Anti-Immigrant Sentiments and Job Competition in Contemporary Japan

Hiromi Ono, Washington State University
Hiroshi Ono, Texas A&M University

Japan recently joined a group of nations hosting a substantial number of international migrants and is also expected to increase the number of immigrants it accepts. Yet little information is available on Japan as an immigrant host country. The first key contribution of this paper is to investigate variations in general anti-immigrant sentiments among the Japanese using the Japanese General Social Survey, 2006. To examine the presence of variation, we test the hypothesis that antagonism towards immigrants is structured by job competition. Is anti-immigrant sentiment spread evenly across all levels of job competition? Or is it higher in industries and occupations with greater job competition in the local labor market? The second contribution of this paper is an investigation of the race/ethnic specificity of antagonistic sentiments. Finally, we provide cross-national comparative statistics from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), 2003.