By Nicholas A.R. Fraser
Over the past decade, the Syrian refugee crisis has created one of the largest outflows of forced migrants since the Rwandan genocide, and the largest refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War. While government decisions to host large numbers of Syrian refugees garnered public support in countries like Germany and Canada, other countries such as Japan pledged to send aid, but refused to commit to resettle Syrians fleeing civil war citing public resistance. More recently, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine has similarly led millions of people to flee, and like the Syrian conflict, could drag on for several years. This begs the question, when do citizens of prospective host countries support admitting refugees?
Because refugee policy cuts across several policy domains including immigration, national security, and welfare, to name a few, it depends on navigating and overcoming domestic political constraints. Understanding public support for refugee policy connects to several themes of the project on “Policy Innovations in Crises: New Pathways for Japan-U.S. Cooperation Project.” Natural disasters triggered by climate change, as well as the recent security challenges to the liberal global order, increase the likelihood that developed democratic states will receive more refugees in the coming years. During the Cold War, the US relied on its close ties to Japan to help manage refugee flows from Southeast Asia. As the US and Japan face new refugee crises, the question remains: how can governments ease public anxieties about admitting those fleeing dangerous situations?
Japan has a relatively smaller immigrant population. Of the 29 wealthiest OECD countries (which on average have a foreign-born population of 8.31 percent), Japan had one of the smallest foreign-born populations sitting at 1.62 percent of the national population (OECD 2018). Moreover, Japan admits very few state-sponsored refugees (roughly 200 in total since 2010) and rejects about 99% of the asylum claims it receives. In recent years, most of Japan’s immigrants come from East and Southeast Asia.
My book project, ‘Bogus’ Refugees: How Bureaucratic Politics Shapes Asylum Policy, investigates asylum policy – that is, how states like Japan decide refugee claims by spontaneously arriving migrants. In contrast to most studies on Japanese immigration policy, I adopt a comparative approach examining developed countries with consistently high (Canada) or low (Ireland, Japan, South Korea) asylum recognition rates that cannot be fully explained by changes in application rates, policy, or electoral politics. In doing so, I challenge previous explanations for Japan’s comparatively strict asylum policy legacy, which attribute it to public opposition to immigration or weak immigrant advocacy groups. Like Canada, Ireland, and South Korea, Japan enjoys geographic buffers with sending countries, maintains high bureaucratic autonomy, and has adopted policy reforms which refugee advocates lobbied for.
I employ a mixed methods research design including qualitative analysis based on interviews with domestic refugee advocates and bureaucrats tasked with deciding asylum claims, quantitative analysis based on decision-making patterns based on data from Canada and original survey experiments fielded in Japan. In this way, my study compares elite and public attitudes. The analysis shows that the Japanese public is more receptive to hosting refugees than previous studies suggest. I argue that extreme asylum policy legacies stem from bureaucratic autonomy while entrenched beliefs that elicit sympathy or skepticism toward asylum-seekers explain high or low recognition rates. Hence, Japan’s strict asylum policy stems from bureaucratic politics. In this way, my book contributes to broader debates with political science about whether states that respect individual rights can control immigration by identifying how bureaucrats’ behavior and influence over policy can lead to stable policy legacies that defy conventional explanations.
My research as Policy Innovations Fellow engages with previous studies that suggest that Japan’s strict refugee policy is rooted in public attitudes and news media discourse. In her 2009 book, Refugees, Women, and Weapons: International Norm Adoption and Compliance in Japan, Petrice Flowers argues that while Japanese initially supported hosting Indo-Chinese refugees during the late 1970s but that the public turned against this policy within a few short years. Similarly, Kei Hakata claims that most Japanese oppose admitting Syrian refugees in his 2016 book, Refugee Crisis: Disturbances in the Islamic world, Distress of the EU, and a Challenge for Japan (in Japanese). These studies have suggested that it is difficult to persuade Japanese to support hosting refugees based on anxieties about immigrants disrupting Japan’s history as an ethnic and culturally homogenous society. Furthermore, Atsushi Yamagata suggests that negative media coverage shifted public attitudes against Chinese asylum-seekers in the late 1980s. Despite the insights of these studies, there have been few that directly link negative media coverage to public attitudes. In addition, they tend to rely on polling data that is decades old as in the case of Flowers (2009) or that draws on an unrepresentative sample as in the case of Hakata (2016).
My research during the Policy Innovations Fellowship term will explore three questions. First, in general, what factors predict support for hosting refugees? Second, under what conditions might Japanese support admitting refugees? Third, to what extent have Japanese public attitudes influenced Japan’s policy toward refugees?
Notably, my early findings challenge the conventional wisdom about media discourse and public attitudes on refugees. Concerning media discourse, several studies on Europe and North America highlight negative portrayals of immigrants and refugees suggesting that news coverage influences public attitudes. If negative media coverage induces hostility toward refugees, one could reasonably expect political elites to respond by maintaining or pursuing a stricter refugee policy. According to the logic of this argument, we would expect that news outlets in a country with a strict policy legacy, such as Japan, would produce more negative coverage of refugees. Examining how Japanese newspapers have covered several refugee populations over time, my article published in the Journal of Refugee Studies (with John W. Cheng) shows that negative media frames are less common in Japan.
My early findings also challenge the notion that Japanese are reluctant to support a more generous refugee policy. A survey experiment using a sample that approximates the Japanese voters published in Political Psychology (with Go Murakami) demonstrates that public support (or opposition) toward refugees is rooted in human psychology. Specifically, this second study finds a link between individuals’ humanitarian disposition (a psychological trait) and the nature of refugee-sending crises (type of event that compels people to flee). In other words, these findings suggest that Japanese who are inclined to help those in need can be persuaded to support admitting refugees.
As a crucial case for explaining the reasons why people support (or oppose) immigration, this project will add to scholarly debates about what factors render hosting immigrants politically (in)feasible. My research will also help policymakers understand the extent to which Japanese have tolerated hosting refugees in the past and what might persuade them to host refugees in the future. In doing so, my postdoctoral project explores how public opinion impacts one aspect of interstate cooperation between the US and Japan.