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

在这一年里，我按照之前收到的推荐人的建议，专注于修改那篇研究日本公众对移民态度决定因素的论文。一个建议是强调我的研究的独特性，即使用了日本的数据。为了丰富我的论文，我对日本的移民政策进行了全面的回顾。我发现，直到2018年修订的《移民管制法》（ICA），日本才有正式的移民政策接受非技术移民。因此，在20世纪80年代，为了满足经济高速增长带来的劳动力需求，非技术移民工人开始流入时，这些移民工人大多是非法的。1989年修订的ICA建立了一个“培训生制度”，非技术移民工人可以留在日本“获得技能”。此次修订是日本移民政策的指导原则“不接纳非技术工人”与低技术工人劳动力短缺的现实之间的妥协。这种不愿接纳非技术工人的态度无疑受到了公民对低技术移民工人的假定负面态度的影响。因此，通过了解当地人对移民的态度是如何形成的，政府可以制定更好的政策来改善公民对移民的态度。我详细介绍了日本移民政策的历史发展，然后提交给一个新的期刊。

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.