East Asia’s long opposition to increased immigration is showing new cracks. With grim demographic outlooks across the region, analysts have long warned that countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan must either abandon their restrictive immigration policies or resign themselves to smaller, older populations with fewer workers. Earlier this year, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared his country—which has the world’s lowest birth rate—was facing a “demographic national emergency” amid projections the population could be halved by 2100. This year, South Korea will issue up to 165,000 temporary visas for restaurant, forestry, mining, and other workers, a record number and more than twice as many as 2022; as many as 35,000 of them will be able to transfer to renewable visas offering something close to long-term status. The new Ministry for Population Strategy and Planning has also been tasked with immigration policy, although a Yoon campaign pledge to create a new immigration agency has yet to materialize. "The time for worrying about whether or not to proceed with a new immigration policy has passed,” then-Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon said last year. “If we do not proceed, we will inevitably face a crisis of national extinction due to population decline." Meanwhile, the number of foreign-born workers in Japan surpassed 2 million for the first time ever last year. The government has also taken steps to replace the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), which has been heavily criticized for allowing grave abuses of workers, to give migrants more protection of rights and freedom to change jobs. In Taiwan, immigration has steadily been trending downward, but about 20,000 workers have taken advantage of a program unveiled in 2022 that sought to offer long-term status to some “intermediate-skilled” workers. Still, policies are slow to develop and immigrants in these three countries comprise a much smaller share of the population than in other high-income countries. Immigrants were less than 4 percent of the populations of Korea and Japan in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among the lowest in the group. The foreign born report encountering discrimination and other obstacles across the region. Moreover, governments have repeatedly flirted with more open-door policies for foreign workers only to stop short of clear, navigable pathways that would avert serious demographic challenges. The recent changes follow wide-ranging regional movement shutdowns during the COVID-19 era. Border restrictions were relatively effective in blunting the pandemic’s impact regionally, but may have hobbled countries’ long-term fight against demographic challenges. And leaders generally continue to resist long-term settlement of the foreign born. "In order to preserve the country, the government has no intention of adopting a so-called immigration policy by accepting foreigners and their families without imposing limits on their stay," Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in May, quoting former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It has now been multiple decades that East Asian countries have faced increasingly dire warnings about their demographic outlooks. For countries and economies desperate for a youthful injection, the latest trends may be a welcome sign. But some will wonder whether they are too little, too late. Best regards, Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
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