‘This is not an immigration policy’

The trainee programme was technically a development programme, and thus trainees settling in Japan after their period of training would violate the spirit of the programme, since the trainees would not be using their new skills to improve their countries of origin. While the debate leading up to the 1989 revision was about whether Japan should admit foreign ‘labourers’ or foreign ‘trainees’, many critics of the 2018 revision focused on the fact that, according to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other advocates of this new law, it was ‘not an immigration policy’ but instead a policy to admit foreign labour. Trainees and technical interns have increasingly been treated legally as employees, rather than students. The Ministry of Justice has convened a number of Immigration Policy Discussion Panels, composed of experts outside of government. The Trainee and Technical Internship Program is widely recognized as a de facto low-skilled labour migration policy.