Topic：Between ethnonationalism and neoliberalism: the logics of post-war migration and refugee policies in Japan
Speaker：Gracia Liu-Farrer（Professor, Faculty of International Research and Education, Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Waseda University）
Moderator：藍佩嘉 Pei-Chia Lan（臺大社會系特聘教授 Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, NTU）
Time：15:30-17:00,Thu. June 6., 2024
Venue：Room 401, Department of Sociology
Abstract：
Japan’s post-World War II immigration and refugee policies have gone through several stages. Its policy toward labor migration is characterized by the following developments: No immigration policy in the first three decades after the war (1945-1975); selective migration prioritizing the highly skilled and restricting low-skilled labor migration from the late 1980s onwards; and the loosening of restriction on manual and service migrant workers from the 2010s. Japan’s policy toward refugee has also developed slowly. Japan resisted to signing on the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugee and the 1967 Protocol until 1981. While admitting extremely few Convention refugees, since 1991 Japan granted a sizeable number of asylum seekers temporary resident statuses. This presentation provides an overview of migration and refugee policies development in post-war Japan and discusses the contexts and rationales of their emergence and application. It argues that three concepts capture the logics of Japan’s policy making: ethnonationalism, neoliberal nationalism, and neoliberal humanitarianism.
Bio
Gracia Liu-Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migration at Waseda University, Japan. Her research examines immigrants’ economic, social and political practices in Japan, and the global mobility of educational and labor migrants. She is the author of books Labor Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants (Routledge, 2011) and Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020). She has co-edited Handbook of Asian Migrations (with Brenda Yeoh, Routledge, 2018) and Tangled Mobilities: Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration (with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Berghahn Books, 2022).
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