Japan Versus The West: A Tale of Two Immigration Policies
Immigration has dominated the headlines in the past couple of weeks with the Trump administration's policy of separating Central American families seeking asylum at the United States' southern border being litigated by the media and in the court of public opinion. That's the latest drip in what will be a lake's worth of immigration-related headlines facing the United States and most of the industrialized world in the years to come as immigration is poised to be the most prominent issue on the globe for a variety of different reasons. A telling statistic that hammers this point home came late last week when it was revealed that caucasian whites in the United States are dying at a faster rate than replacements are being born. Even among nonwhites in America, the birth rate has been dropping at a steep pace in the last generation. On the surface, this would seem to validate the notion that the unprecedented levels of immigration embraced by the United States and most of the Western world is needed for a growing economy. But upon closer inspection, that's not quite so clear, at least to me....
There's one industrialized nation on the globe defiantly bucking the conventional wisdom of the West that survival depends upon population infusion via immigration. Japan has very little immigration and one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It's current population of 126 million is already falling and poised to dip to 88 million by 2065. Conventional wisdom suggests the nation is committing economic suicide, poised for permanent structural decline and an inability to finance its promises to its aging population. That may well be true, but they're gambling on an acceleration of the very thing that scares Americans most....widespread automation that boosts economic output with less need for human capital. The same robots that Americans fear will take their jobs are fully embraced in Japan, both by the government and the people. The gamble is they can preserve the purity of their culture and still grow the economy enough to serve their people's needs.
Now this is a HUGE gamble, but I'm not sure it's that much more of a gamble than the opposite approach embraced by the United States and even more so in western Europe, where nations are combating declining population trendlines with soaring rates of immigration, primarily from developing nations. Some countries, such as Canada, are doing this smartly with a merit-based approach that gives preference to immigrants with skills that match the needs of the economy. Most countries are doing it stupidly, however, allowing a disproportionate number of immigrants whose skills more closely match the economic needs of 1948 than 2018.
If the economy of the future still featured massive widget factories employing thousands of low-skilled workers, then the American approach of bringing in the unskilled family members of the last wave of immigrants, and the European approach of bringing in refugees from the Middle East and north Africa, might be the wisest course in response to the population stagnation or decline. But with an uncertain trajectory of automation putting in question the need for the human capital we already have, isn't it likely to be a net negative to grow the number of people who are least likely to make the transition to the economy's next phase? Will Japan look like geniuses by betting on automation over people as a catalyst for a best-practice growth policy while the rest of the Western world contends with a restless surplus of unemployed or underemployed people?
Nobody knows the answer on this, but I think it could go either way....or at least is much more likely to go either way than what is widely acknowledged. Discussing immigration with my fellow travelers on the political left these days is an exercise in futility, so convinced are they in the pro-immigration platitudes they've been trafficking in for at least a decade. Senator Bob Corker recently described the Republican Congress as behaving in a "cult-like" manner regarding exercising legislative authority over Trump's ability to levy tariffs. Good analogy. The political left is similarly cult-like in viewing immigration as unambiguously virtuous with no downside worth mentioning or even thinking about. I was reminded of that this weekend when attempting to discuss the issue on a liberal website. One commenter had a thoughtful and extended discourse with me but the rest wouldn't concede an inch and seemed confused even at the concept of immigration having policy or electoral consequences.
That's not only disappointing but depressing. Donald Trump's racist demagoguery and bull-in-a-china-shop approach to the immigration topic is poisoning our chances to have a serious discussion over a topic that will define the direction of global public policy for most of the rest of my lifetime. Trump's critics are responding by behaving only slightly less immaturely, embracing a maximalist approach to immigration primarily based on emotional appeals, failing to provide any cogent logic to the table in terms of national economic self-interest. As a result, tempers are flaring up in response to the most cartoonish caricatures of the immigration debate spectrum. And I anticipate that in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, Democratic candidates will be falling over each other to embrace the most expansionist possible immigration policy thinking that it will be catnip to primary voters eager to simply be as far apart as possible from Trump on the issue. From what I've read, the argument is just as shallow if not more so in Europe.
People deserve better. There's a serious debate to be had on this topic with consequences that are hard to overstate, but nobody in the public policy sphere seems mature enough to even know where to start.
There's one industrialized nation on the globe defiantly bucking the conventional wisdom of the West that survival depends upon population infusion via immigration. Japan has very little immigration and one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It's current population of 126 million is already falling and poised to dip to 88 million by 2065. Conventional wisdom suggests the nation is committing economic suicide, poised for permanent structural decline and an inability to finance its promises to its aging population. That may well be true, but they're gambling on an acceleration of the very thing that scares Americans most....widespread automation that boosts economic output with less need for human capital. The same robots that Americans fear will take their jobs are fully embraced in Japan, both by the government and the people. The gamble is they can preserve the purity of their culture and still grow the economy enough to serve their people's needs.
Now this is a HUGE gamble, but I'm not sure it's that much more of a gamble than the opposite approach embraced by the United States and even more so in western Europe, where nations are combating declining population trendlines with soaring rates of immigration, primarily from developing nations. Some countries, such as Canada, are doing this smartly with a merit-based approach that gives preference to immigrants with skills that match the needs of the economy. Most countries are doing it stupidly, however, allowing a disproportionate number of immigrants whose skills more closely match the economic needs of 1948 than 2018.
If the economy of the future still featured massive widget factories employing thousands of low-skilled workers, then the American approach of bringing in the unskilled family members of the last wave of immigrants, and the European approach of bringing in refugees from the Middle East and north Africa, might be the wisest course in response to the population stagnation or decline. But with an uncertain trajectory of automation putting in question the need for the human capital we already have, isn't it likely to be a net negative to grow the number of people who are least likely to make the transition to the economy's next phase? Will Japan look like geniuses by betting on automation over people as a catalyst for a best-practice growth policy while the rest of the Western world contends with a restless surplus of unemployed or underemployed people?
Nobody knows the answer on this, but I think it could go either way....or at least is much more likely to go either way than what is widely acknowledged. Discussing immigration with my fellow travelers on the political left these days is an exercise in futility, so convinced are they in the pro-immigration platitudes they've been trafficking in for at least a decade. Senator Bob Corker recently described the Republican Congress as behaving in a "cult-like" manner regarding exercising legislative authority over Trump's ability to levy tariffs. Good analogy. The political left is similarly cult-like in viewing immigration as unambiguously virtuous with no downside worth mentioning or even thinking about. I was reminded of that this weekend when attempting to discuss the issue on a liberal website. One commenter had a thoughtful and extended discourse with me but the rest wouldn't concede an inch and seemed confused even at the concept of immigration having policy or electoral consequences.
That's not only disappointing but depressing. Donald Trump's racist demagoguery and bull-in-a-china-shop approach to the immigration topic is poisoning our chances to have a serious discussion over a topic that will define the direction of global public policy for most of the rest of my lifetime. Trump's critics are responding by behaving only slightly less immaturely, embracing a maximalist approach to immigration primarily based on emotional appeals, failing to provide any cogent logic to the table in terms of national economic self-interest. As a result, tempers are flaring up in response to the most cartoonish caricatures of the immigration debate spectrum. And I anticipate that in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, Democratic candidates will be falling over each other to embrace the most expansionist possible immigration policy thinking that it will be catnip to primary voters eager to simply be as far apart as possible from Trump on the issue. From what I've read, the argument is just as shallow if not more so in Europe.
People deserve better. There's a serious debate to be had on this topic with consequences that are hard to overstate, but nobody in the public policy sphere seems mature enough to even know where to start.
posted by Mark at 5:48 PM
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