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This paper examines the economic mobility of foreign migrants in Japan. In a country that is largely regarded as homogeneous and closed to outsiders, how and to what extent do immigrants achieve economic success? A survey conducted by the authors revealed that the conventional assimilationist perspective does not fully explain immigrants' economic success in Japan. Migrants from the West experience what Chiswick and Miller () refer to as 'negative assimilation.' That is, their earnings decline over time in Japan. While negative assimilation was not clearly observed among immigrants from neighboring Asian countries, wages among them did not increase with the length of their stay in Japan. For both groups, the skills they brought from abroad were found to be largely accountable for their economic success, while locally specific human capital, such as education acquired in the host society, did not contribute to their earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration scholars have frequently emphasized the tremendous increase in international migration in recent years. But several advanced industrial countries -- Japan in particular -- have relatively small numbers of foreign workers. Most of the literature on labor migration relates only to "positive cases," i.e., countries that have actually experienced significant inflows of foreign workers. This article proposes considering Japan as a "negative case" of labor migration in the post-World War II period. There has been much recent interest in the growing numbers of foreign workers in Japan, but what is most interesting about Japan is the fact that the numbers are relatively small (as a percentage of the labor force) and I that they began to increase so late, in comparison to other countries. The main goal of the paper is to advocate consideration of negative cases in migration research; a proper theory of labor migration would distinguish between positive and negative cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Seminar of Population and the Economy: From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth, held in Toyonaka, Japan from January 7 to 10, 1997, was cosponsored by the Historical Demography Committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and the International Association of Economic History. The seminar objective was to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of findings concerning the relationship between population and economic change in pre-industrial Europe and in non-European regions, both in the past and more contemporary times. Seminar organizers hoped to generate research that would bring us closer to filling existing gaps in our knowledge concerning Malthusian demographic-economic dynamics. Although the role of migration as both a short and long-term adjustment mechanism to population pressures and economic stress has been emphasized in the literature, people still have limited knowledge concerning this mechanism. In the first paper presented at the Session on Migration in Demographic Contexts, Massimo Livi-Bacci posited the hypothesis that nineteenth century European emigration served as an escape route from Mathusian population pressures. In the paper, Migration, Marriage, and Population in the Netherlands, 1500-1900, Jan de Vries considers the role of migration in the patterns of population growth, urbanization, and nuptiality in the Netherlands during the 1500-1900 period.

This article comments on the paper, Illegal Migrant Laborers in Japan, by Steven A. Spencer, published in the Fall 1992 issue of International Migration Review. The paper purports to describe an emerging immigration problem or dilemma in Japan. But it is misleading in at least three respects: illegal foreign workers in Japan nowadays are not in fact a relatively large magnitude; the recent inflow of such workers represents not so much a long-term developing labor shortage as the short-run business book of the late 1980s in Japan; Japanese social practices in normal times can fill low-level jobs with native workers. Spencer takes off from the trends of illegal workers apprehended in Japan: only 1,889 persons in 1982 but rising rapidly to a peak of 16,608 in 1989. This is indeed a nearly ninefold jump; but the numbers are no more than trivial if measured against the whole Japanese labor force. Spencer misconstrues the appearance of a labor shortage in Japan during the last five years. Those were boom years when many companies hired furiously, and the labor gap was filled to some degree by part-time workers. In other word, Spencer has taken a temporary scarcity of labor in Japan to represent a long-term rising trend that is not happening.