Live data from Hacker News

Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

tokyopaladin.substack.com

181–190 of 213 posts

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. My parents had a beach house for a while. It was rented May-Sept every year. They'd visit for a week in each shoulder season, spend half the time doing major cleaning/fixing, and left the day-to-day during rental season to a management company (same one that managed bookings for the house). It wasn't 100% passive, but it was about as close as you can get as a retired upper-middle-class couple.

>100% this >wasn't 100% passive Apparently it's not passive, then. It's a seasonal job essentially.

Sure but not “a lot of work” as nradov suggested above. And they could have outsourced that as well, but at some point it made sense to do some light maintenance while they were on-site.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My close relative does it, and it's exactly like I wrote above: if it doesn't take your time, money mostly go to other people. There's a comment from everforward which gives a glimpse into reality.

> which gives a glimpse into reality. Fun :| Impossible that different people have different experiences? Not claiming you're wrong, the world is a pretty big place after all.

All sorts of weird things can happen from time to time, but simply in terms of basic economics it isn't a stable arrangement. If you're making passive income that means you're operating inefficiently and someone could eat your lunch. The only exceptions that come to mind are significant moats and regulatory capture.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#183
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just dependents. It includes parents and siblings of both the skilled immigrant and their spouse. And, transitively, cousins, etc.

Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and…

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers.

I don't care about this or that individual. The problem is volume. When we came to the U.S. in 1989, there were only 10,000 Bangladeshis. Today there are over 600,000. There are "Little Bangladeshes" in many cities. I have a hard time believing highly skilled H1B workers and their kids are going to create these enclaves.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#184
post #66

> Foreign business owners could lose their residency status after the government increased the capital requirement from 5 million yen (approx. $31,000) to 30 million yen (approx. $187,000).1 A $31,000 capital requirement for a "business" is a joke. A food cart--not a truck, just a cart--requires more capital than that.

Agreed, 31k is a joke, never heard of such a low number for this type of thing ever. I’m surprised it was that low.

Even 187k is very low compared to Europe, I’m pretty sure all European countries have it higher than that.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#185
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse. There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.

It's not about "abuse." It's that family reunification undermines the filters that are at the heart of every immigration law. My dad came over from Bangladesh on an H1 and he's the guy you put on the brochure when you market skilled visa programs to voters. He's a public health expert who had a job in-hand in the U.S. And he moved his kids to a neighborhood without any other Bangladeshis and raised us without any for…

Is that really so bizarre? You're framing it as some sort of fundamental policy failure but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business?

Sure, you could propose an alternative regime where that isn't permitted. But that's a competing proposal for how to structure things and has (I think) legitimate tradeoffs. While there might well be practical problems with any given implementation I don't think there's any fundamental issue with handling immigration on the level of the nuclear family.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#186
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and…

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers. I don't care about t…

I will never understand not respect migrants whose first instinct is to close the door behind them the second they get to wherever they're going.

This is not a real problem. First we're assuming that migrants only marry foreigners. A significant portion of green cards are issued to people who marry a US citizen or green card holder so there's no spouse there and, at most, one set of parents. Also, it's not like every parent wants to come to the US.

And who really cares if parents come over? They don't get Social Security. They probably don't get Medicare either.

We are in fact completely dependent upon immigration with a fertility rate of ~1.54 per woman. Many industries (eg construction, agriculture) are completely dependent on migrant labor.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#187
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling. Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide. > quality Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your…

Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Meanwhile, you dismissed the will of Japanese people as "hateful" for not wanting more immigrants.

More of the standard rhetoric. It's like an algorithm generating these comments or an LLM. It just responds with copypasta without even knowing what I said.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#188
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just dependents. It includes parents and siblings of both the skilled immigrant and their spouse. And, transitively, cousins, etc.

Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and…

She's from Slovenia.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#189
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and…

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers. I don't care about t…

This is about the 1983409258094th time I have to remind you about Vivek Bald's book about Bengali Harlem. There were more than 10k but they would be counting themselves as Black or Latin by that point.

Re: Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

#190
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers. I don't care about t…

I will never understand not respect migrants whose first instinct is to close the door behind them the second they get to wherever they're going. This is not a real problem. First we're assuming that migrants only marry foreigners. A significant portion of green cards are issued to people who marry a US citizen or green card holder so there's no spouse there and, at most, one set of parents. Also, it's not like every…

> This is not a real problem.

It doesn't matter what you or I think constitutes a "real problem." The underlying premise of the law is limiting the number and type of immigrants. If a law allows only ~100,000 highly scrutinized skilled workers, but then has a loophole for hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with no skills and no filtering, then it is broken under its own animating premises.

It's like building a biometric security door and then installing an unlocked sliding barn door right beside it. You can't argue that "well, we don't really need to control who gets access." We went to all that trouble to build the security door, so there must be a reason.

And family reunification is largely unnecessary. Maybe you need a small number of family greencards connected to O and E visas, to attract superstar workers that are well established in their careers. But otherwise, the U.S. could easily fill 65,000 H1B slots just from single college students who don't need to bring family with them.

Post reply on HN