Japan, Czech Republic, and Spain: Foreigners, we’ll PAY you to leave

Japan made world headlines in the last few weeks as it began a program to pay second generation Latin American immigrants to go home. It may have been the first domino in a chain of rich countries — now the Czech Republic and Spain are offering immigrants a similar “buyout” if they’ll leave and promise not to come back:

During its manufacturing boom earlier this decade, the Czech Republic wooed immigrants with plentiful jobs and comparatively higher wages. Now the Czech government is paying them to go back home…

Other countries in Europe have reacted similarly, amid rising unemployment. Last November, Spain’s Socialist Party government launched a program to send 100,000 immigrants home. Those who promise not to return to Spain for three years get six months of unemployment benefits — an average payout of €14,000 ($18,500). Some 4,000 immigrants have taken the cash.

The catch, of course, is that once the immigrant leaves, they promise not to come back. But from a practical standpoint, it’s not quite that simple, especially in the EU, where a migrant can take the cash and mozy into another part of the EU.

Europe has a history of offering immigrants cash to go. After World War II, countries including Germany and France recruited thousands of guest workers to help rebuild shattered economies. France launched the first of these programs in 1977, and thousands of immigrants went home.

But there were drawbacks. Many immigrants who took the cash later broke the ban and returned to France. And apart from making them feel unwelcome, the payments often weren’t enough to entice workers who felt job prospects back home remained bleak. Such complications also bedevil the Czech Republic’s program.

You’ve at least got to hand it to the Europeans for being sensitive about the topic. Czech NGOs and government officials stress that, in distributing information on the buyout, they’re only informing immigrants of their options. Japan is being borderline dishonest. When the plan was announced, some thought that the package was almost a paid family leave scheme, and the promise never to return was only fine print.

11 thoughts on “Japan, Czech Republic, and Spain: Foreigners, we’ll PAY you to leave”

  1. While some of those laborers in Europe might need the cash if they wanted to leave, I don’t really feel they are in the same situation as some of the Brazilians in Japan.

    Buying plane tickets from Japan to Brazil can be very very expensive, and I imagine quite a few of the unemployed Brazilians would have wanted to leave Japan if they only had enough money to pay the travel expenses. Better for the government to help cover the travel costs than force them to stay in Japan to remain jobless and poor.

  2. True — which is why the Japanese subsidy is significantly more generous (more than three times) over what the Czech Republic is offering. Japan has failed at the marketing, not the policy.

  3. That assumption about Spain it’s wrong. The ruling party is making changes and offering more money to the immigrants wanting to leave Spain, but the spanish goverment was already offering that money a couple of years ago. Japan hasn’t invented nothing…

    Sorry to break an interesting post with the truth…

  4. “I don’t really feel they are in the same situation as some of the Brazilians in Japan.”

    Well, that may be so, but – as has been noted elsewhere – there is a significant difference in the way that “Japan” and “everywhere else” has been portrayed in the media, and even in the same media organs. Naturally, Japan is framed as racist and insular while other nations are “facing pressure”.

    By the way, I don’t think that “Japan” has ever asked for a “promise” to stay away, or told Nikkei that they can’t come back. There have been reports of officials saying that this is the case, but those officials must be confused. The Nikkei who entered on the ancestral visas can take the money, go home and return to Japan any time they like, presuming they can enter on another visa. Yes, given the low-skilled work that immigrants often do, it is unlikely that they will get a work visa during a recession, but why should that matter? Do they think that Japan should change its immigration law (I believe the stipulation that you can only apply for the Nikkei visa once is not a recent amendment but part of the law as it stands) to accommodate people who make the choice to return home with government assistance.

    I know national comparisons aren’t welcome on this blog, but ancestral visas exist elsewhere with the same one-time-only stipulation. Yet you don’t see the British government – to take one example – offering to pay the airfares home for penniless and jobless New Zealanders and Australians stranded in London. In comparison, what the Japanese government is doing – offering those on the Nikkei visa a choice to go on welfare in Japan or return home if that suits them better – actually seems pretty nice. If Japan is doing something malicious, it is offering a BENEFIT to some workers in Japan (holders of the Nikkei visa) while withholding the same benefit, from others (those on wa-holi visas – same one-time-only stipulation) on the basis of race.

  5. Bryce wrote:

    By the way, I don’t think that “Japan” has ever asked for a “promise” to stay away, or told Nikkei that they can’t come back. There have been reports of officials saying that this is the case, but those officials must be confused. The Nikkei who entered on the ancestral visas can take the money, go home and return to Japan any time they like, presuming they can enter on another visa.

    The Mainichi says:

    …According to an official at the MHLW’s foreign employment service division, the support system was designed to “assist unemployed foreigners of Japanese descent return to their home countries, and the decision regarding re-entry to Japan was made by the Ministry of Justice.”

    “Re-entry will not be permitted as a general rule,” said an official with the Immigration Bureau of the Ministry of Justice. “However, we will individually evaluate cases where persons wish to re-enter Japan to visit a sick person or where other such special circumstances prevail.

    “We wish to observe the employment situation in considering the term for which re-entry will be forbidden,” the official concluded.

    Not all agree with the re-entry restrictions. “There is a need to think wisely and allow re-entry for those who repay their travel expenses,” remarked Yasutomo Suzuki, mayor of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, at a press conference on April 20. Hamamatsu is home to many Brazilians of Japanese descent.

    “It’s possible that the ‘for the time being’ provision may become semi-permanent,” says former Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau chief Hidenori Sakanaka.

    http://tinyurl.com/dd87cz

  6. So Sakanaka’s top two posts on the blog are saying that this program is not only a bad idea but also illegal, for two reasons:

    (1) Denying people with valid Nikkei visas re-entry for no reason other than their acceptance of this payment is an abuse of the justice minister’s discretionary authority and in violation of the constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.

    (2) Denying people landing permission despite their failure to meet any of the specific “conditions for denial” violates current immigration law as the policy as written seems to call on immigration officials to use their informal discretion.

    According to him the government isn’t allowed to pay people to nullify their equal status under the law. By using the existing Nikkei visa system and then just informally denying re-entry to people who accept these payments even if they meet the requirements otherwise, you are setting up a double standard. Normally the only way you should be denied is if you violate the law or participate in anti-government activities, etc.

    He also notes that the situation (large numbers of unemployed Brazilians that want to go home but cannot afford it) that this program was set up to respond to is not the fault of the Brazilians. Therefore attempting to punish them by placing this discriminatory re-entry rules would be unduly cruel and could open Japan up to international criticism (do we count?), and possible retaliation from Brazil.

    I suppose this could just be a technicality if the justice ministry simply rewrites the rules in a more legally watertight fashion (couldn’t they add this program into the “conditions for denial”?), but in essence I think he is right – First off, such a major change would need to pass through the Diet and hence receive exposure to public debate. Second, doesn’t this program just strike people as fundamentally wrong? This is the same mentality as the slave trade, and if the logic is taken further we could have programs bribing women to become baby machines or something for the sake of producing more positive economic indicators.

  7. Eh… They already are bribing women to have babies. In Australia for every child born there’s a one off payment of $5000 AUD.

  8. “This is the same mentality as the slave trade, and if the logic is taken further we could have programs bribing women to become baby machines or something for the sake of producing more positive economic indicators.”

    While I agree that the scheme is wrong in principles,I found your statement troublesome.After all,they can refuse the money and fly home or start new life here in Japan at their own risk and savings,of which they don’t possess in reality.
    The concept totally lacks this idea of self help and personal responsibility.
    Sakanaka’s argument includes the logic that financial crisis isn’t their fault.But they should have somekind of saving instead of just buying cars and huge houses back in Brazil that they can’t keep on paying the loans.

  9. Well, saying that they can never come back is a bit of an exaggeration, but not a huge one. After all, most of the people who came on Japanese ancestry visas did so because they would never hope to qualify for any other sort of visa. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that a Nikkei Brazilian or Peruvian who came to Japan on an ancestry visa will go home, go to law school, and come back in 8 years on a professional visa (I’d even wager that there will be isolated cases like this), but for the vast majority of this population losing out on ancestry visas is basically the same as a ban.

    However, some countries (such as Spain) only deprive the repatriated worker of their right to apply for a guest worker visa (which really is more or less what the ancestry visa is for in Japan) for a few years. Of course, there is no reason that Japan could not say today that people who accepted such payments will lose their visa status forever, and then 5 years from now reverse the decision, but I think the affected people would rightly feel they were being jerked around a bit.

    I suspect that this program, if implemented in accordance with the original proposal, is probably a very bad idea long term. There is still little doubt that Japan will need significant numbers of foreign workers in the future, after the crisis passes, and even if the fantasy of Nikkei South Americans magically integrating into Japanese society didn’t pan out, the ones who had lived here for several years would absolutely do a better job of fitting in, if allowed to come back, than the inevitable fresh arrivals with no knowledge/experience of Japanese culture and language.

    (This reminds me, it would be a good idea to compare the Japanese ancestry visa with the ones that exist in S Korea and Taiwan, which despite being legally/procedurally very similar actually serve an entirely different role, due to the nature of the diaspora of those two countries.)

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