Bifurcated Incorporation and Social Mobility in Japan

The context of reception is critical in establishing pathways for different types of migrants within host societies. Given that access to government resources is increasingly restricted to citizens and permanent residents and most states provide relatively few avenues to naturalization or permanent residence, host country human capital and social networks are often vital for upward social mobility. I use a variety of research methods including 60 semi-structured interviews, over 800 hours of participant and non-obtrusive observation, and ethnography from a 14-month period in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area to investigate how Sub-Saharan migrants experience mobility within Japanese society. Consider two different respondents, Nieto and Gerard, as both talk of their experiences adjusting to Japanese society.       

Nieto, a Nigerian man is his late 30s, works as a street hawker in urban Tokyo. When asked to recount his initial experiences navigating Japanese society, Nieto said:

It was very difficult for me to become acclimated. It took a lot of time, not just for me, but for any other migrant from Africa. So the early stages were very, very, very difficult.

Gerard, an Ivorian investment banker in his late 20s, recounted an altogether different acclimation experience from that of Nieto:

So I was going to school and progressively starting to understand some basics; what I really needed to be able to live without much problem here. I was there (at a Japanese language training program hosted by a university in a semi-rural area of Japan) for six months and I met many friends. I had a host family also and I could go to that family’s house on the weekends or holidays to see how the Japanese live and how they interact with each other. I’m still very good friends with them, actually.

All of the Sub-Saharan Africans I spoke with while conducting this study in Japan recalled some difficulty adjusting to Japanese society. This is a wholly unsurprising finding given previous accounts of migrant adaptation (Hirschman 1994; Zhou and Bankston 1998; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004; Smith 2005; Bloemraad 2006). However, Nieto’s assertion that “all” African migrants have a long and rough journey acclimating to Japan is undercut by immigrants like Gerard, who seem to be relatively more advantaged upon arrival. Nieto and Gerard represent two distinctly different paths of initial immigrant incorporation in Japan. One path contains migrants like Gerard, who arrive as students or professionals with stable, long-term visas and are provided institutional resources such as access to language training, living stipends, subsidized housing, and employment services by the state or formal institutions within the state. The other path contains migrants like Nieto, who arrive without access to long-term visas, usually endure a period of undocumented status, and require the direct assistance of native-born individuals in order to experience upward mobility within Japanese society. These two different paths for migrants are facilitated by actions (or inactions) of the state. I refer to this purposeful culling of migrant trajectories by the state as bifurcated incorporation. Bifurcated incorporation as a state-led migration management strategy also results in different sorts of strategic action for migrants on either side of the divide.

The Japanese state uses bifurcated incorporation to try to select a limited number of very highly skilled migrants and prevent the long-term settlement of all other migrant categories, who have been officially branded as “low-skilled” or “illegal’ by the state. By erecting substantial barriers to legal settlement, the state incentivizes migrants who have been first incorporated as low-skilled or undocumented to seek the intervention of native-born individuals in order to experience upward mobility in Japanese society. The most effective form of native-born intervention is through marriage, which is perhaps the most “sticky” and intimate form of social incorporation any migrant can attain. At the same time, the state does not go far enough in providing the sort of welcoming social environment necessary to ensure that migrants who have been incorporated as highly skilled fully invest in the state for the long term. Thus, the state ends up with a number of deeply incorporated migrants who were initially undesired and a sizable proportion of coveted highly skilled migrants who remain reluctant to permanently commit to staying in Japan. This unanticipated (and unwanted) outcome shows the limits in state-guided immigration outcomes, even for regimes with the strong immigration-limiting policy structures. It also shows that migrants who face severely limited institutional options can and do engage in purposeful action to improve their odds of succeeding in experiencing upward social mobility.

There have been several studies that address the consequences of the differential social and economic incorporation of migrants (Zhou 1997; Portes 2007; Xie and Greenman 2011). By comparison, relatively few analyses have addressed the macro-level processes behind the differential social and economic incorporation of migrants. This paper provides empirical evidence in support of a theoretical account for the bifurcated social and economic incorporation of migrants in Japan. I start with an account of the differences between contemporary usages of assimilation, integration, and incorporation and discuss their relative importance for the current migration regime in Japan. I then move on to describe my qualitative data, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and ethnography to show how the state divides migrants into two different and unequal groups and how each group responds to their relative advantage or disadvantage. In particular, I focus on three measures of social and economic incorporation: employment, intermarriage, and social inclusion and use interview and ethnographic data to illustrate how migrants on each side of the bifurcation navigate their way through Japanese society in search of upward mobility. I conclude by explaining how potential state action to preference one group of migrants over another runs up against both the social contexts of reception and the agency of individual migrants.