Japan beginning to encourage immigration

Good article here.

Japan has long used foreign immigrants, of which they have very few, as a scapegoat for their social ills. As Fukuda, the last of a long uninterrupted string of conservative prime ministers said, "There are people who say that if we accept more immigrants, crime will increase. Any sudden increase in immigrants causing social chaos [and] social unrest is a result that we must avoid by all means."

The Japanese media almost seems to promote the idea that foreigners bring crime with relish, trumpeting any crimes committed by them on the front pages, as if foreign crime is a rampant epidemic happening everywhere, ignoring the fact that by and large, immigrant are actually less likely to commit serious crimes than Japanese citizens. Not more. The same is true in America; for all the heat they get for the country's problems, the threat of immediate deportation makes for a pretty good deterrent.

As I've said before, this kind of attitude may have been safe when the population was growing, but with the declining birthrate, the country can not afford to maintain these prejudices. The population is scheduled to drop by a third in a generation. Japan doesn't even have enough workers to care for its increasing numbers of elderly, let alone fill its factories and companies. So its good to see that even the conservative government is beginning to wake up to the idea that they need to support immigrants and provide them with language training and help them assimilate into the population.