The transformation from restrictive to selective immigration policy in emerging national competition state: case of Japan in Asia-Pacific region

Abstract

"This paper introduces and reports a part of my own research project 'cross-national analysis of immigration reform politics' in several OECD countries during the last decade. The research aims primarily to make a theoretical explanatory model to explain this paradigm change of immigration policy and secondarily to investigate the different domestic political processes in comparative perspective. The paper attempts to explain the recent transformation of immigration 'policy paradigm' in European destination countries, focusing on the historically contingent modality of state intervention, taking the cases in West Europe since the late 1990s, and using the arguments of 'national competition state' by Philip Cerny, and others. Then the paper applies this time the explanatory model to a case in quite different region, Japan where the government in past pursued the most restrictionist immigration policy among OECD countries and the neo-liberalist and reformist conservative government since 2001 opened the way to immigration policy reform, in the changing international and regional circumstances. Although we have experienced few outcomes of the reform, Japan has been launching the policy paradigm shift with the emergence of 'national competition state' and by the foreign and trade policy's imperative in Asian-Pacific region and it has transformed in part even the form of immigration politics in which the ministry bureaucrats and the governing party politicians dominated in past." (author's abstract)