The state-backed British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has defended a one-sided article attacking Japan for refusing to embrace mass migration.
This article was updated on March 2nd to include a comment from Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK.
In a January article titled ‘Japan PM says country on the brink over falling birth rate’, the BBC — which everyone in Britain who watches live television is required to pay a licence fee to, even if none of it is BBC programming, or else face criminal fines backed by imprisonment for non-payment — highlighted comments by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida saying it was “now or never” for the East Asian country to right its demographic decline.
Kishida emphasised that “[f]ocusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postponed,” seemingly not mentioning immigration — but that did not stop the BBC from crowbarring it into the article as a supposed solution for the country’s ills.
“Japan has continued implementing strict immigration laws despite some relaxations, but some experts are now saying that the rules should be loosened further to help tackle its ageing society,” the report interjects, failing to actually cite any of these experts or their research — something that would likely fall below the standards of even the likes of Wikipedia.
The second half of the “report” is given over to an “analysis” of the issue by Japan correspondent by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes which would more accurately be described as an opinion column, in which he asserts outright: “If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start.”
This is immediately followed by the observation that “[r]eal wages haven’t grown [in Japan] in 30 years” — but absolutely no evidence is presented that mass immigration increases real wages.
Moreover, real wages are falling in the United Kingdom, in which mass migration is currently at a historic high and has been allowed for decades, while the Labour Party, citing World Bank data, is complaining that the average Pole is projected to be wealthier than the average Briton by 2030 — despite little non-Ukrainian inward migration to speak of in Poland and its population trending downwards overall.
Despite theoretical legal requirements to offer balanced, neutral reportage, the BBC is widely regarded as harbouring deep-seated left-liberal bias — including by some of its own broadcasters, with veteran presenter John Humphreys, who hosted its flagship Today programme for 33 years, saying it has actively “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-Left image”.
It was put to the BBC that the one-sided nature of its Japan report did not meet its requirement to be impartial, given they left out important context — for example, UN Population Division research cited by Civitas as long ago as 2002, showing that you cannot actually resolve issues with “a growing number of older people, and… declining numbers of workers to support them” through inward migration because migrants also age, meaning it would have to increase exponentially year on year in order to maintain a worker to pensioner ratio of 4.09:1 in the UK.
Indeed, the UN’s calculations suggested that to keep the ratio of pensioners and workers constant to 2050, fully 59,722,000 migrants would be required in Britain, increasing the population to around 136 million, while in Japan the number of migrants was an astonishing 523,543,000.
Nothing like this — or the fact that mass migration of the sort Western Europe has indulged in has arguably weakened welfare systems, with the millions-strong Turkish population of Germany imported since the 1960s having an unemployment rate three times higher than the national average, and more recent Syrian migrants overwhelmingly not supporting themselves, for example — was referenced by the BBC.
Nevertheless, their complaints department stood by the Japan article, insisting: “Immigration was mentioned that could ease the problems created by an aging society, however was not the main focus [sic].”
Incredibly, the Rupert Wingfield-Hayes “analysis” was defended with reference to a standalone opinion piece — something the supposedly impartial broadcaster thinks its journalist should be producing, apparently — he had written, titled ‘Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past’, which supposedly “gives more context to his statements”.
In reality, Wingfield-Hayes’s opinion piece simply puts his bias on even fuller display as he rails against Japan having “alt-right admirers” — who are once again not identified — “for refusing immigration and maintaining the patriarchy,” which is an emphatically woke-left concept to begin with.
“[Japan’s] hostility to immigration has not wavered. Only about 3 per cent of Japan’s population is foreign-born, compared to 15 per cent in the UK,” he later complains before once again point to nebulous “right-wing movements” in Europe and America which allegedly “point to it as a shining example of racial purity and social harmony.”
“If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start,” he repeats, and again implies a link between mass immigration and increasing real wages with zero supporting evidence.
Amusingly, however, all of this criticism is prefaced with an acknowledgement that Japan still has “the world’s third-largest economy” and is “a peaceful, prosperous country with the longest life expectancy in the world, the lowest murder rate, little political conflict, a powerful passport, and the sublime Shinkansen, the world’s best high-speed rail network.”
Yet, in another telling passage, the BBC correspondent appears to express outrage when Japanese villagers tell him that, if he wanted to bring over his family to help replace their community’s fading population, they would have to integrate.
“Well, you would need to learn our way of life. It wouldn’t be easy,” he reports one elder as saying.
“The village was on the path to extinction, yet the thought of it being invaded by ‘outsiders’ was somehow worse,” the journalist seethes.
“Low or declining birth rates and population decline are a feature of many countries,” said Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, in comments to Breitbart London.
“What Japan is facing are issues that large tracts of the West are also having to deal with. The answer is not to open up borders. This would be reckless and ultimately punish ordinary people,” Mehmet said.
“The suggestion that immigration would increase real wages is absurd. The evidence from the UK, including from the Bank of England, is that high and uncontrolled inflows of people from abroad have helped to depress the wages of those who can least afford it,” he explained.
“Indeed, productivity has flatlined over a decade when immigration has been, pretty much, uncontrolled. Indeed, over the last 20 years, immigration has added eight million people to the UK population. GDP has grown while GDP per head has hardly changed in the past ten years.”
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