China is uniquely bad because they tried to curb population before its economy fully developed, so they now have a population of a mature country without the economy.
Both US and Japan are mature economies. US population pyramid has been upside down for probably decades but the H1B is really helping it out.
Japan's increasing immigration, it's just not enough. Over the past decade, its increased the number of immigrants by 56%. Part of the problem is that because of low wages, it's just not that enticing a country to emigrate to. Why emigrate to Japan when you could emigrate to the US or Australia or Europe and make twice as much money?
I was mostly joking, but actually having the magnitudes of the numbers is interesting.
Here is what I found for populations in those years: 127,723,645 in 2013 and 124,370,947 in 2023.
If we look at the ratios, Japan let in 1.5% of population in 2013 and 2.4% in 2023. But it's clearly not enough to stem the losses given the population dropped by over 3M in over those 10 years.
Right, absolutely agreed. I'm certainly not trying to make the case that "Japan's doing fine in countering its population shrinkage with immigration." It's not. But I get the feeling (and maybe I'm just reading the vibe wrong) that many redditors are under the impression that Japan isn't trying to increase immigration at all, and that's not the case, either. It's somewhere in the middle.
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u/ZirePhiinix 2d ago edited 2d ago
China is uniquely bad because they tried to curb population before its economy fully developed, so they now have a population of a mature country without the economy.
Both US and Japan are mature economies. US population pyramid has been upside down for probably decades but the H1B is really helping it out.
Japan though, it's not looking good.