Anti-foreigner policy just political theater, or a real policy reset?
It feels like there’s a new anti-foreigner crackdown measure announced/floated every week.
What I’m trying to gauge, though, is whether this is mostly political theater, with the LDP still basically committed to its long-term policy of increasing immigration (including more permanent settlement) to deal with the population decline every and labor shortage.
Or is that underlying consensus inside the LDP actually starting to crack?
For years, the basic direction seemed pretty clear: Japan has a worker shortage, so even if nobody wanted to call it “immigration, the government was gradually creating more ways for foreign workers to come here, work here, and stay more permanently. That seemed to be the technocratic/business consensus, and it’s no secret that groups like Keidanren were pushing in that direction.
But lately, anti-foreigner politics seems to have become much more electorally useful. So I’m starting to wonder whether the politics has shifted enough that the government might actually start backing away from the “we need more foreign workers” model, even if the economic logic still points that way and even if keidanren/big business want immigration.
So I guess my question is:
Do you think this is mostly fake toughness/emergency posturing, while the LDP quietly keeps expanding immigration in practice?
Or do you think this is a bona fide reset?
And if you do think it’s a bona fide reset, what do you think the endpoint looks like for the various visa/immigration types/patterns