Talk about a different political approach.
Word is that Barack Obama is going to unveil some new amnesty push later this year. Despite the rising level of unemployment in the US, particularly in rust-belt and housing boom states out West, the President is willing to snick his neck out for a law that would take our large Latin immigrant population out of limbo.
In Japan, they're offering them cash money to leave. Laid of workers of Latin descent -- mainly Brazilians --are being offered $3,000 each, plus $2,000 per dependent to take a flight home and promise never to return. Not even their kids will be allowed to seek employment again in Japan. If anything it seems like the severity of this, that they can never return, is what's causing many unemployed Brazilian Japanese to hesitate.
NYT: In 1990, Japan — facing a growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.
The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-averse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard, dirty and dangerous).
But the nation’s manufacturing sector has slumped as demand for Japanese goods evaporated, pushing unemployment to a three-year high of 4.4 percent. Read the whole thing >
What's interesting, too, is that while some in Japan see the move as shortsighted, others look to the US as a failure of the immigration model, with our extreme disparities in wealth, as a reason to reverse course.
