{"id":16382,"date":"2021-01-18T10:11:29","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T18:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16382"},"modified":"2021-01-18T10:20:08","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T18:20:08","slug":"my-latest-sna-visible-minorities-18-latest-visa-rules-could-purge-any-foreigner-jan-18-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16382","title":{"rendered":"My SNA Visible Minorities column 18: “Latest visa rules could purge any foreigner” (Jan 18, 2021), on how Covid countermeasures disproportionately target Non-Japanese against all science or logic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog. My latest SNA column’s point is this: Even after political leadership has finally shed Shinzo Abe, the Japanese government has found new ways to discriminate against foreign residents of Japan. This is no accident, as NJ were in no way protected, considered, or involved in this policymaking that profoundly affects them<\/a>. \u00a0Soon, any foreign resident of Japan may be under threat of immediate deportation. Excerpt follows, full article at\u00a0http:\/\/shingetsunewsagency.com\/2021\/01\/18\/visible-minorities-latest-visa-rules-could-purge-any-foreigner\/<\/a>\u00a0 Debito Arudou, Ph.D.<\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

“Latest visa rules could purge any foreigner”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 18, January 18, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

[…] New year, new salvo of foreigner bashing: Last week, the Suga administration unveiled re-entry rules that permit non-Japanese residents to re-enter the same as Japanese, as long as they completed the same paperwork and fourteen-day quarantine.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Good, but here\u2019s the wrinkle: If you are found in violation of any quarantine regulations, you don\u2019t just get in trouble like Japanese by, err, having your name made public. You may lose your visa status and get deported from the country. You read that right.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This policy was in reaction to the discovery of the United Kingdom mutation of Covid within Japan this month. But like most policy created in times of shock, it has hasty assumptions: that a foreign variant meant that foreigners were somehow responsible. In fact, the Patient Zeroes who came back from England and went out partying instead of quarantining were Japanese.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This new policy is ironic. In addition to the past year of Japanese media blaming foreigners for creating \u201cforeign clusters,\u201d it also ignores the lazy government response to Covid. Nobody at the national level wanted to take the responsibility for declaring a blanket state of emergency. But since infections have now reached record numbers, here comes the crackdown\u2014and once again foreigners are being disproportionately targeted.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Granted, the government is now threatening to mete out jail time and fines for Japanese who don\u2019t cooperate with measures to reduce Covid\u2019s spread. This has occasioned the perfunctory hand-wringing about the effectiveness of punishment in curbing infections and \u201cinfringing too much on personal freedoms\u201d for Japanese. I see that as part of the healthy give-and-take of political debate, to make sure things don\u2019t go too far. But where is the parallel debate about the \u201cfreedoms\u201d of non-Japanese residents who are receiving unequal treatment under the law?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Japanese getting a fine or a spell in the clink is one thing, but it\u2019s incomparable to a foreigner losing their legal status gleaned after years or decades of residency, followed by deportation and permanent separation from their lives, livelihoods, and families in Japan.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We know that one of the reasons Covid became a pandemic is because of asymptomatic transmission. So what if a person who doesn\u2019t know they\u2019re sick and hasn\u2019t left the country gets linked to a cluster by contact tracing? If that somebody happens to be a foreigner, his or her life in Japan may well be over…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the rest at http:\/\/shingetsunewsagency.com\/2021\/01\/18\/visible-minorities-latest-visa-rules-could-purge-any-foreigner\/<\/a>
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SNA: New year, new salvo of foreigner bashing: Last week, the Suga administration unveiled re-entry rules that permit non-Japanese residents to re-enter the same as Japanese, as long as they completed the same paperwork and fourteen-day quarantine. Good, but here\u2019s the wrinkle: If you are found in violation of any quarantine regulations, you don\u2019t just get in trouble like Japanese by, err, having your name made public. You may lose your visa status and get deported from the country. You read that right.<\/p>\n

This policy was in reaction to the discovery of the United Kingdom mutation of Covid within Japan this month. But like most policy created in times of shock, it has hasty assumptions: that a foreign variant meant that foreigners were somehow responsible. In fact, the Patient Zeroes who came back from England and went out partying instead of quarantining were Japanese.<\/p>\n

This new policy is ironic. In addition to the past year of Japanese media blaming foreigners for creating \u201cforeign clusters,\u201d it also ignores the lazy government response to Covid. Nobody at the national level wanted to take the responsibility for declaring a blanket state of emergency. But since infections have now reached record numbers, here comes the crackdown\u2014and once again foreigners are being disproportionately targeted.<\/p>\n

Granted, the government is now threatening to mete out jail time and fines for Japanese who don\u2019t cooperate with measures to reduce Covid\u2019s spread. This has occasioned the perfunctory hand-wringing about the effectiveness of punishment in curbing infections and \u201cinfringing too much on personal freedoms\u201d for Japanese. I see that as part of the healthy give-and-take of political debate, to make sure things don\u2019t go too far. But where is the parallel debate about the \u201cfreedoms\u201d of non-Japanese residents who are receiving unequal treatment under the law?<\/p>\n

A Japanese getting a fine or a spell in the clink is one thing, but it\u2019s incomparable to a foreigner losing their legal status gleaned after years or decades of residency, followed by deportation and permanent separation from their lives, livelihoods, and families in Japan. We know that one of the reasons Covid became a pandemic is because of asymptomatic transmission. So what if a person who doesn\u2019t know they\u2019re sick and hasn\u2019t left the country gets linked to a cluster by contact tracing? If that somebody happens to be a foreigner, his or her life in Japan may well be over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,18,43,36,22,34,33,50,20,5,12,26,73,4,14,16,13,60,11,64,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embedded-racism","category-academia","category-bad-business-practices","category-bad-social-science","category-cultural-issue","category-exclusionism","category-fingerprinting-nj","category-gaiatsu","category-history","category-human-rights","category-immigration-assimilation","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-japans-blame-game","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-politics","category-labor-issues","category-media","category-nj-voices-ignored","category-problematic-foreign-treatment","category-sitys","category-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16382"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16390,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16382\/revisions\/16390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}