dinny_g wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 11:12 am
Beany wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 11:05 am
We can't claim to be a forward looking, modern looking, world leading country by just slapping a number on immigration numbers
Horseshit... Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia all have caps on immigration - defined as an actual Number.
And Japan and Australia regularly get shit for how they run their immigration systems, internally and externally.
The Australian system has a 'hard limit' on permanent migration, but their temporary residency system is so broken after years of exactly the sort of rhetoric we see in the UK, that they want to rebuild it from scratch because it hasn't done what they claimed it would do.
Australia’s “broken” migration system encourages 1.8 million guest workers to be “permanently temporary” due to strict caps on permanent migration, a landmark review has found.
The migration review, to be released on Thursday by the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, calls for “major reform”, warning that fixing Australia’s migration system “cannot be achieved by further tinkering and incrementalism”
....
It noted that while “successive governments” had imposed caps on permanent migration – currently 195,000 – “the temporary migrant cohort has been demand driven and has doubled in size since 2007 and now stands at 1.8 million people”.
That's from the Aus governments own report.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... view-finds
Basically, by putting a 'hard number' on permanent residents, they've just swept the problem under the carpet, and because it's a 'hard number', if it moves up, it looks very bad for governments with a firm 'look at us, we're tough on immigration' standpoint.
The number of temporary residents who are basically permanent without the rights of permanent residents proves they need to adjust the numbers of permanent migrant residents up, but to do so is politically....dangerous.
And Japan? Japan has it's own, well known, problems - there are plenty of parts of the major cities that have 'non-tourist' areas - that is if you don't appear ethically Japanese, you won't get served. Japan is notably xenophobic, even compared to the far east overall who are
generally more insular on the whole. They have effectively no laws against hate speech. I mean, they have a law to confirm with UN regs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Spee ... 16_(Japan)
But it's so poorly worded that local regional governments don't know what actually constitutes hate speech outside of extreme examples:
https://soranews24.com/2017/02/07/japan ... ation-law/
So telling someone to get out of the fucking country and go home is given as a (near comically, childlike) example, but calling someone from the indian subcontinent a p*ki day in day out - the sort of subversive, daily racism might not be - due to the wording and subjective nature of the regs.
As another example, a famous author there genuinely suggested the South African model of apartheid for foreign workers and it was published in the mainstream press (one of the top 5 conservative leaning japanese newspapers - like a japanese Daily Express) and no, I am not joking.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-19220
“Since I learned the situation in South Africa 20 to 30 years ago, I’ve come to believe residential areas should be separated, so whites, Asians and blacks will live among themselves,” she wrote.
She then offered an anecdote about an apartment building in Johannesburg, saying that an influx of black residents after the end of apartheid caused white residents to flee.
This was ten years ago, and it caused a minor kerfuffle, but it was never retracted and I can't find any evidence of her or the paper apologising for publishing it - this is
not a wildly outrageous position for conservatives in Japan.
The wiki on Racism on Japan (not a gotcha, most countries have one) is worth a read with respect to their highly insular attitude, which is part of the reason their population balance is a mess - the young are being born at a lower rate, and are leaving more often and those that don't are having fewer families, but they're also such a migrant hostile country that they don't want immigrants, hence why their socio-economics are such a mess.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/01/asia ... index.html
I know about those off the top of my head - I remember rolling my eyes at that hate speech law for example a few years ago, and I know Aussies who grumble about the shitty immigration system on a regular basis.
I'd wager if I dig into New Zealand and Canada I'd find problems with their systems too, such as obfuscation of numbers (as our press do by conflating asylum seekers, people without right to remain, and migrant workers, all the time) but I don't know that many canucks or kiwis who talk politics, and besides I think I've demonstrated well enough that 'hard caps' on immigration aren't a magical solution to anything.
Again, I tap the sign and repeat that simple answers are, more often than not, the incorrect ones for complex issues.
