, Takenoshita Hirohisa, and Tanabe Shunsuke.

I could not have taken on the Korean case without the openness and cooperation of scholars in Korea. Lee Jungwhan of Cheongju University took me to visit many migrants’ shelters and responded whenever I had questions—I cannot thank him enough. Others who have shared their time and research are Chung Ki-seon of the International Organization for Migration in Seoul, Lee Hye-kyung of Pai Chai University, Seol Dong-hoon of Chonbuk National University, and Yoon In-jin of Korea University. I am grateful to all of you and hope that I have fairly represented your work.

In Japan and Korea, I have met only openness from the many national and local officials, staffs of local international centers, and NGO representatives who have allowed me to take up their time and have willingly explained local conditions. Those at the national ministries are too numerous to count. I am grateful to officials from the cities of Fukuoka, Hamamatsu, Iwata, Nagoya, Ōta, Toyota, and Yokohama, and from Aichi and Kanagawa Prefectures, not to mention the staffs from the affiliated international centers. At Ijūren, Watanabe Hidetoshi and Yano Manami met with me multiple times over the years. In Korea, national officials, Ansan city officials, and many shelter directors gave liberally of their time.

In North America, I have benefited from colleagues who have shared their perspectives. Glenda Roberts, Leonard Schoppa, and Takeyuki Tsuda at points along the way commented on papers related to the book. A brief stay at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a Japan Policy Fellow supported by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership enabled me to try out my ideas and to make new contacts through the sponsorship of Japan chair Michael Green. Pat Boling of Purdue University has been a loyal friend as we have made our parallel journeys of working on multicountry comparative projects. Ito Peng has challenged me to meet a high standard. John Campbell, professor emeritus of the University of Michigan, has always been ready to provide advice. Members of my virtual writing group of over five years, none of whom I’ve met in person, have sustained me through the process with wit, encouragement, and day-to-day stories of meeting challenges. At Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon’s readiness to take on this book and shepherd it through the process has made a world of difference. Two anonymous readers for the Press gave me extremely helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript—I have incorporated almost all of them.

Financial support for the book has come from many sources. An Abe Fellowship in 1995–96 made possible through the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership allowed me to begin to develop the project through a year-long stay in Japan. Support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2001 allowed me to conduct research for seven months in Japan. I have received other funds over the years for shorter stays in Japan from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and from the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech.

At Virginia Tech, supportive colleagues include Bruce Pencek, political theorist and Virginia Tech librarian, who vetted earlier versions of the introduction and chapter 1, and Chris Hays, who edited several chapters at an early stage. Two department chairs, Ilja Luciak and Tim Luke, have shielded me from extra responsibilities so I could work on the book. Karen Hult has helped me to keep priorities clear. When it came to contacts in Korea, conducting interviews, translating materials, and obtaining documents from Korea, doctoral students from the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, who have since earned their degrees and moved on, provided invaluable assistance, including Boo Hyeong-wook, Kim Se-jin, Lee Maeng-joo, and Park Soo-young. Undergraduates Ivy Choi, Chan-hyuk Kang, and Maria Kim also helped in deciphering Korean materials.

I am fortunate to be part of a large immediate and extended family that has encouraged me and provided welcome distractions. My mother Georgia Bywaters Milly has been a model for how we can continue to learn and grow at any age. My siblings, especially my sister Susan Milly Davenport, have rooted for me in the midst of family ups and downs. Special thanks go to my niece Michelle Milly Rodriguez for staying close to mom and for her posts. Finally, but far from least in my thoughts, Bob D’Intino has stayed with me through it all. I don’t think there is anyone else who could so ground me, keep me laughing, and give me the space to work on this project for so many years. I thank him most of all.

Conventions and Abbreviations

Throughout the text, Japanese and Korean names are written following local usage (family name followed by given name), except in the case of authors of English-language publications. Translations from Japanese are mine.

Abbreviations and Short Forms of Organization Names

Newspapers and Periodicals

Introduction

ADVOCACY AND GOVERNANCE FOR IMMIGRANTS

About a two-hour train ride from Asakusa station in Tokyo lie the communities of Ōta and Ōizumi. En route from Tokyo, the train passes expansive rice fields and clusters of small factories. Route 354, a main road that forms the boundary between Ōta and Ōizumi, is also the center of Brazil-town, an area of shops and businesses that cater to the local Brazilian community. In 2013, about 3.3% of Ōta’s population of slightly more than 220,000 were registered foreigners. Of Ōizumi’s roughly 41,000 residents, 14.5% were registered foreigners, the vast majority of whom (84%) were Brazilians and Peruvians. Ōta’s foreign population was more mixed, with less than one-half from Latin America, followed by Filipinos (14.7%) and Chinese (12.6%).¹ Since the early 1990s, a plant in Ōta affiliated with Subaru has regularly accepted industrial trainees from Indonesia, and Latin American workers have come to work at other plants in the area.

Although Japan’s foreign-resident population is comparatively small, certain areas in the country are home to a substantial number of foreigners. Japan has begun to adopt governance approaches and measures for supporting foreign residents similar to those found in other countries. And, in spite of the lack of a strong national voice for humanitarian civil society advocates, proponents of immigrant policies have found ways to penetrate elite policy discussion. How has this happened, especially given the failure of national political leaders to spearhead major immigration reform? There is an answer specific to Japan, but when placed comparatively it produces insights on the intersection of processes of governance and advocacy in contemporary society and their implications for immigrant policies. The communities of Ōta and Ōizumi are useful prisms for illuminating central issues in the governance of immigration in Japan and other countries where appreciable increases in immigration in the past three decades and changes in the profile of the immigrant population have spurred policy innovations.

While giving special attention to Japan, I comparatively situate it with Korea, Spain, and Italy to examine dynamics of policy change in these countries for which, as in Japan, a marked increase of foreign residents is a relatively recent phenomenon. While countries designated as immigration countries by the OECD, such as Canada, France, Germany, and the United States, consistently experienced net immigration from 1959 to 2009,² many countries the OECD labeled as emigration countries, among them Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Spain, shifted as a group from net emigration to net immigration by 1990.³ This shift occurred in 1981 in Spain and 1988 in Italy, leading the Council of Europe in 1990 to call them new countries of immigration.⁴ Japan’s pattern was one of year-to-year fluctuation between net immigration and net emigration, but foreign residents’ share in the population doubled between 1990 and 2010, approaching the severalfold increases in Spain and Italy during the same period. In contrast, between 1995 and 2009, increases in the portion of foreign-born population in Australia, Canada, Luxembourg, and Switzerland stood at about 20% and in the United States at about 30%.⁵

Due to the timing of increased immigration to Japan and its counterparts since the 1980s, these countries have often developed policies for immigrants when processes of reconfiguring governance were also under way. States have been decentralizing responsibilities, relying on third-sector providers, experimenting with new deliberative arrangements, and harmonizing national policies with those of supranational organizations. For instance, the trend of decentralization is reflected in a study of forty-two countries by Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, and Arlan H. Schakel that found that reforms to strengthen subnational regions’ authority dramatically increased in the 1980s and 1990s.⁶

This convergence of these two trends—reorganized governance and increased immigration—in the countries I examine indicates a need to look beyond central policy processes when comparatively accounting for policies to support new foreign residents. I probe the relationship among devolved governance, policy advocacy, and processes of national policy change for immigrants by asking, How have reorganizations of governance contributed to policy processes for immigrant supports? How have new governance arrangements been related to patterns of policy advocacy? Further, how have changes in the relationships among different levels of government over policy, civil society’s participation in governance, and policy advocacy contributed to national policy changes? The comparative framework I develop to answer these questions identifies three major variants of governance associated with different patterns of effective policy advocacy for immigrants.

Rather than focusing on a single level or set of actors, such as national policymakers, local governments, or civil society actors, I traverse these different sites of political action and trace the ways that different levels of government and civil society groups interact, forge cooperative links, and advocate national policy changes to support foreign residents. I identify systematic differences among countries in terms of how multilevel governance has emerged, the national role played by civil society groups, patterns of governance for immigrant policies, and characteristics of national policy advocacy.

The findings add perspective on multiple aspects of politics of concern to an audience that extends beyond specialists of Japan to include scholars and experts with an interest in the politics of immigrant inclusion, the comparative impact of new forms of governance, and comparative processes of policy development. For the politics of immigrant inclusion, I show how the new forms of governance involve processes spread across a government hierarchy in ways that affect both local and national approaches to membership for noncitizens. For the fields of public administration, public policy, and comparative politics, my analysis contributes to discussions of multilevel governance by identifying different patterns of advocacy that produce national policy change when policy responsibilities have been decentralized. Finally, although some of these themes have become frequent in discussions of the European context, by using cases from East Asia together with cases from southern Europe, I highlight dynamics that span regions.

Shifting Governance, Participation, and Policy Advocacy

A focus on both multilevel governance and immigrant support policies has advantages. For policies that support immigrants, considering reorganized governance reveals implications for how these policies are made, the role of local communities in developing inclusive methods, and the origins of approaches to including foreign residents that may enter national policy discussion. Simultaneously, these policies also serve as a case for observing and analyzing how general dynamics of multilevel governance contribute to changes in national policy advocacy likely applicable to other policies.

Changes in governance do not simply define who is responsible for immigrant policies, they also affect the investments made in noncitizens. The general cross-national changes in governance of the past three decades have included changes in the organization of governmental responsibilities and the roles played by citizens that affect any number of policies. When it comes to foreign residents, responsibilities for policies that support inclusion of foreigners have been dispersed; changes in the processes for developing and implementing policies have changed the ways that advocacy is exerted; and these reorganizations have produced contexts for making concrete, through policy, the membership of foreigners within the local and possibly the national communities. These changes have consequences, not just for how policies are made, but arguably for citizens’ investment in decisions and policies themselves, as many policy decisions are now made by subnational governments with more opportunities for citizen participation. Tied to these changes in governance, changes have also occurred in how effective advocacy is exerted nationally.

Changes in governance have involved both devolution of responsibilities and the emergence of networks of public, private, and nonprofit actors. Together with governmental devolution, whether through constitutional changes or through policy-specific changes, responsibilities have also often been entrusted to nongovernmental associations, frequently nonprofits. Besides such intentional reorganization, other dynamics also contribute to changes in governance. For instance, nonpublic organizations autonomously develop services and measures that involve coordination with public officials, and supranational organizations add a layer of governance that provides new avenues for advocacy and sometimes funds to support associations’ engagement with domestic issues.

The combination of intentional devolution, expansion of supranational institutions, and emergence of networks that span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors has led to consideration of the phenomenon of multilevel governance, a concept that continues to evolve. General usage of the term refers to constellations of governing that encompass reorganized official jurisdictions along with networks of governmental and nongovernmental entities in ways that alter hierarchical government and administration. Scholarly applications of the concept have ranged from the multitiered governance found in the European Union to the increased reliance of local governments on partnerships with the nonprofit sector; some but not all commentators make supranational institutions such as the European Union a necessary feature of multilevel governance.⁷ Efforts to characterize multilevel governance have emerged from different thematic concerns, such as public administration, constitutional relationships, or the weakening of state authority.⁸ For my purposes here, the term refers to the trend of dispersing power away from central states and the increasing role of collaborative networks in governance, regardless of the role of supranational organizations.

The reasons given for the emergence of this reorganized governance are mixed. Some commentators see globalization as leading to concerns about subnational regions’ economic vitality and corresponding efforts to strengthen them. Others point to Europeanization and the European Union’s use of structural funds to encourage region-level activities that strengthen regional governments and civil society organizations while bypassing national states. Tied partially to these structural shifts, national governments have met fiscal challenges by offloading national state services to nonpublic organizations, whether to enhance the market features of policies or to shift the burden away from the national state. Finally, political movements—regional movements for autonomy, democracy movements, and issue-oriented grassroots movements—have also played a role.⁹ In short, when a government introduces changes, the justification can be based on a neoliberal reform agenda, the desire to enhance democracy, the search for more effective policies, or some combination of the three.¹⁰

The reconfiguration of governance often involves changes that weaken the role of national elites and give greater influence to local officials and local citizens over policies that remain partially under national jurisdiction. With the spread of issue-specific networks of public and nonpublic actors, nongovernmental associations may provide services for government, participate in various government-sponsored consultative systems to aid in decision making, or even develop their own ways of working that end up leading public officials.¹¹ Terms that refer to these groups carry different nuances concerning their possible political role. Third sector refers to a sector more-or-less equivalent to the nonprofit sector and often includes an expectation of political neutrality, although legal definitions vary across nations.¹² Civil society as used here refers to voluntary associations, thus subsuming the third sector, but is tinged by a view that associational life contributes to the overall health of democratic society.¹³ Social-movement organizations are often cautious about cooperating with government officials, but as they have an impact, they may cooperate with the state or even develop institutionalized relationships with it.¹⁴ In practice, as Yeheskel Hasenfeld and Benjamin Gidron indicate, individual organizations may possess characteristics reflected in all three terms: for instance, a social-movement organization may become institutionalized and work collaboratively with the state as a nonprofit organization, while still actively advocating policy change.¹⁵ In some countries and communities, strong civil society advocates of policy change may participate in formal governance mechanisms, but in others they may prefer, or be required, to remain outside formal governance relationships so they can pursue their advocacy roles effectively.¹⁶

Changes in democratic practice, especially at the local level, underscore the need to consider how they contribute to policy processes, not just locally but nationally. Besides relying on nonprofits and voluntary associations to provide services, public managers have adopted the widespread practice of including stakeholders in deliberations to enhance decision making and governance. These efforts are consistent with positions taken by normative theorists of deliberative democracy, who stress its potential for enriching democracy through including affected groups in reasoned discussion based on shared information while also reducing conflicts and leading to better decisions.¹⁷ Some theorists caution, however, that whether these processes contribute to decisions that better represent minority positions remains contingent on how inclusive they are.¹⁸ These normative considerations, combined with the widespread use of nonprofit services and deliberative mechanisms, indicate a need to scrutinize these processes carefully, especially for whether and how they improve the position of immigrants locally and nationally.

Furthermore, whether specifically for immigrant policies or for a broader set of policies, differences across countries in characteristics of multilevel governance suggest a need to probe the relationship between transformations in governance and patterns of national policy advocacy, two distinct but interconnected processes. Decentralization of specific policies, vertical cooperation, and possibly gradual constitutional changes shift responsibilities to subnational governments and nongovernmental entities in ways that intertwine the different levels of government. Not only does this process introduce greater opportunities for direct input by citizens, it may also influence national policy advocacy by subnational governments. Civil society groups have sometimes been pivotal in advocating adoption of governance mechanisms that ensure they will have an institutionally recognized voice on a policy issue. Even when this is not the case, they often gain influence through participation in governance, though this is usually not intended to be a forum for advocacy. Furthermore, reorganizing governance to give increased responsibilities to subnational governments and nongovernmental groups produces opportunities to forge new advocacy coalitions that then lobby national officials. To date, studies that look at how reconfigured governance has shifted policy processes have mainly addressed conditions in Europe; this book broadens the scope of comparison in addition to homing in on the interconnections between governance and national policy advocacy.¹⁹

The Impact of Changes in Governance for Immigrant Policies

For immigrant-support policies, the combination of dispersed policy responsibilities and increased roles for citizens suggests that changes in local governance may affect the character of policy advocacy at local and national levels by changing citizens’ understanding of and investment in foreign residents. Whether limited to narrow measures or involving general understandings of community membership for foreigners, citizen engagement and problem-focused deliberation should produce alternatives that work for the local community, limit conflict, and cultivate a sense of connection to noncitizens, possibly becoming models for national politics.

The relevance of dispersed governance to national politics begins with characteristics of policies that serve immigrants, as these respond to local demand but often depend on national policies. The overall trend of devolving social policy responsibilities makes it easier to deal with local conditions, but usually national frameworks specify policies or set standards that have to be met. Local governments, often tasked with implementing those programs and standards, also frequently end up as promoters at the national level of immigrants’ social inclusion and access to protections. Although studies of immigration and immigrant policies in federal systems are useful for suggesting dynamics that may also apply to devolved government, many cases of multilevel governance involve policy-specific dispersion of responsibilities across levels in ways that affect the emergence of networks and associated policy advocacy.²⁰

In examining these issues, I complement the work of scholars who focus on the discourse of multiculturalism, especially visible at the local level in Japan, by delving into national and local advocacy for specific policy changes to include new immigrants.²¹ As well, I take a step further the discussion of scholars such as Seung-Mi Han, Chikako Kashiwazaki, and Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, who have already given considerable attention to innovative ways that local communities in Japan include foreign residents, by using a comparative framework to consider the policy role of local governments in relation to the center and to juxtapose their national policy advocacy with that of civil society.²²

Grasping the shifting dynamics of advocacy for the social and political inclusion of foreigners is especially important for the East Asian cases, but it has applicability to countries of southern Europe as well.²³ In East Asia, proimmigrant advocacy has a bearing on whether and how countries will be able to create an environment that is attractive to temporary migrants and would-be settlers as they ease immigration restrictions. Rights and protections for immigrants are not old issues but recent and evolving ones. Policy advocates challenge entrenched interests and policy systems to be more flexible in many different venues. In the southern European countries, dispersed governance also creates challenges for identifying how advocacy is exerted as accommodation and contestation play out and for assessing the scope and practice of inclusive innovations. For all of these countries, the relationship between governance and advocacy is intrinsic to politics concerning policies to promote immigrants’ inclusion.

In addition, understanding the relationship between new governance forms and national policy advocacy promises to broaden how we think about how foreign residents’ rights are established. This book adds nuance to comparative studies that recognize roles for nongovernmental advocacy groups, international determinants of domestic rights, and institutional mechanisms for including immigrants, by merging a focus on organized advocacy for foreigners with attention to the complexities of local and national policy and governance.²⁴ When policies and governance become more rooted in local communities, this should increase the sense of investment by citizen-participants in considering how to include foreign residents, who also often participate in the discussion. Rather than foregrounding volatile rhetoric, the setting can encourage deliberations and problem solving to deal with frictions. We cannot assume, however, that the resulting shared understandings will coincide with the perspective of national civil society advocates that stress rights, because the former will be based on notions of what it means to be a member of the local community. Local approaches may emphasize rights and equal treatment, but they may also emphasize foreign residents’ reciprocal obligations, the need to forge community networks of inclusion, or pragmatic administrative priorities. How such local processes play into national politics and policy is core to the discussion here. In some systems, humanitarian civil society advocates for foreign residents have been included in national discussions, but in others local actors drawing on locally developed policy approaches lead national proimmigrant advocacy.

Foreign Residents’ Inclusion from a Policy Perspective

In this book I focus on policies that affect mainly the social and economic inclusion of foreign residents and that often are spread across levels of government and public and nonpublic actors. These include immigration policies to the extent they affect a foreigner’s treatment in the host country, immigrant policies, and the institutions through which these are developed and administered.²⁵ Whereas immigration policies include measures to control borders and foreigners’ residence status, immigrant policies refer to policies that support immigrants in the host country. The term immigrant policies as used here refers to policies that have been designed for citizens of a country but that are also intended to apply to foreigners without regard to nationality; they also include a wide variety of measures specifically designed to support the lives and social inclusion of this group. In keeping with this usage, even countries without an official policy of encouraging or endorsing immigration as settlement generally possess immigration and immigrant policies. In using the term immigrant I include, primarily, temporary and permanent foreign residents and, secondarily, those who may be naturalized citizens of the host country.

Among the policies that affect foreign residents’ inclusion, I mainly focus on those that have to do with social services, health care, education, housing, vocational training, and support for families. I also take into account that sometimes foreign residents are included in developing and providing these policies and services. Policies that designate the rights of temporary versus permanent residents or provide a path to naturalization fall outside the scope of this book. Many national policies applicable to both citizens and noncitizens have been devolved to local governments, which also sometimes create their own measures along with implementing nationally mandated programs if they encounter special needs among their foreign-resident population. Even when subnational governments and nongovernmental organizations develop and organize these services, national government cooperation and policy adjustments are often part of the mix.

Countries for Comparison

To disentangle the relationship among multilevel governance, policy advocacy for immigrants, and national policy change, I examine four countries that share some basic similarities but vary in terms of world region, their degree of governmental devolution, and the national political inclusion of civil society advocates: Japan, Korea, Spain, and Italy. These countries experienced an increase in immigration during the 1980s, except for Korea whose increase began in the early 1990s. They share roughly similar chronological timing of their initial upsurge of in-migration, and as a consequence, they have experienced parallel, if not identical, effects of global political, economic, and technological developments that might influence domestic political processes. Moreover, all four countries contend with extremely low fertility rates that have implications for long-term economic growth, labor force characteristics, and strains on the welfare state to support large senior populations. In three of the four countries, the in-migration of linguistically or ethnically related groups has also played a prominent role.

Although they are receptive to immigration by highly skilled professionals, immigration to these countries often reflects labor migration to meet demand from small businesses and the informal sector. Table I.1 gives some indication of the changed role for foreign residents in the respective labor forces prior to the global economic crisis that began in 2008, but these official data exclude potentially large numbers of undocumented workers, and foreigners with certain visa statuses may be excluded from the data even though they substitute for temporary workers. Both Japan and Korea have relied on some type of training system in place of labor-migration systems: in Korea until 2004, when it adopted the Employment Permit System, and in Japan, which still maintains programs for worker training and internships conceived as overseas development assistance. Italy and Spain allow foreign-migrant labor, but both countries have modified their systems over the years, and both have engaged in several regularizations of irregular immigrants.

TABLE I.1. Basic indicators for Japan, Korea, Italy, and Spain