Mobilizing International Norms: Domestic Actors, Immigrants, and the Japanese State

In recent years immigrant rights have increasingly been examined in an international context. An important theme in these discussions has been the question of whether, and if so how, states are constrained in developing immigrant and immigration policies. Some scholars argue that states are constrained by international human rights standards, while others, skeptical of this position, focus on a wide range of arguments at the domestic level of analysis. The skeptics are right that those asserting the impact of international human rights standards on immigrant policy have not demonstrated their importance domestically. International norms and standards do not diffuse automatically or consistently across states, and there has been too little detailed process tracing to illustrate the mechanisms of norm diffusion and therefore to move beyond correlation. To do so requires attention to the domestic actors who mobilize international norms and to the specific domestic circumstances in which they operate. This article examines a hard case by studying the impact of international human rights standards on policies toward Koreans and more recent migrant workers in Japan. In this case international norms matter. But they do not matter in a mysterious or automatic way. Domestic actors use international norms in context-specific environments to back up and make arguments for which they have few domestic resources. This is not a story of international versus domestic politics, nor is it a story about a paralyzed state. State actors are actively involved in the process of integrating international standards domestically, and the author examines how those standards work their way into the political process.