Japan’s government has successfully raised the share of old people and women who are working, despite business pressure for more migrants, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 5.
“Over the past decade, and with little international attention, the Pacific island nation has achieved a second economic miracle,” despite a historically low birthrate and a declining population, the Journal reported, adding:
Since 2012, [Japan] has expanded its labor force by around 4.2 million even as its population has fallen by more than three million. As the U.S. struggles to meet its workforce needs, policy makers in Washington would do well to take a page out of Tokyo’s book.
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U.S. business must first accept that a real labor shortage exists and, like the Japanese, lead the way in incorporating talent that has long been neglected. In the U.S., that means finding ways to employ [American] workers who lack traditional credentials or who have been marginalized by such factors as poverty, substance abuse and criminal records.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government allows companies to replace the many sidelined, disadvantaged, older, isolated, or sicker Americans with millions of migrants who have been extracted from poor countries during the last 30 months.
“In Japan, the [labor] market is working as it’s supposed to work,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
[Japan’s] tight labor market is prompting [business] efforts to draw more people into the world of work — which is what we should want. But what we’re doing [in the United States] is ignoring the social forces that are prompting Americans to drop out of the labor market and are just importing [foreign] replacements.
The replacement of Americans in their own society is the predictable result of establishment policy, but not an up-front purpose, he said:
I don’t mean this [replacement policy] in the kind of conspiratorial “Replacement Theory” sense. It is that the implicit [establishment] response to the social problems that are causing drops in the labor force participation rate is to say to troubled Americans, “Here’s your welfare check and your fentanyl, go to a trailer park, we’re going to import somebody else to do the work.”
It’s appalling and immoral … They’re just giving up on Americans, and figuring the immigrants will replace them because they’re somehow better.
[Pro-migration activists] are not monsters. I’m sure if there was some way to address this [spreading American civic] problem that they found easier, they’d do probably go for it. There is clearly a discomfort with ordinary Americans on the part of a lot of these elite commentators, that’s true enough, but it’s not like they’re rubbing their hands together and saying, “How can we screw working-class Americans?” It’s just that mass immigration is just an easier fix, and it is consistent with their cultural disdain for ordinary Americans.
President Joe Biden and his allies repeatedly tell journalists that they extract migrants for economic and “equity” reasons.
For example, the federal government is opening up to 100 foreign-based “Safe Mobility Offices,” to help would-be migrants get to the United States safely.
“We view that as really a fundamental tool to help better organize migration, not just to the U.S., but as I said to some of our partner countries, including Canada and Spain which have signed on,” Blas Nuñez-Neto, the assistant secretary for policy at U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a House hearing on June 6. “We are in active discussions with other countries to allow for referrals to their [immigration] processes as well,” he added.
The southern inflow is in addition to the annual legal inflow of roughly one million migrants and roughly one million visa workers. Overall, the inflow is adding one new immigrant for every American birth.
Biden’s deputies disregard the abundant evidence of the huge pocketbook and civic damage inflicted on blue-collar and white-collar Americans and their communities.
Those harms include the millions of Americans afflicted by government-tolerated drugs, many of whom are part of more than 10 million working-age Americans unemployed or on the economic sidelines.
The vast inflow of migrants leaves more than 10 million working-age Americans unemployed or on the economic sidelines.
In Japan, however, the government took the opposite approach by limiting migration while urging employers to hire and recruit sidelined Japanese people.
The Journal reported:
Older workers. Japan’s labor ministry understood that many older workers looked to find ikigai—roughly translated as “purpose”—from their work. A 2019 survey found that more than 40% of Japanese workers in their early 60s wanted to continue working part-time after 65 and that more than 60% of employers were able to hire them.
To ease pension burdens and attract more older workers to the labor force, the government gradually raised the eligibility age for public-employee pensions and pushed employers either to abandon mandatory retirement ages or increase them to 65 …
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According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statistics, the labor-force participation rate among prime-age female workers in 2021 exceeded that of the U.S. and many OECD member countries.
The WSJ article was written by Daisuke Nakajima, a former economist at Evercore ISI, and by Jeffrey Korzenik, the chief economist of Fifth Third Commercial Bank. The headline was:
How America Can Bring the Japanese Economic Miracle Stateside: Tokyo increased its labor force, despite a falling population, by recruiting nontraditional employees.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.