I acknowledge and sympathize with the pain this will cause, but in regards to Japan itself: Good for them. Not because it is a rightward shift, but because it is a shift toward pragmatism in the face of the inherent tension between respect for all people and respect for one's own people and culture.
In my humble opinion, an ideal world is a liberal one with cherry-picked, tightly controlled, practical conservative elements that boldly take on the intimidating job of maintaining the balance between love and reason.
> I mean, sure, so long as they're willing to deal with the consequences of an aging population and a shrinking workforce.
They're pretty clearly aware of the dire fear-mongering, and chose their path accordingly. They decided to sidestep the pyramid scheme of perpetual growth.
Here in Canada we've been pitched this same scary argument for decades, leading to outrageous levels of immigration, coupled with a growing entitlement among the class (which leads to a complete refusal to integrate in any meaningful way, often while incanting the laughable pablum about mosaic versus melting pot while dragging regressive, destructive habits and cultural norms to Canada, tragedy of the commons behaviour, etc).
Somehow this mass immigration has made us older, and less competitive, moving in exactly the opposite direction of the magical solution it promised while giving away the country. It has led to massive lines for every job, downward pressure on wages, and oversubscribed services at every level.
---
Every now and then there is a discussion about the difference between an "expat" and an "immigrant", but it really is important that people are honest about the difference, because it is very real, and it is informative to why the myth of immigration as a solution doesn't track with the reality that immigration is often massively destructive.
An expat is usually some Westerner that moved to some random country for adventure, a change, whatever. Occasionally they send a postcard home and share videos from the beach. Whatever.
An immigrant, on the other hand, is someone that moves to a country as a beachhead to drag their entire extended family there, often then expanding out from there. Which is precisely what many Western countries have seen where they bring in the "skilled worker", and then the skilled worker drags over their elderly parents, and also their "auntie" as a purported childcare giver, and then registers a business and sponsors their village through every loophole and circumvention, and then... This has destroyed the acceptance of immigration and completely obliterated the "oh you're getting older, something something labour shortage" nonsense.
We need to move on from the mass immigration is the solution horseshit, because all it has done is led every developed country to lurch perilously to the right, giving an easy open for charlatans to take advantage of a real problem to push a lot of ancillary things as well.
>Somehow this mass immigration has made us older, and less competitive, moving in exactly the opposite direction of the magical solution it promised while giving away the country. It has led to massive lines for every job, downward pressure on wages, and oversubscribed services at every level.
Context for others: Already much wealthier on a real GDP per-capita basis, the US increased its lead over Canada from 2000 to 2025 <<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1YbGu" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1YbGu>. The US began the period 28.2% higher, and finished 49.5% higher. Note the lack of growth in the Canadian line that began c. 2015.
Put another way, 100% of Canadian GDP growth since 2015 has been from population growth. Now that the latter has been significantly (not completely) cut back, the country is in a recession (which the bien-pensant media never fails to adding the word "technical" before saying so).
>Here in Canada we've been pitched this same scary argument for decades, leading to outrageous levels of immigration, coupled with a growing entitlement among the class (which leads to a complete refusal to integrate in any meaningful way, often while incanting the laughable pablum about mosaic versus melting pot while dragging regressive, destructive habits and cultural norms to Canada, tragedy of the commons behaviour, etc).
If Trump announced that after annexation the US would deport every TFW/"student" that has arrived since 2015, public opinion would massively swing toward joining the US ASAP.
I'm not following your argument at all, if they had taken no immigrants, the GDP would just be even worse then, and Canada would be even further behind.
It seems no Canadian-born has managed to produce efficiencies or innovations, and only increased labor workforce through immigration has allowed higher production of goods/services (to increase GDP). So wouldn't that mean Canada would have been way worse off without those immigrants?
None of this happens in isolation. If you flood a country with a torrent of migrants, everything else just doesn't continue as is with that one thing happening on the side.
For instance in Canada there was, and remains, a housing shortage. Suddenly a ridiculous amount of our economy turned to speculation on and leveraging of housing. Housing is multi-factorial and there are certainly other issues at play, but it was incredible during the height of outrageous migration when apologists would pretend this adding millions of new people that need to be housed in a short period of time was somehow not a factor (suddenly the demand in S&D didn't matter, because it was a protected topic).
I know even in my neighbourhood migrant families that bought houses they could not possibly afford -- the space was endemic with astonishing levels of fraud, and you could just make up whatever imaginary income you want -- at grossly inflated prices, and the only way they could swing it is to then move a number of international "students" in their basement, the "students" then working full time at minimum wage and often below, etc. A race to the bottom. This sort of knock-on effect happened everywhere. Brampton is basically a giant tinderbox now because it was a city built on this sort of pyramid scheme/fraud nonsense.
Investments all flooded to the same spaces[1]. Who wants to build a business or make a product when you can just make an international "college" or start another exploitative low value human trafficking operation to give points to desperate migrants looking to game the system.
Every business in Canada was competing with race to the bottom "who can hire the most migrants, many who'll actually pay for the right to work" alternatives. Increasing efficiency, automation, etc -- none of it mattered at all, because it can't possibly compete with the place flooding with migrants who'll tolerate anything and accept close to nothing in return. While similar countries were increasing efficiencies, automating, and so on, we were moving to a human trafficking economy. This is true in Canada's agricultural industry where it's like the 1940s because farmers just got accustomed to massive numbers of migrants coming and doing manual labour.
Now add that as the best of the best graduated from Canadian colleges and university, they could take a grossly underpaid job with a Canadian employer, where almost all of their coworkers will be "accept anything" migrants, and fight to pay a million dollars for some shoebox condo....or they could move elsewhere. A shocking number just decided to move elsewhere, primarily the US.
This was hugely destructive to Canada. It was a massive mistake, and we have a lost decade to show for it.
[1] So did government spending. Why do major projects, seek new export markets, etc, when you can announce GDP growth regardless, even if the GDP per capita was flat to declining. A decade when we did nothing but celebrate how wonderfully diverse and tolerant we are.
If I understand, GDP didn't grow nearly as fast as the population. The economy technically got bigger, but once you divided it across millions more people, GDP per capita shrank while living costs, especially housing, surged. Bigger pie, but even more people splitting it, so a smaller average slice.
That seems to show in the data. Canada screwed this up and brought in way too many people, way too quickly, without anything close to the housing, infrastructure or investment needed to support it. Since the cuts started in 2024 and were pushed further by the new government, GDP per capita has started growing again and rents are cooling, which seems partially explained by those immigration cut backs.
What I can't find in the data is evidence that this explains why Canada lagged behind countries like the US. Most of that gap seems to come from high-tech industries. Meaning Canada just doesn't invest in itself enough, and cheap migrant labour doesn't explain why it failed to build the industries that actually drove growth elsewhere.
happytoexplain · · focus · HN ↗
In my humble opinion, an ideal world is a liberal one with cherry-picked, tightly controlled, practical conservative elements that boldly take on the intimidating job of maintaining the balance between love and reason.
greggoB · · focus · HN ↗
llm_nerd · · focus · HN ↗
They're pretty clearly aware of the dire fear-mongering, and chose their path accordingly. They decided to sidestep the pyramid scheme of perpetual growth.
Here in Canada we've been pitched this same scary argument for decades, leading to outrageous levels of immigration, coupled with a growing entitlement among the class (which leads to a complete refusal to integrate in any meaningful way, often while incanting the laughable pablum about mosaic versus melting pot while dragging regressive, destructive habits and cultural norms to Canada, tragedy of the commons behaviour, etc).
Somehow this mass immigration has made us older, and less competitive, moving in exactly the opposite direction of the magical solution it promised while giving away the country. It has led to massive lines for every job, downward pressure on wages, and oversubscribed services at every level.
---
Every now and then there is a discussion about the difference between an "expat" and an "immigrant", but it really is important that people are honest about the difference, because it is very real, and it is informative to why the myth of immigration as a solution doesn't track with the reality that immigration is often massively destructive.
An expat is usually some Westerner that moved to some random country for adventure, a change, whatever. Occasionally they send a postcard home and share videos from the beach. Whatever.
An immigrant, on the other hand, is someone that moves to a country as a beachhead to drag their entire extended family there, often then expanding out from there. Which is precisely what many Western countries have seen where they bring in the "skilled worker", and then the skilled worker drags over their elderly parents, and also their "auntie" as a purported childcare giver, and then registers a business and sponsors their village through every loophole and circumvention, and then... This has destroyed the acceptance of immigration and completely obliterated the "oh you're getting older, something something labour shortage" nonsense.
We need to move on from the mass immigration is the solution horseshit, because all it has done is led every developed country to lurch perilously to the right, giving an easy open for charlatans to take advantage of a real problem to push a lot of ancillary things as well.
TMWNN · · focus · HN ↗
Context for others: Already much wealthier on a real GDP per-capita basis, the US increased its lead over Canada from 2000 to 2025 <<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1YbGu" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1YbGu>. The US began the period 28.2% higher, and finished 49.5% higher. Note the lack of growth in the Canadian line that began c. 2015.
Put another way, 100% of Canadian GDP growth since 2015 has been from population growth. Now that the latter has been significantly (not completely) cut back, the country is in a recession (which the bien-pensant media never fails to adding the word "technical" before saying so).
>Here in Canada we've been pitched this same scary argument for decades, leading to outrageous levels of immigration, coupled with a growing entitlement among the class (which leads to a complete refusal to integrate in any meaningful way, often while incanting the laughable pablum about mosaic versus melting pot while dragging regressive, destructive habits and cultural norms to Canada, tragedy of the commons behaviour, etc).
If Trump announced that after annexation the US would deport every TFW/"student" that has arrived since 2015, public opinion would massively swing toward joining the US ASAP.
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
It seems no Canadian-born has managed to produce efficiencies or innovations, and only increased labor workforce through immigration has allowed higher production of goods/services (to increase GDP). So wouldn't that mean Canada would have been way worse off without those immigrants?
llm_nerd · · focus · HN ↗
For instance in Canada there was, and remains, a housing shortage. Suddenly a ridiculous amount of our economy turned to speculation on and leveraging of housing. Housing is multi-factorial and there are certainly other issues at play, but it was incredible during the height of outrageous migration when apologists would pretend this adding millions of new people that need to be housed in a short period of time was somehow not a factor (suddenly the demand in S&D didn't matter, because it was a protected topic).
I know even in my neighbourhood migrant families that bought houses they could not possibly afford -- the space was endemic with astonishing levels of fraud, and you could just make up whatever imaginary income you want -- at grossly inflated prices, and the only way they could swing it is to then move a number of international "students" in their basement, the "students" then working full time at minimum wage and often below, etc. A race to the bottom. This sort of knock-on effect happened everywhere. Brampton is basically a giant tinderbox now because it was a city built on this sort of pyramid scheme/fraud nonsense.
Investments all flooded to the same spaces[1]. Who wants to build a business or make a product when you can just make an international "college" or start another exploitative low value human trafficking operation to give points to desperate migrants looking to game the system.
Every business in Canada was competing with race to the bottom "who can hire the most migrants, many who'll actually pay for the right to work" alternatives. Increasing efficiency, automation, etc -- none of it mattered at all, because it can't possibly compete with the place flooding with migrants who'll tolerate anything and accept close to nothing in return. While similar countries were increasing efficiencies, automating, and so on, we were moving to a human trafficking economy. This is true in Canada's agricultural industry where it's like the 1940s because farmers just got accustomed to massive numbers of migrants coming and doing manual labour.
Now add that as the best of the best graduated from Canadian colleges and university, they could take a grossly underpaid job with a Canadian employer, where almost all of their coworkers will be "accept anything" migrants, and fight to pay a million dollars for some shoebox condo....or they could move elsewhere. A shocking number just decided to move elsewhere, primarily the US.
This was hugely destructive to Canada. It was a massive mistake, and we have a lost decade to show for it.
[1] So did government spending. Why do major projects, seek new export markets, etc, when you can announce GDP growth regardless, even if the GDP per capita was flat to declining. A decade when we did nothing but celebrate how wonderfully diverse and tolerant we are.
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
That seems to show in the data. Canada screwed this up and brought in way too many people, way too quickly, without anything close to the housing, infrastructure or investment needed to support it. Since the cuts started in 2024 and were pushed further by the new government, GDP per capita has started growing again and rents are cooling, which seems partially explained by those immigration cut backs.
What I can't find in the data is evidence that this explains why Canada lagged behind countries like the US. Most of that gap seems to come from high-tech industries. Meaning Canada just doesn't invest in itself enough, and cheap migrant labour doesn't explain why it failed to build the industries that actually drove growth elsewhere.