Arrival of Foreign Workers through Various Informal Mechanisms

Abstract

The period of the late 1980s was remarkable in terms of the dramatic increase of foreign workers who participated in industries suffering from shortages of labour. This chapter first considers various responses to the rapid increase in foreign workers in the late 1980s and describes the impact of foreign workers in Japanese society at that time. The chapter then proceeds to analyse the government’s response by way of the 1990 revised Immigration Control Act, and examines the impact of the revised Immigration Control Act on labour inflow. The central concern of this chapter is to investigate in what way the 1990 revisions have contributed to a partial introduction of unskilled workers through what we may call the ‘side door’, while keeping the ‘front door’ firmly closed. We also examine the institutional mechanisms associated with two legal channels for the acceptance of unskilled foreign labour. The chapter then focuses upon various other groupings of unskilled workers that exist under certain conditions while not being recognized as foreign workers per se.