Neo-Nationalism and Identity in Japan

Over the past year I have been paying attention to a national scandal here in Japan that is centered around a kindergarten here in Osaka.  (The school is not far from where I was biking a few weeks ago along the Yodo River.)  The larger context of the scandal is the emergence of nationalist movements which are provoking debates over Japanese identity.

The Tsukamoto Kindergarten (école maternelle)  is a private school with some very public supporters including the wife of the current prime minister.  Elements of the curriculum are definitely on the very conservative side of the political spectrum and are meant to instill pride and patriotism in Japanese children.  Children stand before the Japanese flag, bow to a portrait of the Emperor, recite the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) and learn what are called "pre-war" (World War II) values.  Here is a short video filmed at the school that shows a few of these activities.  (Note that uniforms are not something particular to this school, but are common in public and private schools.)

The scandal was not so much about the curriculum (though criticism of it abounds) as it was about anti-foreigner comments by school officials and corruption. The corruption is said to have occurred when the Japan government sold a piece of land to the school's owners at a very good (some say ridiculously low) price so they could construct an elementary school .   The bigotry was discovered in letters and pamphlets issued by the school with statements like, “The problem is that people who have inherited the spirit (of Koreans) exist in our country with the looks of Japanese people” and reports that  the school administrators were espousing belief in the "uniformity of the Japanese race."  

And for the cherry on the top, the school's principal is a member of a Far Right organization called Nippon Kaigi (The Japan Conference).  Lest you think that this is a marginal organization with few members, think again.  Nippon Kaigi is reported to have around 38,000 members but more importantly it enjoys strong support from the prime minister, members of his cabinet, and parliament. 

Here is a short video from France 24 in English about the organization which I think is fairly balanced reporting.  Looking beyond the title of the piece, The Return of Japan's Imperialists, Nippon Kaigi members are interviewed and give their side of the story.

This is a classic modern battle over national identity, one that is very similar to such debates going on elsewhere.  The tactics are also very familiar:  revising the curriculum, arguing for a different interpretation of historical events, creating a top-down movement led by political and social elites, and using religious, philosophical or ethical systems to support a return to an older (and ostensibly better) framework of national values. (And here I deftly avoid the question of whether or not Emperor worship is a religion.)  It reveals a belief that it is possible to construct a different national reality through institutions, the education of children, and persuasive efforts led by political elites.  And it makes me wonder to what extent these tactics, even in a democratic society, are a way of circumventing the wishes of the citizenry.   I do not see great enthusiasm for the prime minister's commitment to a more militarized society and yet, he seems to be moving forward anyway.

Ultimately, the big questions for me are:  How successful is this movement likely to be?  In other words, is Japanese national identity going to change significantly in the near future as a result of neo-nationalism?  (Perhaps it has already changed in some ways.)  And, if so, how might it change citizenship laws and immigration policies?  Or to put it another way do migrants and naturalized citizens have good reasons to be very concerned about where this might go?  

A suivre....

Marriage Migration and Integration

"[C]ross-border marriage migration is understood as migration that results, at least in part, from a contractual relationship between individuals with different national or residency statuses.  Cross-border marriage either changes the immigration status of one partner (for example, by increasing their entitlements to reside or to access the social or economic benefits of the country they are residing in), or it enables one partner to enter and to set up home as a non-citizen spouse in a country foreign to them." (p. 5) Williams, L. (2010). Global marriage: Cross-border marriage migration in global context. Springer.


"Marriage migrant" is an interesting category of migrant.  Williams' definition is both accurate and democratic: it can be applied without reference to country of origin or destination.  Here are two people from two (or more) different countries who establish a contract that the states concerned recognize for immigration purposes.  You could almost say that being the spouse of a citizen confers a sort of demi-citizenship on the foreign spouse.  In many countries a foreign spouse can jump to the head of the immigration/naturalization queue simply by virtue of marriage to a native.  It's a very seductive path (in all ways) and where immigration laws are strict it can be the easiest way to enter a country or stay.

Note, however, that it is not as easy as it was.  Some states have been tightening up the requirements in order to limit or control it.  There is a lot of concern (and press coverage) of  fake marriages - ones that are contracted solely for immigration.  There are interviews by the immigration authorities to determine if the marriage is a "real" one.  The US and the UK have imposed minimum income/asset thresholds on the citizen spouse who is required to show that he/she can support the foreign spouse.  France interviews the spouses before the marriage and upon arrival there is an evaluation by the authorities and the migrant signs an integration contract with requirements for classes in civics and language that must be respected.  The French authorities can refuse a residency card to a migrant who does not attend the classes and is not seen to be sérieux about the process  So the "right" to join a spouse in his/her country is a qualified one and, personally, I believe that more countries will try to use these strategies in order to limit marriage migration and to have more control over which spouses are allowed to enter or stay in the country.

And this is an interesting development because I think there used to be an assumption that marriage itself was a kind of integration program.  The citizen spouse was trusted to 1. contract a legal and legitimate marriage based on feeling and not for financial/instrumental reasons and 2. would see to the integration of the spouse based on, among other things, the assumed power differential between the citizen and the foreigner.  For the state to intervene here is as much a lack of faith in its own citizens as it is suspicion of foreigners.

Are states right to be suspicious of citizens and their foreign spouses?   To a certain degree there has always been wariness.  Take, for example, the military based on foreign soil.  My sense is that even today they are not exactly encouraged to bring home foreign wives and husbands.  After World War I there was a debate in the US over the desirability of French war brides who were seen as a little too Catholic for Protestant America.  In Japan I've talked to foreigners who experienced a very chilly reception when they first met their future Japanese in-laws.  My own French mother-in-law was over the moon when she found out I was Catholic.  

But whatever the reception, once the spouse arrived and became part of the family, I think most assumed that the family would push the foreign wife/husband in the direction of integrating into the larger society.  Or perhaps they didn't think it mattered where the public face of the family was usually a male citizen who was presumed to have control of the family's public and private life.  And if the wife wasn't integrated?  Well, that just meant that he had even more of a mandate to speak for the family because she couldn't.

That is speculation on my part but I think it would be worth looking into.  There are two questions I would ask:  Do marriage migrants integrate better in the host country than other migrants?  and Is there a difference between the overall integration of male marriage migrants versus female ones?

For these questions, I can see arguments for and against.  Assuming that the citizen spouse has more power in the relationship then one might expect to see him/her making more of the decisions about what language to speak in the home, where the children will be educated, where the family goes on vacation and so on.  The culture and language of the foreign spouse can be crowded out if it is allowed to exist at all.  I knew an American woman whose husband simply refused to allow any English in their home.  I know many migrants who would have preferred a bi-lingual education for the children but the spouse was not very supportive of that and given the expense in many cases it would have been a financial stretch.  So those things would probably lead to greater integration.  The more the family publicly and privately conforms to the larger society, the more the outnumbered foreign spouse must comply.

On the other hand I can see situations where the foreign spouse is not encouraged to integrate.  It may be because the citizen spouse does not see this as his/her responsibility.  Having a foreign spouse speaking a foreign language is an advantage for the children and so he/she is encouraged to speak it at home even if the rest of the family uses the local language.  There can be a perception that the foreign spouse can't integrate and will simply mess things up if he/she is sent down to the city office to take care of family business.  Children can be embarrassed by a foreign parent who is visibly different and has an accent.  Read The American by Franz-Olivier Giesbert which is about his relationship with his immigrant American father.  And, finally, let's face it the less integrated the foreign spouse, the more the citizen spouse has power within the relationship.  And where the foreign spouse is a man in a culture where men generally have more power within the family, the citizen wife may like a marriage where she has more power than if she had married a native man.

So, yes, I think there are reasons to wonder if marriage to a native citizen is or is not conducive to greater integration.  Whether the state needs to step in to correct this is a judgment call.  On one hand I can see that treating a marriage migrant as an individual and not as spouse could be beneficial for integration, especially in a case like France where the state will help.  Insists on it, in fact, regardless of what the French citizen spouse thinks.  However, what are we then to make of the laws which give preferences to spouses for entry and the right to remain?  Let's be very clear - they are allowed to enter or stay on the basis of a relationship, not on their other merits.  Make the relationship irrelevant and many migrants could not, in fact, migrate or obtain residency status.

I wonder if we are not moving in that direction.  I can see a world where marriage migration is legally possible (those "family values") but there would be so many qualifications that it would be practically impossible for most people.  Marriage wouldn't be irrelevant but it would simply be one criteria for admission trumped by others like finances, literacy, health, and country of origin.  

And let's face it, where there are fewer international marriages, there will be a lot fewer people to integrate. 

Problem solved.

Play Poker Not Privilege

The word "privilege" is one that I use with extreme caution in any context but especially when talking about migration. C. Lundström wrote an entire book about White Migration in which she argues that race is part of that Invisible Knapsack and it travels well. 

My thinking about "privilege" is evolving and by that I mean that I haven't come to any conclusions that satisfy me and I'm open to more information.  I'm also very wary of my own feelings and visceral reactions.  A part of me would very much like to be seen as "privileged" and bask in the notion that I am a special snowflake. Behold the wonderfulness of me! The saner part of me says, "Hey, kiddo, get real."  (And I can't tell you how many AA meetings it took to get that one straight in my head.)  

I'd say that "privilege" has so many negative connotations, is so relative, and so muddy that I prefer to reframe it and use Bourdieu's idea of "social capital" instead.  This terms captures what people are getting at when they use "privilege" but without evoking knee-jerk reactions.  To make it even clearer in my head I think of it as a poker hand.  Some people are born in a particular cultural, social and economic context with a lot of good cards (inherited social capital) which enables them to more easily accumulate other cards.  Some folks start with really bad ones and they struggle.  In between the two is a continuum where people hold mixed hands.

A good example of a card is citizenship.  In The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality by Ayelet Schachar she argues that birthright citizenship in a developed country is an inherited privilege  that is undemocratic and unfair.  It persists, however, because it's a privilege of birth that benefits just about everyone within an affluent nation-state.  The poorest factory worker in France is automatically part of an exclusive club just by virtue of being born in France and having parents who were born or naturalized in France. He/she will automatically transfer that membership to her children. 

It is, as Schachar says, "The quintessential inherited entitlement of our time."  This matters she says because there are wide disparities in income, health, education and opportunity between the citizens of a developed country versus a developing one.  So it's definitely better to be born a French citizen as opposed to being born as a citizen of Mali.  In fact it may determine whether you live or die as an infant.  France has an infant mortality rate of 3.3 deaths/1,000 live births versus Mali which has 100 deaths/1,000 live births.  (All figures are from the CIA Factbook.)  And let's be clear about this - none of us had any choice about where we were born and the laws under which our citizenship was ascribed to us.  

But that's just one card, albeit a pretty important one.  We are born into families, We are born into groups.  We are born into hierarchies.  Our social capital or lack thereof is always a matter of context and I would argue that it's a combination of cards (inherited or accumulated) that determines our relative position within a particular society. And it would be idiotic of me to argue that these things don't make a difference in terms of opportunities.   However, I would be extremely cautious about taking a national conversation about things like race, class, educational attainment, language, or sex and making broader claims about other societies or all societies.  

Because I would contend that the cards a migrant brings to a new country can't be played in the same way in a new context.    Not only does the migrant not have the same rights as a citizen but he will be inserted into at least two hierarchies:  one that positions the migrant relative to other migrants (more desirable versus less desirable) and another that places her below the native-born citizen who has an inherited position in society.   

But other cards come into play here like education, skills, language, finances, race and gender.  But they don't necessarily have the same meaning in the new country.  Polytechnique is a big name in France and it confers enormous social capital.  Outside of France?  Not so much. But the degree itself may count for a lot.  Money may buy a very nice standard of living in one country but go to London or Vancouver and learn how little one has in a place with a very high cost of living. Or conversely, one can move to a country where even a small amount of money means a much better standard of living. English-speakers may believe the hype about it being a highly-valued "global language" and arrive in a country to find very few jobs for the monolingual.  And yet, they may find one and be very content.

As for race there are enormous variations in how it is defined locally.  People who are considered to be  (and consider themselves) "black" in the US , might not be in parts of South America.  I don't see that Poles in the UK get to be "white" in the same way as British "whites".  I have read arguments that say that being "white" is a always a good card wherever you are in the world.  Honestly, I think this one collapses under the impossibility of defining racial categories when there is no globally agreed upon definition of any of them.

What I am arguing for here is that if we are going to look at people's poker hands (social capital) when they migrate, I do not think it is sufficient to look at one card and pronounce a verdict of "privileged" or "underprivileged."  That's just laziness.  It's simply too easy to say "these people all have at least a BA, therefore they are privileged" or "those people migrated, therefore they are privileged (or underprivileged)." (The latter can go either way.)  I think that you need a lot more than that to support an argument for or against.  And if this is a serious exercise you have to be open to contradictory information and willing to dig into the context,.  

Perhapsa better response to someone who shouts "privilege" in your face is for both of you to gently place all your cards on the table and start asking and taking questions.  What it is about my cards that makes you think that I have an unfair advantage over you?  What is it about your cards that leads you to think that the deck is stacked against you?  And then no cross talk, no interrupting.  This is called a conversation and it can be quite enlightening when both parties are active listeners.      

France and the Competition for the Highly Skilled Migrant

The new president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has spoken directly to the American people in response to Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord, an international agreement to fight global warming.  Here is Macron's message:




A very good short speech.  I suspect that he deliberately used migration as an example of one of the bad consequences of climate change. For those who are anti-immigration (and they are legion in both the US and France), they hear their own position which is that migration is a bad thing.  Thus,  fighting climate change is also a battle against immigration.  But for the supporters of immigration (or the immigrants themselves) they can assume that Macron was referring to "forced migrations" due to climate change.  Very deft.

The most interesting part of the speech (to me anyway)  was his call to American entrepreneurs, scientists. and researchers to "come and work here [France]."  That might seem to be a complete contradiction to how the French feel about about migration these days.  But note that he did not use the word "immigrate."  Nor did he mention anything about integration.  He did not extol the virtues of French life, language, and culture as reasons to come to the Hexagon.  Macron implies that this is a "come as you are" migration party for the lucky few who fall into the category of "highly skilled migrant."  France wants their degrees, their research, and their entrepreneurial skills and in exchange they are being offered honor, support, and recognition.  A powerful benediction in which the words "migrant" and immigrant" will never be used because these are the kind of "quality foreigners" that even an anti-immigrant country is happy to welcome.

What is particularly noteworthy about this is that it is rare to see such a public invitation to the citizens of another country coming from the highest levels of  the government.  Yes, many countries have programs to attract the highly-skilled but you don't see the Prime Minister of Japan holding a press conference to personally invite French or Germans to bring their talents to the land of the rising sun.  Migrant recruitment (and, yes, they are migrants) exists but it is discreet.  It is as if there were an unspoken agreement among developed nations that, yes, countries can try to skim off the cream of another country's citizens as long as they aren't too obvious about it and the trickle of brains leaving one country for another does not become a flood.

So what Macron said was very daring - an in-your-face shot fired against the Trump administration. But I'd say that there is very little risk involved.  The Trump administration is very unpopular in France and the United States and Macron will only gain politically at home by taking Trump on. And how he did it is fascinating. Macron has used the Internet/social media to bypass the American president completely and to address the American people directly in fluent English.  And what does the world see when it watches this contest?  A young, dynamic leader running circles around a tired, bewildered, old man.

Sad.

The Impulse to Conquer

"Yet this writer does not judge MacCannell as intending to encompass all forms of tourism in all ages and societies, but as providing a model for the leading sector of modem Western tourism. that of the middle classes “scouring the world in search of new experience.” This model of the educated classes seeking authenticity “out there” has a historical continuity with the exponents of the leading exploratory urges of the post-Renaissance Western world, who in order to more fully understand the world, bring parts of the experience home to understand it and make it safe-in other words, the impulse to “conquer” the Other, whether it be space, the wilderness. foreignness, the past, and so on. to order, categorize, and consume it, and often to show it off in museums (cf. Graburn 1977a 1982)."

Graburn, N. H. (1983). The anthropology of tourism. Annals of tourism research, 10(1), 9-33.

Of all the motivations for integration in a host society, the "impulse to conquer" is one that I would like to reject immediately.  It smacks of imperialism. It brings to mind the missionary or the military.  What migrant (or tourist) from the Western world wants to be associated these days with la mission civilisatrice?   The purpose of going abroad is not to change the society in the host country but to be changed by it.

And that is, indeed, what happens.  Living in a new place does provoke profound change as we navigate new waters and learn to live according to different standards. In theory, we are open to this; in practice, many of us come up against aspects of local ways that don't appeal to us at all.  If the local culture and ways, for example, insist that women stay home and care for children, do we change ourselves to conform or do we resist and retain our values that say that women must have a choice in the matter?  And if we resist, can this be construed as a refusal to integrate?  Or worse, can we be accused of attempting to change the society itself?  For as much as we find their ideas threatening, so is the host society threatened by ours.

My sense is that our strategy for deftly avoiding such things is to define integration in a limited way:  learning the language and culture.  This allows us to call ourselves integrated while circumventing the truly dangerous or disconcerting ideas that really would change us in profound ways.  I think that there is an argument here that we are attempting to make the host country culture "safe" for consumption.  Does this strategy work?  Hard to say because as we work to master the minimum, the culture is working on us in subtle ways.  The day I realized that I no longer had the same commitment and understanding of "free speech" was a dark one.  And I'm still not sure how to resolve it.  It remains one of those internal battles between the respective cultures of my home and country.  For the life of me I cannot explain how that happened.

Having defined integration in a very limited way, do we then go out to "conquer" the language and culture?  If "conquer" means to "master for our own purposes" then, yes, I think that's a fair description.

It starts with the Self.  We are learning the culture and language because, ostensibly, it's good for us.  We think of ourselves as better people for being bi-lingual and bi-cultural and we assume that others will think the same.  Not everyone has the opportunity to live or travel abroad and so we must demonstrate that we have not squandered this chance of a lifetime.  Furthermore, language and cultural competence serve two purposes at once:  it confers social capital in the home country and makes it possible for us to find work and make connections in the host country.  It can be a matter of survival because otherwise we are horribly limited in what we can do.  This is cultural capital that we are wise to accumulate because it can be converted to social and economic capital in the home country, and is the lowest threshold for being able to do so many things in the host country.

I find the argument that we are doing this for the native citizens of our host country to be questionable.  We are basically saying that we don't want to be a nuisance and inconvenience them like the terrible tourists that we see gesturing and talking loudly and their native language to the local people.  We are better than that - more considerate - and that gives us the moral high ground over other foreigners be they tourists or new arrivals.  I wouldn't quibble with the argument that it is more convenient for everyone when there is a common language.  That's just common sense.

However, I question how much native citizens really care if  certain categories of migrants master the language and customs or not.  Basic knowledge may suffice or workarounds.  The inconvenience of incomprehensibility is easily overcome with a competent translator or the mastery of a few phrases that cover most common situations.  The baker could care less if you can read Moliere in the original; she just wants a "Bonjour, Madame" plus something that indicates what you want (pointing usually suffices) with a "S'il vous plaît" tacked on at the end.  As for a deeper conversation, well, the French generally don't like to have long conversations with people they don't know (one exception I have found is the chemo clinic), and perhaps don't wish to know. :-)

We could also consider that mastering a language and culture can sometimes be perceived as a threat by the native citizens.  It blurs the boundaries between "foreign" and "native" making it harder to separate the "us" from the "them".  In places where native citizens view language as somehow connected to biology or birth within a particular language community they may be perturbed by examples of fluent foreigners.  I will never forget the Frenchman I met one day who asked if I had any French blood.  Yes, I replied, in the 16th century some of my ancestors left France for Canada.  Ah, he said, that explains why your French is so good.  I still find that reaction to be amusing.  No, sir/madame, there is no gene for the French, English, Japanese or any other language.  We all start from zero with a general blueprint for any language, though admittedly at different ages.

And, more broadly, integration of the foreign is not always welcome for other reasons.  Where the home culture culture confers prestige in the host country, for example.  In one study I saw of French in the US, they appeared to derive more status by playing up their Frenchness as opposed to becoming more American.  Some Americans were frankly delighted to have an "authentic" French person in their midst and so, on all sides, integrating was not particularly interesting or desirable.  I think something of that sort also applies in Japan where association with North American or European foreigners can confer status on a Japanese or  Japanese institution. But note that this status is contingent on the foreigners remaining foreign and not too deeply integrating into Japanese culture.  For example the Gwen Gallagher case (1997-2008).  An older American who was fired from her position at a Japanese university  the Japanese court determined that she could indeed be fired because (among other reasons): "As the plaintiff has been living in Japan for about 14 years and is also married to a Japanese, she lacks the ability to introduce firsthand foreign culture found overseas, as is required of a teacher of level 3 [classes]."

This is an interesting example of how the "quest for authenticity" goes both ways.  Just as there is the search for the"authentic" French/Japanese/German/Thai experience and people on the part of the migrant/expatriate (who also seeks to master the experience and integrate), so, too, there exists a desire for the "authentic" foreigner defined precisely as someone who has not integrated too much.

That "impulse to conquer," I suggest, is reciprocal with all concerned having interests around integration that are not necessarily compatible. My sense is that the host country society has the greater weight - they define the parameters around integration for their own purposes which will always be more powerful than our intentions. This makes the charge of "imperialism" laughable because we are not as in control of the integration process as we might think, and we change in ways we never imagined. Dare I say that we don't "conquer" a new culture as much as it "conquers" us?

Not a conclusion that I like, mes amis, but one that makes sense to me.  Your thoughts?

Migration Systems

In my migration studies the theory that I liked (loved, actually) the best was migration systems theory.  I thought it captured the complexity and interdependence of migration in a wonderful way and one of my first papers was about the migration system that I thought existed between Quebec and France.

General systems theory goes back to the middle of the 20th century.  Since then it's been applied to a lot of other fields.  It argues that a system is a set of interconnecting elements that create a specific  environment that is much greater than just the sum of its parts.  In 1970 a fellow named Akin Mabogunje  (a Nigerian professor of geography) applied systems theory to internal migration between rural and urban areas.  And then it was applied more broadly to international migration.

What do I like about it?  It's a more holistic approach  In order to understand a migration flow you have to look at the whole picture:  sending AND receiving countries and the links between them be they formal or informal, economic or cultural.  In migration systems theory people are just one element among many others and it's the interaction of the elements and the creation and maintenance of links that make up the system. Furthermore, the history of those connections matter a lot; with Quebec and France I went back 400 years and traced the always evolving links to the present day.  

Evolution is the key word here.  Systems are dynamic in the sense that elements in it change and so do the links.  The demographics of Mexico, for example, or the strained circumstances of Americans on fixed incomes will change the migration system between those two countries.  The thirst for native English speaking teachers in Japan could change as could the number of Anglophones from the US, Canada, or Great Britain with university degrees willing to migrate and provide that service. Culture, science and economic ties matter, too.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans came to France and Germany to study medicine. In 17th century French urban dwellers went to Canada to become farmers. In the 21st century migration system between France and Quebec a common language is still a driver of reciprocal migration between the two - a good example of how migration between two developed countries (sometimes called north-north migration) has elements very similar to migration between developed and less developed countries.  

In 1989 James Fawcett published a very good paper that attempted to define the basic elements of a migration system. He identified four categories of linkages: State to State Relations, Mass Culture Connections, Family/Personal Networks and Migrant Agency Activities. A Mass Culture connection could be a common language or history.  State-to-state relations could be formal agreements to recognize each others professional and academic credentials.  Networks of people are another type of link where, for example, one person migrates because of marriage and other members of the family follow.  The most interesting to me are the Migrant Agency Activities which still exist and not just in the Philippines.  I think many Americans, Canadians and others would be very surprised to learn that Japanese companies in the education industry have a presence in countries outside of Japan and recruit young college graduates in major cities.  ECC. a language school in Japan is actively recruiting now in Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK. This is an important, though often overlooked, migrant recruitment that is very active and drives temporary and permanent migration from Anglophone countries to Japan.  

I find that migration systems theory is a very elegant and comprehensive way of looking at migration flows.  For instance, with a systems approach to migration between the US and Mexico would look at all the links between the two and what is happening in Mexico is just as important as what is happening in the US.  It would consider how the flows are reciprocal:  Americans migrating to Mexico, for example, as well as Mexican nationals coming to the US.  These flow are not disconnected from each other or from the other cultural or economic links. With that in mind, many migration flows look more like an exchange of people as opposed to a unilateral exodus.  Granted, one flow may be numerically greater than the other but they are still linked and in very interesting ways.

On a personal level all of us who live outside of our countries of origin can use this theory to start asking a different, much broader question then the usual "Why I moved to [insert country here]." The better question is:  How do I fit into this broader migration system between Canada and Japan, the US and France, Mexico and Spain or any other combination of countries?  An American academic, for example, in Japan will find there is a long history in Japan of importing foreign academics.  He/she might also learn that US citizens do not pay a fee for getting a Japanese visa (State to State agreement).  The contract and terms under which a foreigner was recruited for the position is a Migrant Agency Activity.  The position itself may be known to him or her because of a personal and academic network.  And it may be (something to investigate) that this migration system was kicked off (or perhaps only greatly encouraged) by war and occupation, though it is not sustained by these things today. 

Now I am not saying that there actually are migrations systems between the countries I have mentioned - that argument would require much more research than I have done in this short blog post. However, I invite you to consider your own migration experience in  light of the links between your home and host country and to consider how your own migration may have been facilitated and shaped by being part of a larger system.  It was quite a revelation to me, for example, how a sister city association between Nantes, France and Seattle, USA was the French/American link that led to my own migration to France.  So follow the links and see where they take you.

The truly fascinating aspect of migration system theory for me is that "[e]ach migration system is unique in the sense that the combinations of links between two countries will be different from one migration system to another." (Quebec and France - A Dynamic International Migration System by V. Ferauge, 2016.) That means that every migration system can be analyzed by its links but when they are taken together every migration system will be singular. For that matter, individual migration experiences are, I argue, a result of different links in different contexts which makes comparisons between migrants and flows possible, but also allows each migrant to be unique thanks to different combinations of links as well as different personal life trajectories and levels of social or economic capital. This, I find, is quite familiar to me in that it very closely resembles Amin Maalouf's take on identity and individuality: "Thanks to all my adherences, taken separately, I have a certain relationship with a large number of people like me; thanks to the same elements, taken all together, I have my own identity, which can never be confused with any other."

Aging Parents and International Marriage

"In other words, it is postulated that a semi-independent relation links the nuclear family to the extended family. Because the extended family cannot offer a complete guarantee of occupational success it legitimates the moves of nuclear family members. On the other hand, receiving as it does significant aid in achieving many of its goals, the nuclear family retains its extended family connections despite geographical distance." (Litwak, Eugene. “Geographic Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion.” American Sociological Review, vol. 25, no. 3, 1960, pp. 385–394., www.jstor.org/stable/2092085.)

International Marriage is more than just the joining of two individuals from different nation-states, it also links two extended families in different countries and creates a web of kinship ties that transcend borders.  This can be seen as an opportunity for all since immigration laws that favor family reunification make it possible for other family members to migrate, too.  Remittances play a role as well with money being sent back to help family members in the home country.  In Klekowski von Koppenfel's study of Americans in Europe, she found that American migrants sent money to family in the US to help pay for unexpected expenses like medical care.

There is opportunity but there are also obligations.  Conflicts can and do arise when the couple must make decisions in favor of one extended family over the other.  The couple (unless they are very wealthy) simply can not provide personal care to two sets of aging parents living in two different countries. And while there may be general agreement that some assistance is necessary there can be arguments over just how many resources the nuclear family can afford to transfer to one or the other's elderly parents.

Where to live, where to send the children to school, what languages to speak in the home are all issues that are salient to a bi-national couple and some are mutually exclusive or just very difficult to achieve.  Caring for parents is one that is fraught with cultural expectations that neither spouse may be aware of until it becomes an issue.  In some countries (US, UK) older people are encouraged (and want) to be independent.  After a lifetime of caring for their children, they see retirement as freedom and don't want their children interfering in their lives. It is assumed by all that they will move into some sort of assisted living as they become less able to care for themselves.

Other countries and cultures have very different expectations.  Parents remain active in their children's lives (and vice versa) and they help raise their grandchildren. A retirement home is a last resort - the ideal is to grow old at home with one's children and grandchildren.  If the parents must be moved to a long-term care facility, it is still expected that  the adult children play a large role in their parents' care. (Spain, Japan).

To complicate matters even further, different countries have different approaches to care for the elderly.  Some countries like France or Sweden have state-provided services.  France has something called allocation personnalisée d'autonomie (APA) which is a subsidy for people over 60.  Sweden has similar subsidies and services. These things do not mean that family isn't involved in care, but it does mean that there are local resources to help the elderly whether they have family living nearby or not.  In other countries like Japan the state has had less of a role (this is changing) and families still provide a lot of care.  

These factors plus the distance or proximity of parents and limited financial resources make for some very hard decisions - decisions that involve both spouses and test their ability to be culturally aware and compromise.  A foreign spouse may be surprised to learn that she is responsible for caring for the husband's parents while her parents rely on state care at home..  Another may be shocked to be told that the spouse's parents are moving with them because "that's what we do here."  The native spouse may resent having to transfer money locally or abroad to help in-laws he or she hardly knows (or doesn't like very much).  In the event of a crisis one spouse may need to purchase plane tickets and have to leave for extended periods. There may even be strong pressure to return "home" with an equally strong reaction on the part of the other spouse to stay.  Gender certainly plays a part here since there may be more pressure on women to provide personal care, while men might feel more pressure to contribute financially.

Family connections are a social and biological fact, "family values" are not.   The cultural context is extremely important and even very well-integrated migrants may discover that their assumptions about how parents should be cared for when they can no longer care for themselves differ dramatically from that of their spouse.  Like other questions that require a projection into the future (where will we send the children to school?) most of us don't think about them until we must.  And thinking of our parents as aging and needing care is one that most of  us put off thinking about because we love them and want them to live forever.  However, this is one we should probably discuss with our spouses beforehand.  In my time here in Japan I have met migrants who married  under very explicit terms - that they would take care of the spouse's parents in the host country first and that they would never leave Japan for long periods.  That arrangement shows a foresight that many of us don't have.

I do wonder, however,  about the fairness of such deals.  Circumstances change.  A decision made when one is 30 may not be the same one he/she would make at 50.  For as our parents age, so do we.  And when they are gone, we may be the ones needing care one day from our children who may be just as far from us as we were from our parents.

Return to the Ancestral Homeland

There are books that make me want to ask for my dissertation back so I can cite them and add to my bibliography. Redefining Japaneseness:  Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland by Jane Yamashiro is one I really regret not having read before I submitted.

This work is based on a study and fieldwork on Americans of Japanese origin who came to Japan to live and work.  In this very clear, very well-written book, Yamashiro has some fascinating insights about their experiences.  There are a few areas where I would respectfully disagree with her, but overall her arguments and conclusions are cogent and worth reading by anyone interested in migration.

Yamashiro declines to use terms like return migration or diaspora in favor of her own term:  ancestral homeland migration.  She makes a very good case that her term is more accurate and more useful in the context of her research on Japanese-Americans in Japan.  Return migration is inaccurate, she says, because the Japanese have been migrating to the US for centuries and it's their children, grand-children or even great-grand-children who move to Japan.  How can they "return" to a place they have never been before, to a land that is often only a distant memory passed down through family members?   As for the term diaspora, she argues that this assumes an orientation toward that distant homeland that many second, third or fourth generation children of immigrants just don't have. Ancestral homeland migration, she argues, is a better fit because it doesn't use the language of "return" and it doesn't imply that there is any sort of active transnational connection between them and the land of their ancestors.

I found this argument to be very persuasive and I like the term. "Ancestor" implies distance while "homeland" acknowledges the connection to the destination country.  "Migration" (without the "return") completes it because they are indeed on the move.  Furthermore, I can see how is an elegant and appropriate way of describing, say, a Polish-Canadian's or Irish-American's move to Poland or Ireland.  The connection may be distant but it is there.

Yamashiro also investigates something that we do not think about enough when we look at migration: the role of regions and sub-regions within a larger nation-state.  Migrants do not just come from France, Canada, Brazil, they came at specific times from specific regions, towns, or cities.  In Choquette's work on the French who came to Canada, she found that many came from urban areas which is surprising since they moved toward a rural life in Canada.

Yamashiro looked at where Japanese-Americans grew up in the United States and found a clear division between those who were from the continental US and those who came from Hawai'i.  In the continental US (even areas in the West that were destinations for Japanese immigrants) Japanese-Americans are a minority.  Some of her informants grew up in places where they were the only Asian family in the neighborhood.  Not so in Hawai'i where Asians are not a minority and the Japanese-American community has influence and socioeconomic status.

These things have an impact on integration in Japan, Yamashiro argues.  The ability to "pass" as Japanese in Japan is a kind of privilege that European or African Americans in Japan do not have.  In my own research this was cited consistently by my Japanese-American participants as a reason they felt comfortable and integrated in Japan.  They were presumed to be Japanese as they walked down the street in Tokyo or rode the metro to work.   However, when they interact with Japanese, their Japanese phenotype clashes with their accent and their non-native level of language ability and cultural knowledge.

What is most fascinating are the strategies her Japan-American study participants used to get around their unveiling as "stealth migrants."  Those from the continental US would make it clear that they were Americans with native-level English.  Those from Hawai'i emphasized their regional identity over the national (US) one.  Hawai'i has a very favorable image in Japan and it is a common tourist destination for Japanese tourists and emigrants.  This is a very deft use of race, nationality, reginal identity, and language to create a favorable space within Japanese society.  And it is one that they are uniquely qualified to use.

My quibbles with Yamashiro's work are minor but I will mention two areas where I have a different view.

I felt that she made assumptions about "white privilege" and a preference for whiteness in Japan that have been challenged.  The idea that some migrants are automatically privileged because they are "white" is something that may have been true at one point in Japan, but is it still true?  I see a lot of evidence that this is not necessarily true now.   I would have liked to have seen a more nuanced presentation of this race-based "privilege" that points to research that contests these assumptions.  Also, the idea that a preference for white skin in Japan is linked to Europeans and white North Americans has been challenged by Hiroshi Wagatsuma (1967) who showed that this preference goes back to the Nara period (8th century) and predates the presence of Europeans in Japan by centuries.

The other assumption that deserves a closer look is the notion of English Language Teaching (ELT) as a white-collar "privileged" profession.  One has only to look at the research and the media reports in Japan to begin questioning that assumption.  I would argue that it was, indeed, a profession with status at a certain point in time in Japan.  The picture is very different today.

But those are relatively minor quibbles.  None of these assumptions are directly linked to her main arguments which are, in my view, thoughtful and persuasive.  The short review I have written here does not begin to do justice to the entire work.  I highly recommend you read it for yourself.

Lifestyle Migration

When I first heard the term Lifestyle Migration I really didn't know what to make of it.   "Lifestyle" in English implies something rather frivolous and even pretentious;  something that must be the province of the rich global elite and not within the reach of regular folks.  What I discovered when I looked into it is that this is actually a very broad category into which a few migration scholars have poured very disparate people:  international retirement migrants, sojourners in India, small entrepreneurs running bed and breakfasts in France, and foreign spouses of nationals.

In a 2009 article Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly wrote, "As we perceive it, lifestyle migrants are relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life." And there the trouble begins.  What does "relatively affluent" mean?  All middle and upper-class Europeans, North Americans and a few privileged Asians? Or can it be applied to any migrant from any country who is richer and better educated than her compatriots in the home country and nationals in the host country?  It appears that the phenomenon is very much about people from the Global North moving to other developed countries or the Global South which makes it suspect in my mind.  Why is a middle-class Canadian woman with a B.A. in Political Science who moves to Berlin a Lifestyle Migrant, while a woman from Morocco with a Masters degree in Engineering who moves to Paris is an Economic or Highly-Skilled Labor Migrant?

The difference, say the Lifestyle Migration scholars, is intentions.   The Canadian women is looking for the intangible - that better quality of life - and her move is informed primarily by a social imaginary of her target destination. This is essentially a romantic project, freed from the crassness of corporate ladders and the necessity of earning a living in ways that she feels are inauthentic.

Intentions alone are, I contend, a very poor basis upon which to differentiate migration flows.  The Moroccan woman may be just as motivated to emigrate by visions of Paris as a cosmopolitan global city as she is by the job opportunities there.  And the Canadian woman once she lands may be very preoccupied by the necessity of getting a visa and earning a living in her new home.

In Global Migration Governance, Caroline Olivier gives this definition:  "The term 'lifestyle migration' is applied to a growing number of migrations that are largely undertaken for lifestyle reasons and which do not fit into the existing policy categories of migration."  My counter-argument is that migration is always undertaken for a variety of motives and most Lifestyle Migrants can fit very comfortably within the existing migrant categories:  Family Reunification, Retirement, Labor (skilled and un-skilled) and others.

Some Lifestyle Migrants even share an important characteristic of less exalted migration flows:  they are "illegal migrants."  Foreigners (many of them from the West) in Thailand are forced to become "visa runners" because the Thai authorities won't give them residency.

"While exact numbers aren't known, it is suspected that tens of thousands of Westerners reside in Thailand using this combination of back to back visa waiver stamps and / or tourist visas. They comprise a diverse bunch with several major sub-groups. There are English teachers whose employer has not or will not provide them with a work permit and 1-year visa. There are digital nomads for whom their work is location independent and for whom South-East Asia's combination of warm weather, friendly people and low cost of living make an ideal base. There are plenty of economic refugees, those who can't afford to have much of a life in the West, or those who choose to live here because they can have a higher standard of living than they could in their homeland." StickmanBangkok 

Many migrants from the Global North work under the table doing translation work or teaching their native languages. In some countries they are tolerated because they bring money in at a very low cost to the host countries:  a retired American in France on U.S. Social Security is not doing any harm and may even be doing some good since the money is coming from outside France and is being injected into the local economy.  Similar reasoning applies to French retirees in Morocco.  Some countries have designated retirees "quality foreigners" because they have a regular income (unlike many of the teachers, writers, and translators) and they offer special programs to draw these migrants in.  The Malaysia My Second Home program seems to be very popular and the Japanese government was actively promoting at one time "overseas ikigai towns".

Every time I take a tour of Lifestyle Migration and the attempts to define it as different from other migrant flows, the more I think this is a distinction without a difference.  Migrants from developed countries (all social classes and income levels by the way) who say they are seeking intangible things that cannot be expressed in monetary terms are still migrants.

That does not, in my view, make their motives selfish or suspect - something that I have always felt is implied in the term "lifestyle."  Is there something illegitimate (or exalted) about wanting to get a better job, seeking a higher quality of life, fulfilling a dream of owning a business, stretching one's pension, or raising children in a country that has a better education system and more opportunities for social mobility?  These are just a few of the aspirations of all migrants from all countries and from all socioeconomic classes.

The danger of lumping all these people together under a tent called Lifestyle Migration and glorifying their pure intentions is twofold.  The first problem is that it ignores the very concrete social problems faced by more and more people in developed countries: lack of opportunity, high unemployment rates for the young and the old, the precariousness of national pensions, debt, lives ruined by the Great Recession, and cuts in government programs.  Le Monde noted in this article from 2014 that the flow of young people leaving France was on the order of 60,000 to 80,000 a year.  Is it not easier to paint these young emigrants as having a fine adventure abroad gaining skills that they can bring back to France (because, of course, it is unthinkable that they might not return) as opposed to addressing the high unemployment rates experienced by the young in the Hexagon - an impetus for their leaving in the first place?

The second problem is that Lifestyle Migration as defined by scholars of the Global North is described as personal growth projects entirely based on individual choice and, some would say, a certain égoïsme.  This is almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of people in their home countries who might excuse a few of their compatriots having an temporary overseas adventure  but who begin to cast a suspicious eye on those who succeed brilliantly in their host countries.  That suspicion turns to outright anger when their temporary migration becomes permanent and they do not return.

In all fairness sometimes developed country migrants have a discourse that is not terribly kind or understanding of the people back home.  It does not help matters when a migrant describes his life outside the home country as an "escape" or when she treats people in the homeland as boring and unenlightened.  This is unnecessarily provocative and unfair - moving to India to live in an ashram or to France to start a gîte does not make anyone morally superior or special.

So I am hoping that the term Lifestyle Migration goes out of fashion very fast.  I don't think it's accurate or useful, I find its reliance on a global hierarchy of nations absurd, and I think it's potentially dangerous because it paints all developed country migrants as rich, privileged, egotistical, quasi-traitorous escapees - something that invites reactions like diaspora taxation or limitations on dual citizenship.

What would be far more helpful here, in my opinion, is to broaden every one's understanding of migrants and migration.   Instead of showing how these Lifestyle Migrants are different, how about looking at all the things they have in common with other migrants?

Developed country migrants who accept a migrant identity and identify with their fellow migrants (and who refuse to let academics stroke their egos) could go a long way in convincing the 97% of people who don't cross borders that migrants are not scary threatening aliens from destitute (but exotic) locales but people doing normal things like raising families, working jobs, going to school, making the most of their retirement.  And the only difference is that migrants just aren't doing those things in their countries of origin.

Would it not be a much better world if everyone everywhere  recognized that a migrant could be a daughter (or son), a parent, a childhood friend, a colleague, a parishioner from church?

I think so and I encourage all of us wherever we come from and whatever shore we've landed on to make it so.

Why are Migrants Coming to Your Country?

And we all think we know the answer to that.

It's because my country has opportunity, jobs, a good social welfare network, the best political system, the most comprehensive system of rights, the highest respect for human rights, the nicest culture, the finest cultural artifacts, the most logical language, and the best weather.  Furthermore,  migrants come from terrible places that are clearly inferior in all ways to our little paradise that we (the ethnic/civic geniuses that we are) have created right here on earth.

May I ever so gently suggest that it's just a tad bit more complicated than that?

The first two weeks of class have filled my brain to overflowing with different theories that all seek to answer this deceptively simple question:  Why do people move around?

Because most people don't.  97% of the people on this planet will never leave their countries of origin - may not, in fact, ever leave the city or region where they were born.  That right there should sober everyone up. Most of the people in the world are not going anywhere, and however lovely your country may be, they will never come knocking on your door asking to come in.  Perhaps it is because they can't, but it is just as likely that they don't want to.

The theories of international migration are concerned with that 2-3% (3.3% in 2015 says the UN) of people who do move - the people we call "migrants."  The United Nations definition of that term is as follows:  "an individual who has resided in a foreign country for more than one year irrespective of the causes, voluntary or involuntary, and the means, regular or irregular, used to migrate." (International Organization for Migration website.)

So what have some of the best and the brightest come up with to explain the phenomenon of international migration?  Here are three theories I find interesting.  Bear in mind as you read that this is my modest attempt to simplify some very complex theories and I invite you to read more about them and not just take my word for it.

Push/Pull Models:  In this model you could think of countries and people as magnets with poles that repel and attract. In these models, people feel "pushed" to leave by difficult conditions  (economic, environmental, political or demographic) in the home country, and they are "pulled" by the powerful qualities (jobs, freedom, opportunity) of the host country.

This, I think, is the model that most people have in their heads.  If a migrant is here in my country, then it must mean that things are pretty bad (or inferior in some way) where he came from, and isn't he lucky to have escaped?

It might surprise you to learn that the push/pull models can't even explain economic migration very well.  For example, most migrants do not come from the poorest countries and move to the richest countries.

Look at this Key Fact from the United Nations 2015 International Migration Report:

"Most migrants worldwide originate from middle-income countries (157 million in 2015). Between 2000 and 2015, the number of migrants originating from middle-income countries increased more rapidly than those from countries in any other income group. The majority of migrants from middle-income countries were living in a high income country."  

Oddly enough, sometimes emigration really gets going when things improve - when a country goes from a poor to a middle-income country.

Neoclassical theory:  This one says that it's all about supply and demand for labor.  Migrants go where they can find jobs and good wages.  Every migrant is a "rational actor" who looks at the costs and the benefits of leaving one country for another and makes an informed decision about where he/she will do well or better.

Sounds plausible until we start counting the ways that human beings can be very irrational.   How many of you who are migrants sat down and did a formal risk and cost/benefit analysis before buying that plane ticket?  How many of you based your decision to move on the advice of friends, a job offer, a charming lad or lass, a short stay as a tourist, a nicely written expatriate biography or social media?

And for those who think that a migrant is in your country because he/she has made a cold-blooded calculation to exploit some feature of your world (social welfare, healthcare, jobs), consider this:  the first class healthcare and fine social welfare networks in France do not trump the impression (not perfect knowledge) that France has no jobs, (something that is not true by the way) and is therefore not a choice destination for migrants (not even refugees).

Migration Network Theory:  This one says it's all about how people are connected.  A migrant network is a web of relationships between people in the home and in the host country who make it easier to migrate.   Family, friends, recruiters, clubs, professional associations and the like are all important because they create a support structure for migrants that helps them navigate the immigration bureaucracy and find jobs, schools for the kids, a doctor that speaks the home country language, and a place to live. And I note here that this is exactly how I found a place in Brussels - through a personal cross-border migrant network.

How do these networks get started in the first place?  The Age of Migration by Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas and Mark Miller have a fascinating list of obvious and no-so-obvious things that they say can kick off a migration network:

"warfare, colonialism, conquest, occupation, military service and labor recruitment, as well as shared culture, language and geographical proximity..." (Castles et al: 40)

So this theory says that very plausible reason that a migrant might be in your country is the existence of  a support structure that has made it easier for him to be where you are as opposed to somewhere else.  Which, to put it another way, means that's it's not really about you or your paradise on earth.

Three different theories and there are, I assure you, many more - World Systems Theory, Globalization Theory, Segmented Labor Market Theory and Migration Systems Theory. Each one looks at the question from a different angle and there is no one theory that explains it all, or has the definitive answer to the migration equation.

I realize that this is not terribly helpful for a voter or anyone who is being asked to make decisions about immigrants to and emigrants from his or her country.  

However, I do hope that the next time you are thinking about migration that you reflect on how very hard it is to answer the question:  Why did they move here? 

Because the theorists don't really know and neither do you.

On the Move Again

Susan Ossman, a professor at UC Riverside, has done some fascinating work on a migrant phenomenon that she calls serial migration.

A serial migrant is a category of migrant who immigrates once and not having suffered enough the first round, chooses to migrate again to a Third (or Fourth or Fifth) place. Think about that for a moment. The usual narrative is one where the migrant takes that great leap, casts him or herself on a distant shore, integrates insofar as she can in this new homeland, and then gratefully becomes a citizen of this new and wonderful place that she has learned to love as her own.

This idea and many others have been on my mind a lot lately.  When I last posted in this blog I was writing at a coffee table in front of my big blue chair on the 14th floor of a high-rise apartment building in Osaka, Japan where I had been living for about a year.

Today I am writing this post at a desk  in my room on the 4th floor of an apartment complex in the Schaerbeek neighborhood in Brussels, Belgium.

What happened?  Well, like most of my cross-border moves this was a happy accident.  I turned 50 this year and spent the entire year in Osaka thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up.  And the one thing that kept popping up in my mind was the idea of taking what I have been doing with this blog for several years now (thinking and writing about migration) and taking a year or two to do formal studies in that subject.  

Once I decided that I wanted to be a scholar of migration I looked around for programs in Asia, Europe and North America and I finally applied to a Masters program at a British university here in Brussels.   I chose this program for many reasons but probably the most important for me personally was the opportunity to study under someone whose work I greatly admire, Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, the author of Migrants or Expatriates?  Americans in Europe.

To my delight I was accepted.  I attended my first class as a graduate student yesterday morning and it was everything I was hoping to find.  I have a great deal of reading to do (no hardship there) and writing.  And here I have a lot to learn because writing for a blog is not at all the same as writing formal papers in academia.  I will spend a term here in Brussels and then I will return to Osaka for the summer to start on my dissertation.  Then it's back to Brussels in the fall for more classes.  If all goes well, I will graduate in 2017.

Now that I have a plan which essentially divides my life between three countries, Japan, Belgium and France,  I will return to posting regularly here at the Flophouse.  I hope to share with you some of the topics that come out of my studies, and I'm sure that my International Migration and Citizenship reading list will be greatly extended as I do my reading and add worthy titles to the list.

And speaking of serial migration, I noted the first day of school that many of my classmates fall into this category.  These are young people (about the same age as my Frenchlings) for whom Brussels is their second, third or even fourth country.  And my housemate too - a woman about my age who was born in Canada and whose parents returned to Ireland when she was a child.  Since that return migration she has lived in France and now Belgium.  Needless to say, we have a lot to talk about every night at the dinner table.

And all that is what I think will be the very best part of this experience - talking to other migrants, learning about their lives, how they ended up in country X or Y and why they stayed (or didn't).  For all the media attention focused on the cosmopolitan globe-trotting elite, the refugees fleeing conflict or the undocumented immigrant, there are many other categories of migrants who don't make headlines:  students, teachers, tech writers, IT workers, nurses, small business owners and so much more.

In the media frenzy over this or that migrant "problem" what is lost is how migration is fundamentally just about People Who Move Around.  And those people come from every country, every culture, and just about every socio-economic class.  Migration is an incredibly complex phenomenon which has in our time certainly been enhanced by globalization and technology, but has always been part of the human experience.

If there is a larger and loftier goal in my ambition to became a scholar and writer on this topic, it would be simply this:  to communicate and convince the homelanders that migrants are people, and that just about every human being on this planet today is potentially a migrant, too - their co-workers, their friends, their children, their grand-children, or even their precious selves.  If more people could see in themselves the potential for a life lived upon a distant shore, I would hope that there would be much more empathy, and a lot less fear, about migrants and migration. 

Some Statistics on Foreigners Entering Japan

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What a delight to find the website for the Statistics Bureau of the Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication which has an entire webpage with links to easy to read Excel spreadsheets in Japanese and English with information about Japan's population including the foreign population in Japan and the number of Japanese living abroad.

Why was I so happy to find this?  Because I made an assertion about the diversity of the foreign population here in Japan a few posts back.  That was an opinion (also known as a guess or a feeling) because when I was writing I had no data on hand  to back up my argument. So allow me to stop being lazy and let's look at some facts.

At the bottom of the Statistics Bureau webpage is the spreadsheet Foreigners Who Entered Japan by Status of Residence in 2013.

Most of the foreigners who entered were (no surprise here) temporary visitors or tourists.  But there are 27 other visa categories, which gives you a pretty good idea of why these migrant/expats came to Japan.  The data is broken down by region (not country) so you can see things like how many Asian diplomats versus European or South American diplomats, how many professors from Africa versus Oceania, and how many inter company transfers from all regions-

I will let you peruse the spreadsheet at your leisure, but here are a few things I found noteworthy:

Asia:  11 million foreigners entering Japan and most arrived from other parts of Asia:  nearly 9 million people from China, Korea and other parts of Asia of which over 7 million were temporary visitors.  That is 8 times the number of foreigners entering from North America and Europe (both at about 1 million).  

What are the top 5 visa categories (excluding temporary visitors and long-term/permanent residents) for Asian nationals coming to Japan?

College Students (246,853)

Exceptional Permanent Residents (134,506)

Spouses or Children of Japanese (131,814)

Specialist in Humanities (126,441)

Dependents (107,884)

North America:  Slightly over a million people from Canada, Mexico and the US of which 800,000 were temporary visitors.

What are the top 5 visa categories (excluding temporary visitors and long-term/ permanent residents) for North American nationals?

Specialist in Humanities (15,756)

Spouses or Children of Japanese (14,410)

Instructors (10,304)

Dependents (9,226)

Entertainers (7,863)

Europe:  A little under a million of which 820,000 were temporary visitors.

What are the top 5 visa categories (excluding temporary visitors and long-term/permanent residents) for European nationals?

Entertainers (16,409)

Specialist in Humanities (14,700)

Spouses or Children of Japanese (12,762)

College students (11,456)

Dependents (9,909)

Three categories make the top 5 for each region:  Children and spouses of Japanese, Specialist in Humanities, and Dependents (spouse and children of a resident with a working or student visa).  A lot of marriage migration/family reunification from all regions. 

What is a Specialist in Humanities/International Services?  It's a very broad category.  This site has these definitions:  "working in legal, economic, social fields or in the human science" and it requires a university degree or 10 years experience and "working in translation, interpretation, language instruction, public relations, international trade, fashion design, interior design, product development." This category excludes engineers, lawyers, interns, professors and doctors, 

What is an Instructor?  That was a category that made the top 5 only for North Americans. This is the category for "Instruction of foreign languages or other education at elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, etc."  So these are language  and school teachers.  But interestingly enough there were more North American language instructors  (10,304) than there were college students (6,846).  There was one category, however, where North Americans made a greater contribution of human talent compared to the other regions:  Legal and Accounting Services (615 and no other region came close to that number).

Why so many Entertainers from Europe and North America?    I have no idea and could not find any answers on the Net.  Does anyone know what that's all about?

And last but not least what about those company expats?  Here are the numbers of Intra-company Transfer visas for each region:

Asia:  34,423

North America:  6,726

Europe:  9,351

Asia Expats Before and After the Great Recession

The first time our little Franco-American family headed off for Asia back in 2006 the French multinational my spouse worked for built us a golden bridge.  We were seduced with a package that included a job for me in Tokyo, Japanese language lessons, a great international school for the Frenchlings, and business class plane tickets "home" so when we returned to France on vacation we did so in style.

As we settled in that first year in Tokyo we learned that our package was not unique at all.  The office were we both worked was filled with other French expatriates and those higher on the food chain had even better packages.  The Grand Poobah himself, a product of France's finest schools, travelled in a car with a driver, lived in a huge apartment, and was given a French tri-lingual secretary whom he treated with great respect.  She was a necessity because even after 10 years in Japan, he spoke very little Japanese and preferred to conduct business in French or English.

Sounds positively colonial, doesn't it?

In 2015 all that is gone, gone, gone.  Most of the French expatriates who worked with us years ago went home.  It was simply too costly, we heard, to support so many in the style to which they had happily become accustomed.  And so the French company  gave them two choices:  repatriation or local contracts.  Most left.

As for the company (a different one) that sent us to Osaka earlier this year, this package is nothing compared to what we had the last time.  During the negotiations prior to leaving France, the company did everything they could to keep the costs down.  They succeeded;  it is only costing the company slightly more to have us in Osaka, Japan as opposed to France, my spouse's home country.

Personal experience is not proof of a trend.  And yet a recent Wall Street Journal article analyzing the state of the traditional business expat in Asia argues that, yes, post-financial crisis. the business expat experience in this part of the world is very different.

In Singapore, China and Hong Kong, says writes Rashmi Dalai, the packages are slimmer, the salaries are lower, and the profiles are different:  more expats from other parts of Asia and fewer from Europe and North America.  Younger, too, and willing to stay long-term even if it means less money and living in less desirable locations.

Very interesting article and well worth the read.  If you are a Flophouse reader in any of these Asian countries, I would to have your take on what she says.  Dalai was based in Shanghai, a city I worked in temporarily a few times, but don't know it well.  All I can offer here is my perspective from Japan, and I have a few questions about her argument.

Writing about three countries on this vast continent and implying that this is representative of Asia is a bit hard to swallow.  Yes, over the years the action (so to speak) is centered on Asian countries with growing power and influence, and strong economies.   I am old enough to remember when Japan was booming and was the place to be.  Some of the expatriates I've met here who stayed through the busts and the natural disasters have a certain nostalgia for that period when even a foreign language teacher could make decent money.  

Last time I looked Japan was still part of Asia as is Korea or Thailand or Vietnam or Cambodia.  There are business expats in those places, too.  So I would argue that she would have to look at a more diverse selection of places before she can dub this an Asian trend. For that matter it would be interesting to know if the trend was not regional at all, but international in scope with business expatriates in South America, Africa or Europe having similar experiences. 

I was also a bit dubious of this assertion:  "Five years ago, the majority of expats in Asia were Westerners on short-term assignments with multinational corporations that offered generous housing, schooling and travel packages."

I really doubt that is true.  Yes, there are cities in Asia with a high number of business expats like Tokyo and probably Hong Kong or Shanghai.  But however large that population, there is almost always a greater population of  Western foreign language teachers, academics, translators, small business owners, spouses, students and missionaries.

They are far less sexy (and probably of little interest to WSJ readers) than the entrepreneurs or company transfers and reflect a much wider socio-economic spectrum than the businessmen and women.  These Westerners are not drawn to Asia by the expat packages because they don't have them and never did.  For that matter, some arrived without any job at all and did what was necessary to get one.

Whatever is going on with the traditional business expats in Asia or elsewhere, a far more interesting question (to me at least) is the relationship between the foreign company transfers, the floating group of short to medium-term expats with more mundane jobs, and the more or less permanent Western communities in Asian countries.  If what Dalai says is true about their being fewer Western expats with money to burn and the power to hire, and there are more local people who have the qualifications and the profiles to take over those positions, what is the impact on all the other Western expatriates or permanent residents?

Will there be fewer opportunities for Westerners overall?  Will it be harder for the permanent foreign residents to survive even with their language and culture skills?  What happens to the infrastructure (schools, churches, societies) if there are no longer enough well-heeled foreign nationals to support them?  Or the small businesses built around "translating" the local culture and language for short to medium-term expats?

Last word.  It is a real pity that we have such a loose definition of expat and that so much energy is expended avoiding the word migrant for people from Western countries.  Why?  Because the surface interpretation of this article would be that one type of expat is simply being replaced by another type of expat.  Another, and I think a truer interpretation, would be that the expats are being replaced by economic or opportunity migrants who just happen to be from Western countries like Europe or North America.  And once we've opened our minds to that, we can look to migration experts for theories and answers.

Defining Terms: Migrants, Expatriates and Travelers

Contempt before investigation is a most perilous mindset and I was skirting the edges of it as I reluctantly picked up  Self-Initiated Expatriation: Individual, Organizational, and National Perspectives  by Maike Andresen, Akram Al Ariss , Matthias Walther (Editors).

Self-initiated expatriation?   The meaning was (I thought) clear but why invent a term when others already exist?  I feared that it was just another bit of academic nitpicking designed to glorify the "adventurers" of the First World to the detriment of other migrants.

To my surprise, the book is quite good and I'm glad I gave it a chance to surpass my low expectations.  I will discuss the difference between Self-Initiated and Assigned Expatriates in another post (in the book there is a good, if limited, study of both in Japan).

Today I'd like to talk about the very first chapter where the three editors  take a stab at defining terms.  What is the difference between migrants and expatriates?   And what distinguishes both from long or short-term travelers?

These are not easy questions to answer.  Sometimes migrant and expatriate are used in the same way citizenship and nationality are used:  as interchangeable and having more or less the same meaning.  Often they are used (especially when people label themselves) to make a distinction between someone from the developed world versus a "real" migrant or immigrant from the developing world.  This distancing reveals not just global hierarchies, but also says a great deal about the self-perceptions of  Europeans or North Americans.  (See this Flophouse post on Immigrants vs. Expatriates.)

 Even academics and researchers use these terms in different ways.  The editors looked at English-language journal articles and found 74 definitions for expatriate and 84 for migrant.  They concluded, "there is no consistency in the literature regarding how each of the three individual terms [migrant, expatriate, and self-initiated expatriate] is defined."  They then took it upon themselves to clear up the chaos.

Their model is a good one, I think, and worth using.  It is perfect but it is, I contend, more objective and deftly avoids the trap of trying to define migrants/expatriates by their countries of origin, socioeconomic class, and intentions.  They are defined instead by what they do when they hit that distant shore.

The first step in cleaning up these categories divides the "people who move around" into two groups based on the answer to this question:  Is there a geographic relocation across national borders and a change in the dominant place of residence?  If the answer is No then the person is not a migrant, but a traveler.  If the answer is Yes then the person is put in a big bucket called Migrant.

Under the category Migrant are subcategories and of them is Expatriate (others might be Entrepreneurs, Retirees, Education, Marriage or Family Reunification Migrants.)  But what is the one thing, say Andresen et al, that always puts someone in the Expat group?  An employment contract.

"Individuals," they argue, "who move to a foreign country without taking up employment cannot be categorized as expatriates."  This can be a contract with a home country organization or company, or one with a host country organization or company.

And that is the difference between the Assigned Expatriates (AEs) and the Self-Initiated Expatriates (SIEs):  the former is sent by a company in the home country (or country of residence) and the latter deals directly with an organization or company in the target country, signs a contract with them and relocates on his own dime.

I like it.  Under this model an engineer, professor, aid worker, programmer, teacher, hairdresser or agricultural worker with a work contract who hails from North or South America, Europe, Africa or Asia are all Expatriates.

"But, but, but..." (I can hear some of you sputtering.)

OK, I agree that this model is not perfect, so let's discuss.   Tell me what your objections are and, if you like, propose your own model.