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

tokyopaladin.substack.com

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

#191

Post by rayiner »

selimthegrim wrote: post #189
rayiner wrote: post #183

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…

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.

Do you think the fraction identifying as Bengali has changed? So the 10k to 600k number doesn't reflect actual growth?

Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....

For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.

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

#192

Post by ElProlactin »

aurareturn wrote: post #142
mmooss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a house next to immigrants This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them. The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood. > lower quality Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.

I'm explaining why Japan is doing this. A lot of people don't understand why Japan would do this when their population is already declining. It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue si…

I'm sorry but you're spewing a lot of misinformation here.

Japan's relationship with immigration is complex but what you're talking about really has nothing to do with the business manager visa.

Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.

The problem with the business manager visa was that it was being abused by people who weren't actually running real businesses in Japan. They were setting up shells to obtain residency. Much of the abuse was by Chinese nationals, which was for obvious reasons especially disturbing to Japanese given the history between the two countries.

Japan isn't the only country in Asia that has been forced to revisit its visa policies due to Chinese abuse. For example, the Philippines has made changes and added oversight to its SRRV retirement visa program because of abuse by Chinese nationals, most of whom were younger males coming as "retirees" but working and running local businesses illegally.

So yes, immigration is a sensitive, complicated subject in Japan but you're reading way too much into the changes to the business manager visa.

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

#193

Post by junon »

toss1 wrote: post #57
junon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how so? I'm not familiar with the economics of this.

The short answer is this an exemplar of the distinction between generating income by producing vs generating income by rent-seeking. Producing something, goods, services, useful information, etc. is a net plus for society, adding value for both the producer and the consumer, making the society overall richer. Rent-seeking is purely extractive - it extracts value from the consumer, and in the cases where the extractor…

Seems nobody has read the comment I'm responding to. I understand this part. They're saying it is detrimental to the home country. Why?

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

#194

Post by junon »

ecshafer wrote: post #156
junon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how so? I'm not familiar with the economics of this.

Rent extraction is bad, since it hurts productivity. Ill admit I am an unabashed Georgist, but the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George is pretty accessible. But basically this: Capital and Capitalists are good, they have money, then lend it for ownership, this creates innovation. Labor is good, you need workers, they work, they produce, its good. But Rent (extracting value from land, patents, etc.) is just a ne…

But what about their home country?

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

#195

Post by junon »

margalabargala wrote: post #92
junon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why it's not great for the target country . I'm asking why GP said it was bad for the home country .

It's bad for wherever the person happens to be operating.

Which is the target country. Not what I'm asking about.

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

#196

Post by margalabargala »

junon wrote: post #195
margalabargala wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad for wherever the person happens to be operating.

Which is the target country . Not what I'm asking about.

The implication is that the person in question is also extracting rents from their home country in addition. They're already bad for their home country, they additionally become bad for the target country as well.

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

#197

Post by rayiner »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #185
rayiner wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business?

That assumes we couldn’t get the number of skilled workers we want without allowing them to bring over their parents, siblings, etc. I don’t think that’s true, especially these days. I bet you could easily fill the 65,000 H1B seats just with unmarried foreign students studying in American colleges.

I don’t think the system was ever designed with the idea that we need to allow in all these additional family members to get the skilled immigrants we want. I think it’s just an accident of history. And the result is a law that simply makes no sense on its own terms. Why go to all the trouble of heavily scrutinizing less than 100,000 skilled immigrants while you allow in several times that with no filtering? At that point, you might as well just assign half a million spots by lottery, or auction them to the highest bidder.

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

#198

Post by selimthegrim »

rayiner wrote: post #191
selimthegrim wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think the fraction identifying as Bengali has changed? So the 10k to 600k number doesn't reflect actual growth? Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-ca…

Here is a recent interview/podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AKGrXQAkKM

You might enjoy Fatima Shaik's books as well (although her forebears were from what is now W. Bengal - which serves to draw out my point - they came like my ancestors before Partition and before 1971, so some were not even aware of what happened or that they were Bengali-descended as opposed to "East Indian" without some research). Remember Bengal and Orissa were joined at a certain point and Bengal was divided at least once before so things were in flux well before 1947.

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

#199

Post by fc417fc802 »

rayiner wrote: post #197
fc417fc802 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business? That assumes we couldn’t get the number of skilled workers we want without allowing them to bring over their parents, siblings, etc. I don’t think that’s true, especially these days. I bet you could easily fill the 65,000 H1B seats just with unmarried foreign students studying in American colleges. I don’t think the system was ever designed with the idea tha…

Your reasoning only works if you place zero value on family or only want students or similar. I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong - I'm sure a cohesive position that includes that could be argued - but it's far from being a default assumption.

To illustrate the point lets extend your line of reasoning to the absurd by imagining a policy that doesn't permit for one's spouse to immigrate. After all, if we're heavily scrutinizing 100k skilled slots then permitting an additional 100k unscrutinized individuals by association reduces the efficiency to 50%, right? Presumably we won't get many married individuals applying at that point but hey, there's plenty of unmarried students and young professionals so that's fine.

My personal view is that ideally any policy should be humane and should work for well rounded people. I don't think we should disregard the well being of the participants in an attempt to maximize a metric that we see as beneficial.

I also personally think that the nuclear family is a much more sensible unit of immigration than the individual is. I think we'd be better off with a system where each application is for a family as opposed to an individual and the applications are scored on an aggregate basis (ie multiple highly skilled family members should be viewed favorably, young children should be viewed favorably, things like that).

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

#200

Post by fakedang »

hylaride wrote: post #107
rayiner wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigra…

It's a contentious issue in Canada, too. There are legit reasons families may want to bring in certain extended family members (grandparents for childcare, etc), but it becomes a chain. Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services. IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to…

Under the UAE's Golden Visa scheme, it's parents, children and any dependent siblings, which I think is an optimal balance. The person who sponsors the rest is/are the primary visa holder(s) and the authorities only take their situation into account when assessing lifestyle.

So your parents don't need to have a pension or an income source if they want to live with you, and you can sponsor any disabled siblings (who get massive benefits from the UAE government whether citizen or non-citizen). But you cannot support an able-bodied male sibling above the age of 25. You can sponsor female unmarried siblings regardless of age as long as they are unmarried (realities of that region I guess). But more importantly, you cannot sponsor just about everyone and anyone, so it stops becoming a chain of sponsorships like it is in the West. There are some workarounds to this system though (e.g.: you can hire one as a personal driver and another as an administrative assistant staff for your company) but they're still very restrictive.

Citizenship is obviously not at all a given, even for long term Golden Visa holders. But at least they don't tax you either which is still a reasonable balance altogether. You will get considered for citizenship though if you have a stellar track record (research, entrepreneurship, sports, govt service).

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