New Policies for New Residents: Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance in Japan and Beyond by Deborah Milly (review)

New Policies for New Residents: Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance in Japan and Beyond. By Deborah Milly. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2014. xvi, 260 pages. $45.00.

Scholars of Japanese politics have increasingly turned to the questions of how Japan interacts with foreign residents and how Japan might deal with the future influx of immigrants that is sometimes proposed as a solution to Japan’s demographic problems of an aging and declining population. Two of the most important contributions to this body of scholarship in recent years are books by Apichai Shipper and Erin Chung. Shipper’s Fighting for Foreigners examines the ways in which civil society in Japan has supported (or failed to support) foreign communities in Japan, and Chung’s Immigration and Citizenship in Japan argues that Japan’s immigration and citizenship policies have been shaped by interactions between the Japanese state and foreign communities in Japan (particularly the community of zainichi Koreans that can trace its time in Japan to the period of Japan’s occupation of Korea).¹

Milly’s book pushes our understanding of Japanese immigration policy beyond the contributions of those excellent books in two ways. First, her work is genuinely comparative in nature. Although she writes the most about Japan, and Japan is the only country mentioned in the title of the book, she devotes substantial portions of this work to discussing the treatment of foreign residents in three other “new countries of immigration” (p. 2): Spain, Italy, and South Korea. These discussions of non-Japan cases draw on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, and are painstakingly detailed and careful. Second, her work draws a great deal of attention to the role that devolution of authority from the national government to local and regional governments in a number of countries (including Japan) has on immigration policy. She also examines the extent to which this devolution has interacted with civil society and foreign communities.

Milly addresses her book to the following question:

Japan has begun to adopt governance approaches and measures for supporting foreign residents similar to those found in other countries. And, in spite of the lack of a strong national voice for humanitarian civil society advocates, proponents of immigrant policies have found ways to penetrate elite policy discussions. How has this happened, especially given the failure of national political leaders to spearhead major immigration reform?

(p. 1)

Her argument, in a nutshell, is that proponents of more generous treatment of foreign residents have managed to penetrate elite policy discussions of issues related to immigrants because of efforts by civil society groups and local and regional governments to make changes on the ground. More broadly, she argues that the way in which countries have come to treat foreign residents is conditioned by two factors: first, the extent to which humanitarian groups had a voice in the national government before countries began to decentralize authority in the 1990s and 2000s, and second, the extent to which the national government led the process of incorporating foreign residents into the polity. In the Japanese and Spanish cases, the relatively weak presence of humanitarian civil society groups at the national level when decentralization began, coupled with the national government’s reluctance to lead on immigration, is particularly noteworthy.

The richness of the detail in this book is impressive. The description of the way that Japan’s immigration and immigrant policies have changed since the 1980s in chapter 2 is the most exhaustive and thorough discussion I have ever seen in English, and Milly’s consideration of the other countries’ policymaking is also painstakingly detailed and careful. Moreover, chapter 7 includes a very interesting analysis of the ways in which the financial crises of 2008 have interacted with public opinion in each of her cases to possibly reverse some of the gains made by foreign residents. She finds that, somewhat counterintuitively, the economic crisis did not appear to directly cause a policy backlash against immigrants in all of her cases (although it did appear to turn public opinion against immigrants) (p. 190...