What does Japan actually want from immigration?
As labor shortages deepen, the debate has often come down to a binary: let in more foreign workers, or hold the line and restrict them.
Tomohisa Ishikawa, Chief Economist and Head of Research at the Japan Research Institute (JRI), argues that before the country decides how many people to admit, it needs to decide who it wants to attract, and why.
A coordinating body dedicated to foreign labor policy already exists inside the Cabinet Secretariat. However, Ishikawa says few people are aware of it, and that it barely functions as a coordinating body because it lacks a clear mission.
He frames Japan’s foreign labor policy as suffering from “three absences”: no shared vision, no functioning coordinating body, and no adequate statistics.
In his analysis, the harder part is building a vision for coexistence that the Japanese public accepts, which requires sustained national debate, and constructing statistics on foreign residents that barely exist today. He named family composition, employment type, and children’s educational environment as the most urgent gaps.
Why the Forecasts Kept Missing
That vacuum helps explain why Japan’s 2024 net inflow of foreign residents—over 330,000, roughly double the government’s own forecast—caught policymakers off guard.
The country’s total foreign resident population hit a record 3,768,977 at the end of 2024, up 357,985, or 10.5%, from the year before—the third consecutive record year.
Vietnamese nationals accounted for the largest single-year increase of any nationality, and Tokyo alone now hosts about 739,000 foreign residents, nearly a fifth of the national total.
Ishikawa points to chain migration, growing working-age populations in developing countries, and a hardening stance toward migrants in the US, Europe, and China as factors that could increase migration pressures on Japan.
“Advanced countries have a population of one billion. Emerging countries have seven billion,” he says. “The moment even a sliver of interest in Japan takes hold among that seven billion, you get 300,000 people showing up almost overnight.”
Without a defined vision or usable statistics, he suggests, that kind of miscalculation is likely to recur.
Selection Matters More Than Visa Fees
A recent development in Japan’s immigration debate is the first increase in residency-related fees in 44 years, including fees for applications to change or renew residency status and for permanent residency.
Further increases are now under consideration for 2026 that could raise renewal and change-of-status fees to ¥30,000–40,000 (roughly $200–270) and permanent residency fees to more than ¥100,000 (over $670).
Even then, Japan’s fees would remain below those charged in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Asked whether Japan should move further in that direction, Ishikawa said he was unconcerned by moderate increases but criticized the United States’ roughly $100,000 cost for obtaining an H-1B visa as excessive.
Ishikawa argues, however, that higher fees are unlikely to significantly affect migration flows or address Japan’s underlying challenges. “What matters far more is attracting people who can genuinely contribute,” he said.
For Ishikawa, the key is getting that selection process right: capping annual admissions, setting clear job and skill requirements, and expanding Japanese-language education for newcomers.
That should be paired with educating Japanese citizens about foreign residents and multicultural coexistence so it does not appear that foreigners are receiving special treatment.
If those conditions are met, he says, visa fees become a relatively minor issue and should simply be brought into line with international norms.
A Debate With No Middle
Ishikawa is equally direct about why the debate stays stuck. Support for foreign labor in Japan skews liberal, opposition skews conservative, and the political center mostly stays silent—a vacuum he suspects has amplified his relatively centrist message.
His prescription for journalists covering the issue is to resist ideology in either direction. “The success of the American economy owes something to immigrants—including people who fled the Nazis and later helped build its growth,” he says. “But cultures do differ, so acceptance has to happen at the country’s own pace. Report the good and the bad, and work out the best policy mix—don’t turn it into ideology.”
Building the Pipeline Before They Arrive
Beyond the domestic overhaul, he wants Japan investing earlier in the pipeline: cultivating trustworthy recruitment agencies in sending countries, signing bilateral labor agreements, and potentially opening Japanese-language schools abroad so migrants arrive with fewer cultural blind spots.
He said the goal is a system built around mutual benefit rather than one side simply extracting labor from the other. Until Japan can say what kind of immigration it wants—not just how much of it is arriving—the gap between forecast and reality is likely to keep repeating itself.
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Author: Daniel Manning
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