Japan pays foreign workers to leave and never come back.

Great point, except we are talking about immigrants, and not natural born citizens. Once again, Japan and USA are two very different countries. One has centuries of culture and the other was formed recently on immigration alone. One already has population issues and the other has hundreds of thousands of miles of rural area. No need to draw hated into it. Preserving a culture and hating a race are two very different things.

 

Frankly, the culture argument is just weak. It is never going to be a good justification. I was just joking about the white supremacist. I know you are not.
Even if assume Japan has a legitimate concern to preserve its culture or solve population problem, it is not OK for the Japanese gov't to say we didn't have such concerns 5 years ago when special long term visas were granted, and all of sudden we start to worrying about preserving culture. This is all pretext. Y'all try too hard to justify what Japan is doing. Pure and simple, patently discriminating against Latino Japanese and coercing them to leave.

 

No - everyone there is there is welcome to stay. Again, simple question: how are these immigrants worse off today than they were a week ago?

 

Huh? Companies offer early retirement packages all the time to trim their workforces. 12% of GM's workforce took it last year for example, and over 60,000 GM employees have taken it over the last 3 years.

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090327/BUSINESS/903270339/1003/ARCHIVES

Companies offer this type of thing all the time.

 

It is not even close call to me and many others. Again, Those people are being told by the Japanese government they are unwanted to stay. Well, that doesn't seem to be a big deal to you anyways. The deal sucks for most of the immigrants, as you have pointed out also. Only less than 100 people took it. What will be the next step after the $3000 bait fails? You think the Japanese gov't will up the ante, $5K, 10K until more and more take it. Or force them to leave. The ill-intent is still not a big deal.

 

Had brain lapse there. Thought you meant layoff package. Poop my comment about retirement option.

Stand correct that employment and right to stay are orange and apple.

 

It's not about culture at all, this is just a dumb policy.

Japan is getting old, extremely fast. They have a fast growing senior citizen population and negative population growth. You can do the napkin math, the numbers wont add up for them without immigration. They are facing a dwindling population and a declining knowledge and work base for their economy.

Policies like this will only kick them in the ass once the economy recovers. Very short sighted and poorly thought out policy.

 

Why bother with putting in the "no return" clause into the deal then?

 

What if they do well in Brazil and decide they want to come back to Japan to retire or be close to relatives that are still in Japan?

 

At the risk of sounding redundant...

Your assertion makes it sound like it's a company offering workers with a specific skillset voluntary early retirement. This program is more targeted to one group, so I can't agree how there are only positives for the immigrant workers.

For one thing, it's perpetuating a nationalist business culture where even being a person of Japanese decent isn't pure enough to be able to rise above the corporate ceiling. I had a friend whose father was born here in the US, and by that virtue, he wasn't "qualified enough" to become president of any division. I guess we could argue his other qualifications to gloss over how racist the culture can be, but that's the point isn't it?

Japan is spinning the program as a favor to Japanese transnationals, and let's assume everyone else is buying that spin. It causes an environment where struggling employers and non-foreign workers resent foreign workers who are staying because they're "inflating or oversaturating the labor market". I can imagine a Japanese Lou Dobbs slopping up the masses by claiming, "The more they take the deal. The faster the work market can recover." It entirely ignores the conditions for their deteriorating economy, and it gives politicians a scapegoat to shift potential blame away them. At least those politicians are doing something to address the "employment problem".

So a program like this isn't some brain fart by a bureaucratic twit. It's reinforcing or rebuilding conservative cultural norms against people who are considered second class citizens when it's likely that they were originally invited from a past policy to address concerns over their pathetic population growth rate. It's a middle finger that's saying, "We don't really like you. You're not politically popular or relevant. And the only reason you were here in the first place is for our future survival. Since our immediate survival is at stake, we're offering around a month's stipend and a ticket so can you to leave for a long long time."

 

Companies often do target specific groups - many times, they offer it only to their oldest workers or the ones who've been there the longest (and thus are the highest paid), so they can be later replaced with younger/cheaper workers when conditions improve.

I agree here that Japan looks bad here and it's a dumb idea. But as you mentioned with your American example, Japan already is like that in terms of glass ceilings and outsiderishness. This is nothing new that the immigrants are experiencing. People's reactions here are "it reinforces Japan's image" as opposed to "this is something new for them"

The real test will be as YallMean mentioned - if only a few people accept it, does Japan try to push something more aggressive, or does it let go?