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Waseda University released the sixth episode, “Rethinking Skilled Migration”, of its English language podcast series “Rigorous Research, Real Impact” on January 21, 2025. All podcast episodes are available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

Episode 6: “Rethinking Skilled Migration”

Guest Professor Gracia Liu-Farrer (Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies) joins MC Assistant Professor Robert Fahey (Waseda Institute for Advanced Study) to explore skill-based migration policies in Asia, a region with more people on the move than any other. Japan features heavily in the discussion, with its increasingly liberal migration policies despite its persistent image as a country comparatively closed to immigration. Professor Liu-Farrer also explains the social construction of skill—how skill is constructed and valued in political, social, and economic contexts—and how migration stands to address societal issues such as demographic crises and labor shortages both in Asia and more broadly.       

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About the Series:

Waseda University’s first ever English-language academic podcast titled “Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact” is an 8-episode series broadly showcasing the diverse work of our renowned social sciences and humanities researchers. In each of the short 15-30 minute episodes we welcome a knowledgeable researcher to casually converse with an MC about their recent, rigorously conducted research, the positive impact it has on society, and their thoughts on working in Japan at Waseda. It’s a perfect choice for listeners with a strong desire to learn, including current university students considering graduate school, researchers looking for their next collaborative project, or even those considering working for a university that stresses the importance of interdisciplinary approaches. 

About the Guests

Guest Professor Gracia Liu-Farrer

Dr. Gracia Liu-Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migrations, Waseda University, Japan. Her research investigates cross-border migration and immigrants’ socioeconomic and geographic mobility in Asia and Europe. Her articles have appeared in International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and International Migration. She co-edited Routledge Handbook of Asian Migration (2018, with Brenda Yeoh) and authored monographs Labour Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants (Routledge, 2011) and Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020).

MC Assistant Professor Robert Fahey

Dr. Robert A. Fahey is an assistant professor of political science at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include populism, polarisation, the effects of conspiracy theory belief, and Japanese politics. He is currently working on a series of large-scale surveys aimed at discovering what kinds of conspiracy beliefs are widespread in East Asian countries, and how those beliefs impact the political and social life of those nations.

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Transcript

Professor Robert Fahey (MC) (00:05): Hello and welcome to Waseda University’s English podcast series, “Rigorous Research, Real Impact.” In this series we dive into interesting conversations and stories from Waseda’s vibrant academic and cultural community.

My name is Robert Fahey. I’m an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study and I am excited to welcome Professor Gracia Liu-Farrer of the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, who also serves as the Director of the Institute of Asian Migrations. Professor Liu-Farrer is a distinguished sociologist and is recognized as a leading voice in the study of international migration. Her research examines the challenges and opportunities associated with the cross-border movements of people, labor, and culture.

So, in this episode we’ll be exploring skill-based migration policies in Asia, focusing on the social production of skill, how skill is constructed and valued in political, social, and economic contexts. Join us for an engaging discussion about the interplay of migration, labor, and the politics of skill in an interconnected world.

Professor Fahey (MC) (01:04): Professor Liu-Farrer, thank you very much for joining us today. Conversations around migration are very much a global issue at the moment. It’s a hot topic for a lot of people. Can you tell us a little bit more in broad terms about what it is that you research here at Waseda University and what specific issues related to migration you explore?

Professor Gracia Liu-Farrer (Guest) (01:22):  At Waseda University, I research international migration into Japan and also migration in more comparative perspectives. I study why and how migrants come to Japan, how they are educated, live and work in Japan, where they go from here, how their presence impacts Japanese society. When talking about immigration/ immigrants people tend to think about, say the U.S., Canada, or Australia.

People don’t associate immigration with Japan, but Japan right now has increasingly liberal migration policies and it is important to change our images about immigration and immigrant society. That’s what I try to do. And I also try to investigate international migration in comparative perspectives because the field of migration studies has been dominated by North American and Western experiences. I think migration in Asia should be more central to the conversation on migration. For one thing, we have more people on the move in Asia.

Professor Fahey (MC) (02:30): So, what was it that inspired you initially to pursue this field of research? What was it that made this interesting to you?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (02:36): I think we all have personal reasons for our research interests. And my research interest has a lot to do with the environment I grew up in.

I was born and grew up in China. So, China had this household registration system which essentially tied people to the land. So, people had no possibility of moving between the towns or from villages to cities.

So, I lived in a small town and then my father lived in Shanghai, a big city, for actually the first 10 years of my life and I witnessed how drastically different a small town and a big city were like; how different people’s life chances were. I moved later on from the small town to Shanghai to join my father.

And later on, I also moved from China to the US for education and then came to Japan. So, migration is very dear to my heart. There were quite a number of Chinese migrants in Japan already, but there was very little on them, especially in English.

So, I decided to study Chinese migrants in Japan as my dissertation topic. So, I started from there.

Professor Fahey (MC) (03:52): In the work that you’ve been doing recently, you’re talking specifically about skill-based migration in Asia. Could you explain how it is that countries define this idea of a “skilled migrant” and how does this shape the migration policies that countries have adopted?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (04:07): Skill-based selection as a migration policy emerged in 1960s and 70s, among settler countries such as North America and Oceania. It replaces race and religion- or nationality-based criteria for migration. I think it emerged because there’s this knowledge economy that’s rising in 1980s and 1990s and many advanced economies start feeling the skill shortages.

Domestically, labor migrants were frowned upon, but skilled migration was welcomed because they seemed to be more valuable to the country. There are two ways of selecting skill. One is human capital-based according to your education credentials, and the other is a labor market-oriented selection policy. So, depending on the labor needs. So, if you have these kind of occupations, these kind of sectors, then you will be recruited to fit into that sort of niche.

Professor Fahey (MC) (05:08): So, I think speaking as a European, at least that type of skill-based migration seems very natural to me. It seems like what I’ve always seen around me. How is this different in Asia? What sort of specific challenges as well as opportunities has this created within the migration sphere in Asia?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (05:24): Some governments such as the Philippines, India, Nepal, still rely on labor immigration for revenues, right?

So recently, because of the rapid economic development of some regions, there are also increased inbound and intra-regional labor migration. So, they have to select who to migrate and how they can migrate. So, skill selection is very essential to Asian countries’ migration governance as well.

I think the opportunities for Asia right now may be, you know, you can attract more people from outside of Asia because there are a lot of Asian countries that are economically more developed. But at the same time, you can also call back many of the people who migrated to other countries and now became more skilled or learned a lot of things, and you can attract this reverse migration. And, also, Asian countries, they can also upskill.

Professor Fahey (MC) (06:23): So, it’s not just about countries who are developing skill-based migration regimes for inbound work. It’s also about how countries are responding in the development of their own labor force to be more attractive overseas.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (06:34): Yes, for example, the Philippines and Indonesia have all been trying to upgrade their workforce, training them so that they will have credentials and eventually they probably will be valued more. At the same time, they could be more competitive, you know, when they’re competing with other countries for exporting labor.

Professor Fahey (MC) (06:53): You mentioned that skill-based migration replaced religion and race as a basis for migration systems.

So, it’s perhaps easy to look at that as being an improvement in terms of being less discriminatory. But you’ve also in your article highlighted that there are discriminatory practices or routes to this practice. Where did that originate and how have those sort of discriminatory routes influenced current migration policies?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (07:18): Formerly, many settler countries could use race or nationality as a base to select migrants.

For example, the White Australia policy was abolished in 1973 eventually and the very first nationality-based exclusion act was the Chinese Exclusion act in 1882 in the US. So that sort of policies are no longer possible because especially in the post-war era, we cannot have that sort of race-based or nationality-based discrimination, again. It’s against human rights, against the principle of democracy. So, people start using skill as a criterion, but people do not understand the so-called skill also has this class or race or gender taints in them.

First of all, I think it has this strong influence from colonialism reflects a colonial legacy. There are studies indicating that people tend to see ethnic minorities as, for example, suitable for less skilled jobs. And at the same time, they see white or some ethnic groups are more likely to be professionals or managers. So, I think this sort of racial hierarchy that’s a legacy of colonialism can still be seen in the contemporary migration regime.

Professor Fahey (MC) (08:46): That sort of brings us around to the idea that you introduced that skill itself is a social construction. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on that idea?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (08:57):  This concept of social construction of skill actually was first introduced in the special issue that my colleagues from National University of Singapore, Brenda Yeoh, and also another colleague Michael Bass, you know, put together.

There’s an introduction to that special issue called “Social Construction of Skill: An Analytical Approach Toward the Question of Skill in Cross-border Labor Mobilities.” Basically, we want to use this concept to indicate that skill in cross-border labor mobility and the idea of the high or low skilled migrants is a concept that’s socially constructed by different actors in  specific local or national or global contexts. These actors include say governments, and training institutions, or employers, or labor brokers, intermediaries, and sometimes individual migrants themselves.

What I mean is that oftentimes what skills they can use are determined in particular political, economic, and social contexts. So, people tend to associate migrant workers as lower skilled. And for example, in Japan there are a lot of technical interns and they work in farms and in factories, etc.

That doesn’t mean that technical interns are lower skilled and they’re paid less and they’re doing manual jobs. But some of the technical interns are university degree holders. So, we’d never think of these people, how much skill they actually possess. We only see them in the roles.

So, in that sense, I think, you know, skill is a social perception; it’s socially engineered–has nothing to do with what individual people actually possess and what they are capable of doing.

Professor Fahey (MC) (10:47): Also, when you watch skilled workers in factories, in agriculture, they’re doing things that us Ph.D. holders would never be able to do.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (10:54):  No, I cannot put two pieces of wood together.

Professor Fahey (MC) (10:58): Well, carpentry, something like that, is of course incredibly skilled.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (11:00): Yes, I couldn’t even assemble IKEA furniture.

Professor Fahey (MC) (11:05): I’m also kind of thinking, I know that there’s an example historically that computer programming started out as something that was done mostly by female secretaries and was therefore considered relatively low skilled and was low paid. And at some point, it transitioned into being a primarily male profession and became one of the most highly paid professions in the world.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (11:22): Interestingly you mentioned that because the secretarial jobs used to be male jobs. They were respectable, well-paid jobs. Right. They can feed families.

But later on, when the women started becoming typists and secretaries and all of a sudden it became very routinized jobs and become low wage jobs. There’s a downgrading of that sort of profession as well. And the care work and a lot of women jobs and immigrant jobs just become regarded as less skilled and are actually paid less.

Professor Fahey (MC) (11:52): So how do these sorts of misperceptions or misconceptions around what constitutes skill actually come to impact migrant groups within Asia or specifically within Japan?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (12:04): Yeah, people take for granted if these people are in the low skilled jobs and they’re definitely low skilled without thinking what these people are actually capable of doing.

So yeah, I think it’s really a judgment of migrant’s skill by the type of jobs they take up instead of the other way around, you know, judging the migrants skills and see if we can give them the jobs that match their skills.

Professor Fahey (MC) (12:30): We talked a little bit earlier about how there is a process of skill production within countries, as well as an attempt to regulate migration using skills. So, you have governments and private institutions that are producing, brokering and regulating labor for skill export and this was treating their own human resource as a skill export. Has this also resulted in issues within those countries where you are treating your own workforce as an export commodity?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (12:57): Yes. Many Asian countries rely on labor export for revenue, right?

 In some of the countries, actually the remittances and a very large share of the GDP, the issue is who bears the costs. For example, in the Philippines, the government advocating their labor: “Filipinos have good nurses, have good hospitality workers have good pilots, etc.”

This is the research done by a colleague called Yasmin Ortega, and she found out that students and families have to pay for such education in the private institutions and universities. But then the overseas labor market fluctuates, right? The demands fluctuate. Some countries all of a sudden think, oh, we probably don’t need so many nurses from overseas.

Then they cut down their intake. Then who suffers? Individual students who are trained to take up those jobs overseas. There’s no need for more nurses, for example, or the nurses are not paid so well in their home country.

If you orient your training for export, then you just put a lot of individuals and families into the situation that they take the risk to be prepared for exporting, but they cannot. So, I think that that’s the issue that we have to consider and that’s actually almost the injustice that some of this practice entails.

Professor Fahey (MC) (14:28): Another related consequence of these skill-based migration policies that you’ve mentioned is deskilling. Can you explain a little bit what that means? And it seems like something that would be a little counterintuitive to the goal of attracting skilled workers.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (14:41):  By deskilling, we mean that when people move to other countries to work, and a lot of skilled workers, people who have skills to begin with, do not improve or acquire skill in the destination country. Instead, they experience skill downgrading or they just lose skills. As we know that a lot of times educational skill credentials are not recognized by destination countries, and they do not get to take up the positions or the jobs that their skills actually were trained to do.

Professor Fahey (MC) (15:16): But it’s kind of wasteful, isn’t it? Because you have countries that are trying so hard to import skilled migrants and then they are not actually using their skills.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (15:24): Yeah, because there are a lot of institutional barriers, for example, a lot of medical or legal professions. They have to have this post-country credentialization in order to recognize other people’s training and education to be able to practice.

So, people don’t get to take their skills and work in another country. Sometimes it’s just discrimination. You know, you just see these people maybe talk about their lacking soft skills, right? They’re more cultural kind of skills and they just don’t give them the kind of positions or jobs that their education actually could allow them to do.

Professor Fahey (MC) (16:05): When you look across the totality of the situation with regard to migration in Asia, what sort of unique challenges do you think are faced within this region? Whether that’s to do with the economic disparities between countries we see here, or gender considerations, or, you know, other issues that perhaps are specific to migration in Asia and that we might not think about so much in Western countries.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (16:27): I think in Asia there is a very distinct pattern of migration which is a temporary labor placement.

This is not something that people in North America or Europe oftentimes think about. But Asian countries, as I mentioned, are mostly decolonized nation states. And they tend to have a lot of anxiety about nationhood, about sovereignty, about borders, about population management and they tend to be more wary, of, say, immigration, population mobilities, and many of them, both domestically and internationally, want to bound people to the land so that it’s easier to control. So obviously now the Asian countries have an imbalance of economic development. Some regions are more advanced than others and also some regions, especially advanced economies in Asia, also have population aging and low fertility rate and the labor shortages. So, they demand labor, but at the same time they are anxious about having a lot of foreigners in their country and they rely on this temporary labor placement. So, use them and dispose them. Oftentimes in Japan as well, in Korea and other countries, people are on contract all the time, and after contract terminates, the visa terminates. They don’t have the opportunity to stay. I think this sort of situation really easily leads to deskilling, as we talked about, because it’s just a three-year contract.

People don’t get to develop their skills sufficiently and then once they develop skills, the contract terminates, they have to leave, right? And oftentimes these people who come to work for three years probably have a different skill sets and they never got to use those skill sets in the host country. When they go back to their home country, they don’t get to use the skills to develop in the home country.

Supposedly this should be, for example, Japan’s technical internship, but the reality is they don’t because they see this temporary labor placement as a way for economic gains. And the government, the employers, all see them just as temporary labor. So, I think this is a situation in Asia which leads to a lot of deskilling, leads to a lot of underemployment and also leads to oftentimes labor abuse as well, right?

You have very restrictive labor regimes as well as migration regimes. I see this temporary labor placement and inflexibility of migration regime, especially a labor migration regime, as big challenges that Asian countries will face because given the population aging, I think this migration will continue.

And the countries that we live in, for example, Japan is the oldest country and needs huge amount of labor. But until recently it was very restrictive. Sometimes I wonder if it’s already too late for some of these Asian countries to now start broadening immigration and they could have started earlier.

Professor Fahey (MC) (19:38): Yeah, it would have been easier to go back when the economy was stronger, right?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (19:42): Yeah, especially. Yeah, when the Japanese yen was stronger economy, you know, productivity was higher. Japan is still attractive because there are surrounding countries who are less economically developed. But this migration regime of times, temporary base is not conducive to long term skill development. And also, in a sense, let’s use this more neoliberal economic term, “human resource development”, both for the host countries and the sending countries.

Professor Fahey (MC) (20:15): We mentioned that Japan is at the forefront of the aging society problem in Asia, but it’s far from alone in that. There are demographic crises and labor shortages really across this region and elsewhere. In light of all of that, how can migration policies be reformed to try to reduce these inequalities, to try to create more equitable opportunities for migrants?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (20:37): Yes, I think if you look at some of the more advanced economies in Asia, many of them benefited from the previous emigration, such as Korea, Singapore, you know, even China.

And a lot of the elite firms in these countries were built by people who previously migrated out of countries. So, I think migration and transnational migration certainly benefits and sometimes evens out the economic development. Countries in the region who absorbed a lot of labor from, you know, the less developed countries in the region have the responsibility to help train these people, give them the opportunities to develop skills, and utilize the skills. Especially because these other countries, while developing, are also seeing declining fertility rate. And they eventually will go through the population aging process.

Right now, we have to…Obviously, we can’t have alternatives to labor, for example, automated labor, you know, automation or AI and that will happen, but at the same time, a lot more humanized services probably would not be replaced by AI or machines. So, I think the whole region really needs to think how we could, as a region and as neighbors, to cultivate labor force collectively. And whether these people want to stay in your country or not is their decision. It is perfectly okay if they want to go back to live with other family members in the home country. But, I think, it is the responsibility of more developed countries in the region to not to exploit, not to use other people’s resources as disposable, but help develop the resources which eventually will benefit both the host countries and the home countries.

And when the whole region is more evenly developed, I cannot predict how that will be. But I’m hopeful that with more human resources and with richer neighbors, obviously you’re not going to lose too much.

Professor Fahey (MC) (22:44): So, Japan obviously has these very pressing labor shortages and in the absence of the fantastic robots that I think people used to hope that Japan would build before that came to a head, migration is now proposed as being the solution to that. Thinking about the case of this country specifically, how does Japan assess skills? How does it assess or prioritize skills as it determines which migrants it actually wants to admit?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (23:10): Actually, because Japan’s labor shortages, skill shortages in all level,s are so dire and Japanese government has been relaxing the skill criteria. And Japan has already shifted from education credential-based skill definition to this international labour organization’s definition of skill, which is the kind of skill demanded by the job itself, which all jobs demand skills. Then you don’t have unskilled jobs anymore. So, Japan has relaxed and I think this is actually the direction it has to take. So, for example, before students who graduated from vocational schools could not get the visa of humanities, international services or engineers, but now they can.

So, this is Japanese government’s effort in expanding the pool of human resources. I don’t like this word, but you know, the talent, this direction that Japan is heading, and I think it’s a necessary direction.

Professor Fahey (MC) (24:17): There is still very much, I think, a powerful misconception out there that Japan is one of the hardest countries in the world to migrate to. And that simply isn’t the case anymore, is it?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (24:27):  Yeah, I think Japan has become more flexible and both, in terms of skill definition and also in terms of the kind of people that they want to recruit.

The problem is, as you said, the misconception of Japan as this closed country. But this partially has to do with Japan’s discourse of itself, right? Basically, Japan is the Japanese people’s Japan in a sense, right?

So, it’s a very ethno-national kind of society. So, a lot of the people do not see them… Even the immigrants, you know, living in Japan for some time still ponder on whether they belong to this society or not.

You know, whether their children can claim Japanese-ness, Japanese identity, or not. This sort of discourse on Japan itself and the Japanese government is not helping because Japanese government says Japan is not an immigration country. Still, right?

This “no immigration” myth also makes people think, oh, Japan does not really welcome a lot of immigrants. So that actually are the kind of perceptions influenced by the discourses.

Professor Fahey (MC) (25:36): Yeah. And it’s not in the article we’re talking about today, but I know you’ve written about the fact that the Japanese government has continually liberalized the immigration system while constantly avoiding the word “imin”, which is immigrant. They hate to use this word.

They say, we don’t do imin or we are doing labor or we’re doing something? They just want to avoid ever saying that they do immigration.

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (25:57): Yeah.

I think that’s related to anxiety about nationhood. It’s identity that Japanese government established after the war, at the end of World War II, as a discourse that unite the Japanese population to contribute to, you know, the redevelopment of Japan as a country. But that’s just dated.

It’s never true. And now it has become a kind of a barrier for welcoming more people to the country and to settle.

Professor Fahey (MC) (26:27): In the courses that you teach here at Waseda, part of what you’re doing is helping students to understand the importance of identity and to guide them to some extent, in discovering their own.

How does migration affect personal identity? I know we have our own experiences of it, of course, but more generally, for students who come here to Waseda, a lot of them are students who have migrated. What can they learn here at Waseda about migration and about what that means for their own identity?

Professor Liu-Farrer (Guest) (26:54):  Migration is an opportunity for people to reconstruct their identity, right?

And then also for them to realize that identity is very contextualized. For example, in Ireland, you don’t have to tell people, “I’m Irish,” all the time, but here, the first thing people ask you is, “what are you?” You know? Because then they recognize your foreignness.

And I think migration…and especially a lot of students at Waseda, they experience migration, and they experience in the boundary-crossing and contextual lies that kind of identity. So, I think they have a lot of reflection: what they are and why they’re here. And it’s also an opportunity for people to realize that, you know, identity is just a category. It’s how people see you; how you try to identify yourself and for the benefit of others.

So, it allows this sort of opportunity not to kind of hold onto something that you perceive as somehow essential to you, to be a bit more flexible. You know, as a sociologist, I always use this word, social construction. You know, skill is one and identity is another one.

Professor Fahey (MC) (28:06): Professor Liu-Farrer, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss these complexities of these skill-based selected migration policies across Asia and providing us, perhaps, with a basis to think more broadly about these policies and to critique them. Throughout this conversation, we’ve been exploring the social construction of skill, how skills are defined, categorized, and shaped by political and social factors across these contexts. So, we hope for you, the listener, that this conversation has helped you to understand the challenges related to skill-based migration, the biases that exist in current policies, and the actions that are needed to create fairer migration systems in the world in the future.

For more such stories and insights from the corridors of Waseda University, don’t forget to subscribe and tune in to the next episode on Rigorous Research, Real Impact. Until then, take care and stay curious.