‘Trans-local Policy Assemblages’ in the Governance of Guestworker Migration

• In Event: Foreign Workers or Future Citizens in East Asia?

Abstract

Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) was introduced in 1993, formalizing the business practice of accepting foreign workers as ‘trainees’ while utilizing strict mechanisms to ensure the control and timely rotation of workers to prevent permanent settlement. By the end of the 2000s, the de-facto guestworker regime had surpassed visa overstayers, Nikkeijin co-ethnics, and student visa holders to become the largest of Japan’s unofficial ‘backdoors’ of labor migration. Despite criticism and calls for drastic reform or abolishment of the regime, the policies have only seen slow, incremental change at the national level. Explanations have focused on the role of public sentiments, elite lawmakers’ opinions as well as discourse within bureaucratic spaces which all constrain the potential for a top-down rethinking of Japan’s immigration regime.
In contrast to gradualism at the national-level, the past decade has seen a surge of diverse forms of intervention by subnational-level actors. Municipal governments have introduced a wide range of policy initiatives from subsidizing employers of foreign workers to sponsoring structured activities such as cultural exchange activities, language classes, and sports leagues to facilitate a level of inclusion and engagement while extending control over migrants’ private time. Meanwhile, recent work into the regional governance of migration in East Asia has also grappled with its transnational dimensions, highlighting how non-binding, flexible agreements enable labor migration while minimizing specific accountability. Recent empirical findings showing that Japanese prefectures and municipalities with greatly varying institutional capacities have become transnational actors themselves by directly establishing relations and signing cooperation agreements with government ministries, educational institutions, subnational authorities, and private sector labor brokers in sending countries such as Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia raise many questions. However, this is also an invitation to reap theoretical rewards by unpacking how the growing importance of transnational linkages in opening and sustaining new migration pathways, impacting recruitment practices, and devolving power and responsibility for migration governance over a wider range of actors effectively constitutes new practices of (un)bordering that create new opportunities for migrants while subjecting them to more intrusive and specific forms of identification, quantification, and evaluation.
The paper aims to make three main contributions. First, it will bring an empirically grounded analysis of local-level governance shifts, particularly with its growing transnational character, into conversation with the multilevel governance of migration literature. Although local level policies have received greater attention in recent years, it has increasingly coalesced around a ‘multilevel governance of migration’ perspective primarily based on the European experience. I build upon recent work in bringing competing understandings of the ‘assemblage’ into critical policy research to introduce the concept of ‘trans-local policy assemblages’ of migration, defined as immanent and contingent constellations of relations that transgress official public/private, local/national, domestic/foreign, and formal/informal distinctions to diffuse power and responsibility across a spectrum of associated actors with varying levels of power and engagement in the pursuit of related interests.
The main geospatial data driving this paper has been created by joining the results of an original 2019 survey of municipal governments in Japan to identify migrant-related policies with public documents collected over the period of 2020 and 2023 of agreements between municipal and prefectural authorities and sending-state entities. Additionally, this paper will incorporate insights from fieldwork and document collection conducted in 2016, 2019-2020, and 2022 totaling 35 semi-structured interviews with government officials, NGO representatives, and migrant employers.
By creating trans-local policy assemblages (especially in the case of ‘strong’ ones with a formal cooperation agreement), accessible and clear pathways to recruiting foreign labor become available to local employers of even very modest means while migrants’ presence becomes more visible (and controllable) to local administrations previously disengaged with TITP migrants. Far from a loss of state control or sovereignty, increasing complexity in migration governance and the appearance of trans-local policy assemblages show a trend towards toleration by a neoliberal state willfully stepping back from more intensive, direct control in favor of ‘disaggregated’ involvement by a diverse and diffuse set of actors.
 

Author

• Yunchen Tian, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken)