Using country-level panel data of codified immigration policies to estimate the effects of immigration policies on natives' attitudes towards immigrants

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During this year, I focused on revising the paper that examines the determinants of public attitudes towards immigrants in Japan by following the suggestions from the referees I previously received. One suggestion was to emphasize the uniqueness of my study, which was the use of Japanese data. In order to enrich my paper, I thus conducted a thorough review of the Japanese migration policies. I found that there was no formal immigration policies to accept unskilled immigrants in Japan until the 2018 revision of Immigration Control Act (ICA). Thus, when the inflow of unskilled immigrant workers started in 1980s to meet the labor demand arising from the high economic growth, these immigrant workers were mostly illegal. The 1989 revision of the ICA established a “trainee system” where unskilled migrant workers can stay in Japan to “acquire skills”. This revision was a compromise between the Japanese immigration policy’s guiding principle of not admitting unskilled migrant workers and the reality of labor shortage for low-skilled workers. This reluctance to admit unskilled workers was undoubtedly influenced by citizen's presumed negative attitudes toward low-skilled immigrant workers. Thus, by understanding how the natives’ attitudes towards immigrants are formed, the government can formulate a better policy to improve the citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. I detailed the historical development of the Japanese immigration policies, and then submitted to a new journal.