Do natives prefer white immigrants? Evidence from Japan

ABSTRACT

Does public support for immigration depend on race? One set of literature argues that natives focus on reaping economic benefits and prefer to admit high skilled immigrants. Yet, a second group of studies challenges the notion that natives evaluate skills in a race-neutral fashion. Recent qualitative work argues that natives socially construct the value of foreign workers’ skills. Furthermore, recent experimental studies find that Americans and Europeans prefer immigrants from developed White-majority countries. Do these findings reflect a general preference for White immigrants which also shapes immigration attitudes in non-western countries? Our study explores this question using a survey experiment fielded in Japan at a time when that country was grappling with economic pressures to admit more immigrants. Consistent with the social construction of skills literature, we find that Japanese unevenly apply skill requirements to prospective immigrants based on nationality but that they do not necessarily prefer White immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• skills premium
• social construction of skills
• Japan
• race and migration
• survey experiments

Acknowledgements

We thank all the thoughtful comments by all the reviewers and editors. We would also like to recognize Michael J. Donnelly for his helpful role in providing us with early feedback on our research design before and after our survey was run. We are grateful to Amy Catalinac, Yusaku Horiuchi, Rieko Kage, Charles Crabtree, Hilary Holbrow, Philip Lipscy, and all the participants at the inaugural session of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (July 9/10, 2020). We also appreciate Rohan Alexander, Ben Allen Stevens, Zain Asaf, Randy Besco, Sophie Borwein, Jonah Goldberg, Takumi Shibaike, Blake Lee-Whiting, Peter Loewen, John McAndrews, and Eric Merkley, and all participants of University of Toronto’s Political Behaviour Group’s meeting on July 18, 2018. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nicholas A. R. Fraser by email (check http://nicholasarfraser.com for current contact information).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Given that our survey was translated into Japanese with the assistance of Macromill, which regularly fields surveys in Japan, we assume that respondents understand all visa categories. However, it is important to point out that for “Settle,” category we used the word ijuu which can be interpreted as either “move to,” or “immigrate to.” We acknowledge this ambiguity in terminology is a limitation of our design.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Media Foundation [Grant Number Waseda University Grant].