Whose Problem Is the “Foreigner Problem”?

I. The Noun Arrives Before the Evidence

When I was an international student in Japan, I sometimes heard the expression gaikokujin mondai—“the foreigner problem”—used as though it named a settled object. The phrase always produced a small sense of unease. Before any conduct, statistic, institution, or causal mechanism had been specified, the grammatical subject had already been chosen: the foreigner.

That choice matters more now that the number of foreign residents in Japan has reached an unprecedented scale. At the end of 2025, Japan recorded 4,125,395 foreign residents, including 3,858,499 mid- to long-term residents and 266,896 special permanent residents.¹ This population is administratively visible, politically salient, and internally diverse. It includes permanent residents, employees, students, spouses, technical interns, people of Japanese descent, and many others whose only common feature is that they do not hold Japanese nationality.

This essay focuses primarily on people whom the state has lawfully admitted for medium- or long-term residence. Tourists, asylum seekers, people without a valid status of residence, and naturalized citizens raise different legal and moral questions; they should not be collapsed into one population. The need for this distinction is already part of the argument. “Foreigner” can be a necessary administrative category, but it is an exceptionally poor theory of social causation.

The phrase “foreigner problem” turns that category into something more. It does not merely identify who lacks citizenship. It suggests that foreignness itself is the organizing source of a public difficulty. Rogers Brubaker has criticized “groupism”: the tendency to treat categories as if they were internally coherent, self-acting groups.² Bridget Anderson has similarly shown how immigration control helps construct an imagined community of worthy members against various outsiders.³ In the phrase “foreigner problem,” an administrative boundary quietly becomes a moral and causal judgment.

II. An Administrative Category Is Not a Social Cause

There may be real crimes, labor disputes, pressure on schools, conflicts over housing, or disagreements about public norms. Denying the possibility of such events would be intellectually weak. Yet acknowledging an event does not establish “foreigners” as its cause. A social problem is not explained merely by naming the nationality of one of the people involved.

Once a problem is stated precisely, the category “foreigner” usually loses most of its analytical value. If a person commits assault or fraud, the relevant subject is the alleged or convicted offender, not a nationality category. If a resident violates a condition of stay, immigration law has categories for the status and the violation. If a municipality lacks classrooms or language support, the relevant questions concern budgeting, population planning, and the allocation of administrative capacity. If wages are suppressed through a vulnerable labor channel, the analysis concerns employers, labor regulation, recruitment intermediaries, and the legal design of that channel. If a neighborhood dispute concerns noise or waste disposal, the issue is a specific rule and specific conduct.

To call all of these a “foreigner problem” performs a political operation. It replaces acts with identities, institutions with populations, and mechanisms with visibility. It also changes the direction of responsibility. The offender, employer, ministry, legislature, or municipality becomes less visible, while an entire class of residents becomes answerable for events it did not collectively cause.

This is why the phrase is not a neutral umbrella. An umbrella category can be useful when its members share the feature that explains the phenomenon. “Unemployment” groups people around a labor-market condition; “housing shortage” identifies scarcity in a particular good. Foreign nationality, by contrast, does not by itself explain criminality, school capacity, wage formation, or cultural conflict. The category may correlate with a policy channel or demographic profile, but correlation is not a self-sufficient explanation. Treating it as one is a category error with distributive consequences: blame is assigned to those easiest to name rather than to those who designed, administered, or exploited the relevant institutions.

III. The Power to Admit

Rejecting collective blame does not require denying the legitimacy of borders. Subject to constitutional and international obligations, democratic citizens may decide that admission should be expansive, restrictive, selective, temporary, humanitarian, or some combination of these. They may consider labor demand, fiscal capacity, security, demographic change, family unity, and the ability of local institutions to absorb population growth. David Miller, among others, has defended the right of democratic states to control admission and to shape the future composition of their political communities.⁴ One can accept much of that premise without accepting the rhetoric of the “foreigner problem.”

Indeed, the stronger the state’s authority at the border, the stronger its responsibility for the decisions made there. If admission were an uncontrollable natural force, government might plausibly describe itself as a passive victim of circumstances. But visas, statuses of residence, numerical targets, eligibility rules, renewals, and enforcement priorities are public acts. They are written, administered, and revised by political institutions. Employers may lobby for labor, universities may recruit students, and families may seek reunification, but the state defines the legal channels through which these interests become residence.

The right to say “no” before admission cannot become a right to deny authorship after saying “yes.” A democracy may conclude that it admitted too many people, admitted them under the wrong categories, or failed to prepare local services. It may change future rules. What it cannot coherently do is describe those whom it selected under its own rules as though their mere presence were an unauthorized act committed against the nation.

This does not require celebrating every admission decision. It requires locating political responsibility where political power was exercised. The power to exclude and the duty to own inclusion are not rival principles; they are two sides of the same authority.

IV. What a Visa Means—and What It Does Not

My original paper stated the point too simply: because a person had received a visa, I wrote, that person’s presence was legitimate. The basic intuition remains correct, but it needs qualification.

A visa or status of residence is not a certificate of virtue. It does not guarantee that its holder will obey every law, contribute more in taxes than they use in services, assimilate without friction, or remain entitled to stay regardless of future conduct. A lawfully admitted resident can commit a crime, breach a contract, violate immigration conditions, or harm another person. In such cases, responsibility remains individual and the ordinary law should apply. Legal admission is not immunity.

Authorization nevertheless has moral significance. First, it records that a public authority judged the applicant eligible under rules the state itself established. Second, it invites reliance. People resign from jobs, pay tuition, sign leases, move savings, separate from relatives, reunite families, and reorganize their lives around the permission granted. Third, it makes their presence institutionally coauthored. The resident chose to come, but the state chose to admit.

This coauthorship is the point that “foreigner problem” rhetoric suppresses. The individual remains the author of individual conduct. The state is the author of the admission channel, its scale, its conditions, and much of its foreseeable institutional environment. A visa does not transfer all responsibility to government. It prevents government and the political community from transferring all responsibility in the opposite direction.

The state may lawfully distinguish citizens from noncitizens in important respects. Political membership is not erased by residence. But a noncitizen whom the state has authorized to live, work, study, and build a life within its territory is not morally equivalent to an intruder. The state cannot issue permission in the language of law and then withdraw recognition in the language of public blame while leaving the permission formally in place.

V. Before Entry and After Admission

The moral position of a prospective entrant is not identical to that of a person already living under a granted status. Before admission, the state largely determines the criteria, within the limits imposed by law and its humanitarian obligations. After admission, a relationship exists: not necessarily full citizenship, and not an irrevocable contract, but a relationship structured by authorization, reliance, time, and participation.

This temporal distinction appears in different forms across political and legal theory. Seyla Benhabib treats admission and political membership as central tests of democratic legitimacy.⁵ Joseph Carens argues that the moral claims generated by social membership deepen as people live within a society and become connected to its institutions and other members.⁶ Lon Fuller’s account of legality emphasizes that law must be capable of guiding conduct; prospectivity, relative stability, and congruence between official action and announced rules are therefore not mere technical conveniences.⁷

These ideas do not make immigration rules immutable. A state may tighten future entry, change renewal standards prospectively, or act against fraud and serious violations. Democratic self-government includes the power to revise policy. But revision should not be confused with moral amnesia. A person who organized a life around an authorization has a claim to have that reliance counted, even when it is not decisive. The longer and deeper the residence, the harder it becomes to describe the person only as an external unit temporarily occupying national space.

The asymmetry can be expressed simply. At the threshold, the state may choose. Once it has chosen, the choice leaves a residue of responsibility. Admission is not a promise that nothing will ever change. It is a public act that cannot later be treated as though it never occurred.

This is also why democratic majorities cannot fully escape the issue by saying that a previous government made the decision. The continuity of the state is what allows current governments to collect old debts, enforce old contracts, and inherit old obligations. The same continuity applies to lawful permissions on which people have relied. Elections can alter policy; they do not recreate the political community from nothing.

VI. Japan’s “Side Door” and the Local Costs of a National Choice

Japan’s admission of Latin American people of Japanese descent after the 1990 immigration-law revision shows how a population later described as a social problem can first be produced by a deliberate institutional arrangement. The reform maintained the formal rejection of unskilled labor migration while granting broad work rights to second- and third-generation descendants of Japanese emigrants and their families. Keiko Yamanaka described the reform as part of Japan’s de facto admission of unskilled foreign workers.⁸ Michael Orlando Sharpe later analyzed the Nikkeijin channel as a form of de facto guest-worker policy presented through the language of ethnic return.⁹

The distinction matters. Brazilian and Peruvian descendants did not independently invent a route into Japanese factories. National law created a status that made their entry and unrestricted employment possible; labor demand made the route economically attractive; firms and intermediaries organized recruitment and employment. The resulting migration was neither an accident nor simply the aggregate of private decisions. It was co-produced by public rules and market institutions.

Hamamatsu makes the distribution of responsibility especially visible. The city’s own intercultural planning documents record a rapid increase in foreign residents after the 1990 revision, particularly residents of South American Japanese descent. They also describe unstable employment, language needs, schooling, housing, neighborhood participation, and the administrative work required of the city. In 2001, advocacy led by Hamamatsu helped establish the Council of Municipalities with Large Migrant Populations, through which local governments pressed the national government on issues created partly by national law.¹⁰

This history does not prove that every national decision was wrong, or that every local conflict was imaginary. It shows something more basic: the visible resident at the end of the chain is not the sole author of the chain. When factories use a nationally authorized labor supply while municipalities absorb educational and social costs, the phrase “foreigners arrived and caused problems” erases the verbs that preceded arrival: the state legislated, employers recruited, intermediaries placed, and local institutions were left to respond.

Calling the result a “foreigner problem” therefore mistakes the bearer of a policy’s consequences for the author of the policy. The error is not only unfair to residents. It is also politically convenient for the actors with the greatest capacity to change the conditions that produced the conflict.

VII. The “Technical Intern” as an Institutional Product

The Technical Intern Training Program reveals the same structure even more starkly. It was officially framed as a mechanism for transferring skills to developing countries, yet it also became a major channel through which Japanese employers obtained workers in sectors facing labor shortages. The OECD’s 2024 review of Japanese labor migration treated technical interns as one of Japan’s long-standing low- to medium-skill migration channels.¹¹

The program’s institutional design shaped the vulnerability associated with it. Recruitment intermediaries, fees and debts in origin countries, dependence on particular employers, and practical barriers to changing workplaces could severely limit a trainee’s freedom. The International Labour Organization’s supervisory bodies recorded labor-rights violations within the program that amounted to forced labor.¹² Japan’s own expert review concluded that the gap between the program’s stated purpose and its actual operation required fundamental reform. Legislation promulgated in June 2024 created a replacement Training and Employment System, scheduled to begin on 1 April 2027.¹³

None of this means that every trainee is a victim, every employer is abusive, or every program outcome is harmful. It means that “technical intern” is not a natural type of person. It is an institutional role produced by law. Its incentives, dependencies, and risks follow in substantial part from rules written by the receiving state and from the conduct of employers and intermediaries operating within those rules.

When public discourse asks whether the people admitted through such a system are of sufficient “quality,” it reverses the analytical order. The state first selects a population through a particular channel, limits the terms under which its members can act, and directs them toward particular sectors. Society then observes the resulting concentration, dependency, or conflict and treats those outcomes as attributes of the people themselves. An institutional product is redescribed as a foreign character defect.

The point is not to prescribe the successor system’s design. It is to insist that the program’s authors cannot stand outside its consequences. If a state wants labor while avoiding the political word “immigration,” the contradiction belongs first to the state—not to the workers whose legal identities were constructed inside that contradiction.

VIII. Crime, Burden, and Culture as Rhetorical Packaging

The strongest objection to my argument is that concerns about crime, public burden, or cultural conflict may sometimes be genuine. That is true in the limited sense that real offenses occur, public services have finite capacity, and norms can collide. But the public form in which these concerns are commonly expressed often does not function as a careful diagnosis. It functions as rhetorical packaging for exclusion.

Such packaging can contain a real incident while still misrepresenting its cause. The pattern is familiar: a dramatic case is selected; the offender’s nationality is made salient; the relevant denominator is omitted; distinct statuses are merged; the institutional channel disappears; costs are counted without the labor demand or public decisions that accompanied them; and a conclusion about “foreigners” is drawn from conduct that would have been individualized had the offender been a citizen. Ryoko Yamamoto’s research on Japanese discourse traced how migrants were constructed as a crime threat and how support organizations contested that framing.¹⁴ A University of Tokyo research feature on sociologist Kikuko Nagayoshi has likewise emphasized that raw comparisons can be distorted by demographic composition and social conditions, while media reports often mark nationality asymmetrically.¹⁵

To call this packaging is not to diagnose the private emotion of every speaker. It is to describe the structure of the explanation. “Crime” becomes exclusionary when nationality is treated as a sufficient cause rather than one fact among many. “Burden” becomes exclusionary when services used by lawfully admitted residents are presented as an alien extraction, while the state’s decision to admit, employers’ demand for labor, and residents’ taxes and participation disappear. “Culture” becomes exclusionary when no specific norm or act is identified and foreignness itself is treated as the violation.

A society committed to precision has no need to deny misconduct. It can name the conduct, identify the actor, apply the relevant law, and study the mechanism that made the conduct more or less likely. What it should resist is the conversion of individual culpability into collective illegitimacy. The fact that a foreign resident can be responsible for an offense does not make foreign residents responsible for foreignness.

The same distinction applies to numbers. Citizens may legitimately decide that future admission should be higher or lower. But dissatisfaction with a national admission policy is not evidence of wrongdoing by those admitted under it. If the number is considered excessive, the object of criticism is the number chosen, the criteria used, and the authorities that chose them. “There should have been fewer admissions” and “the people who were admitted are themselves a problem” are not equivalent propositions.

IX. A Caution About Comparison

My original essay contrasted Asian reliance on the word “foreigner” with Western distinctions among immigration categories. That intuition captured something real about the politics of naming, but the comparison was too broad. Neither “Asia” nor “the West” has a single vocabulary or a single moral practice.

Japan, China, and South Korea all use versions of “foreigner” or “foreign resident” as important legal categories. South Korea’s Framework Act, for example, expressly defines “foreigners in Korea” as non-Korean nationals lawfully staying for residence and assigns responsibilities to the state and local governments.¹⁶ Chinese exit-entry law similarly organizes major provisions around “foreigners.”¹⁷ European Union law more often uses specialized terms such as “third-country national,” “legal migration,” and “irregular migration,” supported by an extensive common glossary.¹⁸

Yet specialized vocabulary does not immunize European or Anglophone politics against xenophobia, and the use of “foreigner” does not by itself prove hostility in East Asia. Administrative precision and public rhetoric can diverge in either direction. A technically narrow term can still be weaponized; a broad term can be used in a context of rights protection.

The defensible comparative claim is therefore modest. Different vocabularies direct attention toward different objects. “Immigration” foregrounds movement and policy; “irregular status” foregrounds a legal condition; “third-country national” foregrounds a relation to a political union; “foreigner” foregrounds the boundary between member and nonmember. None is innocent, but some are better suited to particular questions than others. The danger begins when a term designed to classify legal status is asked to explain a whole society’s anxieties.

X. The State Cannot Be Both Author and Bystander

The argument of this essay comes before the choice of any particular immigration policy. A democracy may admit more people or fewer. It may prefer permanent settlement, temporary labor, family migration, students, refugees, or highly skilled workers. Reasonable citizens can disagree sharply about each choice. I have deliberately not proposed a quota, a points system, or an integration program here.

The prior principle is about the grammar of responsibility. Individual acts should be attributed to individuals. Employer practices should be attributed to employers and the rules governing them. The aggregate scale, composition, and institutional conditions of lawful admission should be attributed to the political authorities that designed and maintained them—and, in a democracy, to the citizenry in whose name those authorities act.

This distribution of responsibility protects more than foreign residents. It protects democratic self-government from its own evasions. A state that can exercise power without acknowledging authorship can repeatedly create vulnerable labor channels, underfund local institutions, invite people when economically useful, and later convert the predictable consequences into evidence against the people it invited. Public anger then travels downward, toward residents with limited political power, rather than upward, toward institutions capable of answering for the design.

Since 2022, Japan’s government has formally described its aim as the realization of a society of harmonious coexistence with foreign nationals and has maintained a medium- to long-term roadmap for that purpose.¹⁹ Whatever policies follow, coexistence begins at the level of description. A person may be a worker, student, neighbor, offender, victim, taxpayer, parent, or permanent resident. “Foreigner” may remain one legal fact about that person. It should not become a total explanation of the person or of the society around them.

The phrase “foreigner problem” appears to ask what foreigners have done to the state. Political responsibility requires reversing the question: what has the state decided, through which institutions, for whose benefit, at whose cost, and with what obligations toward those who relied on its decision?

A state may close the gate. It may revise the rules for those who approach it in the future. But it cannot erase the fact that it opened the gate, nor make the people who entered lawfully bear the moral burden of that choice. The state cannot be both the author of admission and an innocent bystander to its consequences.