To Curb Xenophobia, Foster Mutual Understanding

By Fumio Ohtake / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

11:00 JST, October 3, 2025

In July’s House of Councillors election, parties that are cautious about accepting foreign workers and that advocate for tighter restrictions saw their vote shares increase. Anti-immigrant parties have been gaining support overseas for some time, and now the treatment of foreign workers is increasingly becoming a point of contention in Japan, too.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has canceled its “Africa Hometown” project designed to promote exchanges between African countries and four Japanese cities after the project generated considerable opposition and concern in Japan.

Behind the backlash lies a rapid change in Japanese society — an increase in the proportion of foreigners from less than 1% of the population in 1990 to around 3% in 2024, with the percentage in some municipalities exceeding 10%.

Foreigners are working in various sectors in need of labor in Japan, such as manufacturing, nursing care, logistics and agriculture, and they are helping to invigorate the local economies that they land in. However, some people feel uneasy about the swift change.

Regardless, no significant impact from foreign workers on employment or wages in the host country has been observed in empirical research in economics.

Harvard University Prof. Alberto Alesina, who passed away in 2020, and Asst. Prof. Marco Tabellini reviewed past research and conducted a multifaceted analysis of the economic and political impact of immigrants.

They concluded that, on average, immigrants have a very small impact on wages and employment, and that in the long run, they contribute to economic growth through complementary effects, greater consumption and innovation. Moreover, given that many immigrants are young, they play a vital role in providing a labor force and improving the sustainability of the social security system. Nevertheless, public backlash against immigrants and foreign workers is growing all over the world.

Alesina and Tabellini stressed the importance of cultural factors, citing research by a team including David Card, a Nobel laureate and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Card and his coauthors, using data from 21 European countries, said that the belief that immigrants change the “compositional amenities” that natives find in their neighborhoods and schools has two to five times greater influence on individual attitudes toward immigration policy than concerns over wages and taxes.

Card and his coauthors added, however, that cultural concerns about immigration are weaker in urban areas, meaning people in these places are often tolerant of immigrants.

Improving quality of contact

Alesina and Tabellini, meanwhile, said that in various European countries, influxes of immigrants have led to right-wing populist parties taking a greater share of the votes. At the same time, they also cite cases in which campaigns by left-wing parties for immigrants’ rights have led to a shift toward inclusivity across society. In other words, immigration may lead to divisive politics, but it can also be an opportunity to promote inclusive reform of systems.

In reducing prejudice toward foreigners, “quality of contact” is key. Living in the same neighborhood as immigrants does not on its own reduce prejudice, and it sometimes causes increased friction. What does mitigate cultural friction is collaboration in the workplace and in community activities, where there is positive contact with a shared goal.

Referring to studies on the Great Migration of African Americans out of the U.S. South, Alesina and Tabellini showed that while discriminatory attitudes and xenophobic voting behavior among whites intensified immediately after Blacks migrated to the North and West, these attitudes eased over the long term. Their report also includes other studies that show that in those parts of the United States with long-term contact with Arab immigrants, people had more personal contact with Muslims and more knowledge about them, which resulted in less prejudice toward Arab immigrants.

As for the impact of refugees in Austria, the paper reports that there was an increase in far-right support in places where refugees merely passed through. However, far-right support declined where refugees stayed for a longer period of time, with this phenomenon reinforced by the actions of local authorities and nongovernmental organizations that helped to integrate the refugees.

Some studies show that in the United States, counties that received many immigrants from countries that established social welfare programs at an early stage tended to show more support for redistribution and liberal ideologies. These findings suggest that it is not just the “quantity” of contact but also the “quality” and “sustainability” of contact, along with institutional support, that are needed to eliminate prejudice.

Data for Japan confirms that attitudes toward accepting foreign workers have changed in recent years. Seinan Gakuin University Prof. Eiji Yamamura and I, using individual-level panel data from 2016 to 2024, analyzed how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Japanese attitudes. Since the pandemic, support for accepting foreigners has declined, with no recovery seen in 2024. During the pandemic, cross-border travel was restricted and people were asked not to travel between prefectures, which might have fostered exclusionist sentiment. This may have had a long-term, rather than a temporary, impact on how Japanese people perceive foreigners.

Sharing accurate data

In their research based on data from Japanese municipalities, Akira Igarashi, a University of Osaka associate professor, and others have found a trend in local people’s attitudes toward foreigners. When the proportion of foreign residents goes up, threat perceptions tend to rise, but once the ratio exceeds 10%, a contrary trend takes hold and tolerance increases. Their findings suggest that when contact with foreigners becomes more commonplace, people may feel less threatened and more accepting of coexistence.

Igarashi’s book “Kashika Sareru Sabetsu” (Discrimination visualized) unravels the reality of discrimination against foreigners from multiple angles. His research on labor and housing markets and the sharing economy confirmed that even when candidates with foreign names apply with the same qualifications as a Japanese person, they are at a disadvantage.

Igarashi also found that many Japanese people overestimate the crime rate among foreigners and also justify police questioning of foreigners. But why is discrimination bad? To answer this question, he quantifies the disadvantages, such as a decline in wages and education levels, deterioration of health and loss of trust in others.

What is particularly interesting is the discrepancy between social norms and people’s attitudes. Igarashi reports that, although both survey methods guaranteed anonymity, direct questioning in Japan produced more exclusionary answers, while an alternative method that conceals individual responses showed greater tolerance — opposite to what is usually found overseas.

This points to “the possibility that people who are not actually xenophobic at heart may choose a certain answer to align themselves with the ‘social norm’ that they should be xenophobic.” An environment in which people often hear xenophobic remarks may be misleading people into believing that xenophobic views are in the majority, thereby distorting how they express their own views.

This resembles the phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance.” People assume that those around them harbor negative feelings toward foreigners and conform to that social norm. This makes the majority seem xenophobic, possibly creating a vicious cycle in which society appears more fearful of foreigners than it actually is.

To break this cycle, there must be a wide sharing of accurate data and research findings on the crime rate among foreigners and their contributions to local economies, and social norms must be updated to bring them into line with reality.

In economic research, no significant adverse impact has been observed from foreign workers on the employment or wages of native workers. The next challenge is to narrow the cultural distance between foreigners and the Japanese population. I think we can break the vicious cycle of xenophobia by improving the quantity and quality of contact, creating opportunities to promote mutual understanding and continuing to share information to correct false perceptions of the majority view.

Fumio Ohtake

Ohtake is a specially appointed professor at Osaka University, where he served as an executive vice president in 2013-15. He was president of the Japanese Economic Association in 2020-21. He specializes in labor economics and behavioral economics.

The original article in Japanese appeared in the Sept. 28 issue of The Yomiuri Shimbun.