It's a contentious issue in Canada, too. There are legit reasons families may want to bring in certain extended family members (grandparents for childcare, etc), but it becomes a chain. Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services.

IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).

I wouldn't call it a loophole but a compromise.

If you want to attract skilled labour, you must allow them to bring their dependents. They come as a unit.

> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse.

There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.

Same in belgium. It's almost if not the biggest source of migration.

> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it.

It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together.

As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?

I tend to be pretty sympathetic to anyone who does the insanely hard work of operating an actual restaurant.

Yeah, I’ve heard that. Also Bangladeshi. I think it’s a southeast asian mix, really.

> A [person] that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.

Even to their home country.

If foreign nationals are able to extract a lot of capital through rents then that's a sign that the government has made it too difficult to develop new rental housing.

> A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.

Is this a creative way of arguing that landlords are a net loss for the country? Because I would like to remind you that MANY people cannot afford to buy homes, and renting is how they make sure they don't become homeless.

The Maltese route is still open but a bit different since 2025. It's now citizenship by merit (aka the old by investment, since dumping money is considered a cultural contribution).

Also, the capital stays with the company! Wind down the company and (if it was profitable) you get your capital back.

>all aside from the cost of purchasing a home in Osaka

Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.

Because someone who's not a resident in Japan, and claims to be living here, is fundamentally either also abusing the system, or not actually living here.

In fairness, there are a lot of Japanese people who feel they were not consulted on the scale and scope of "Japanese peoples' expectations". So many such people that they could get a Prime Minister elected. I wouldn't assume that living according to the laws that exist currently means that you're living in accordance with "Japanese peoples' expectations". That's the whole reason the laws are being changed at the moment.

That said, as a foreigner right now the best thing to do is to watch the legal environment as it shifts so that you don't fall afoul of it. And to be extra mindful of adhering to Japanese customs, which boils down to being nice along with things like realizing some places may not look on your tattoos the same way those tattoos are looked on in the West.

Yes, a country should want to keep out people with negative fiscal impact and bring in people with a positive fiscal impact. Isn’t that obvious?

By all means bring in people to run businesses in Japan. Legitimate businesses, not visa mills. This increase in capital requirements stamps out the visa mills.

>You can live in Japan as a non-resident and still be following 100% of the rules.

Not for any reasonable definition of "live in", you can't.

Double standards. He is an immigrant in Japan but he doesn’t want immigrants both in his host (Japan) and home (UK) countries. Pretty ironic come to think of. I guess he thinks his type are “good” immigrants, others are not so much.

And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. Your best prospects have lots of options and can take a path of lower resistance.

Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.

Those are four of the most free and wealthiest countries in the world, with the highest standards of living.

> insanity

What is the end of hate and oppression of immigrants, gay people, racial minorities, the working class ...? The point is to get people to embrace hate and oppression.

The (overused) trope is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. What has been the result of institutionalized racism and discarding human rights? It's already horrible for many people.

> a house next to immigrants

This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them.

The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood.

> lower quality

Humans are lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.

"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it.

As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound.

Anyway, migration is a human right.

What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny.

For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"!

So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right.

Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them.

But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it!

[0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are.

[1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.

> I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country ..

To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?

>will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US.

What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.