A False Alarm about Immigration into Japan.

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.