The president made the remark while arguing that Japan, along with Russia and China, would perform better economically if the countries embraced immigration more.
Oh, well that’s true enough. Japan is crazy anti immigration despite that being a solution to their low birth rate.
I can’t speak to Russia or China, but Japan has a history of xenophobia going back CENTURIES. It’s not exactly a newsflash.
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True, also: from what I understand, Korea has been historically worse.
Just looked it up, looks like a nosedive!
Even still, it’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
That pot better be careful around police…
Not enough people know about the time when we invaded Canada and raped all their women
Russia is wildly xenophobic
Which Russians? Ethnic groups in Russia
Why am I seeing multiple news reports today about Joe Biden where they remove context to polarize his comments further? This feels, to me, like a new media trend
Propaganda?
It doesn’t need to be propaganda, just maximizing clicks will do that for you organically.
Yes. Foreign or domestic. Who knows?
CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, an American company.
The post, not the site.
Every news article posted here and across all platforms is public relations, or propaganda. You need / must understand this. There are 1200 stories, graphics, and videos posted per day, just from the Wash. Post. source
the number includes both staff-produced articles and wire stories, written elsewhere. The *Post *editorial staff itself produces about 500 stories per day, she said.
Every story is curated in some way as it filters here. Users decide what they deem worthy of posting.
It’s all propaganda, unless it’s my side. /s
Japan simply is xenophobic. I lived there for 2 years. That’s just a fact.
I lived there for four years. Nice and friendly people. Never felt unsafe.
I shared that experience. I also was actively excluded from all sorts of things (including essential services) because I was a foreigner. Whenever a group of expats got together, at some point in the night, the conversation would be about how everyone got discriminated against recently.
Did you put effort into learning Japanese? I didn’t experience any exclusion.
Welcome, though? They pretty famously don’t like foreigners around them, even if they’re not going to say it directly to you.
Have you lived there? Not my experience. I felt like I was welcomed. I was welcomed into their cultural activities, I was welcomed into their homes. I did put effort into learning the language and the culture, and followed their norms to the best I can.
No, but a lot of other people have and you’re a definite minority saying that, so, X to doubt basically.
It’s not just people who don’t bother trying, either. BBC’s long term Japan correspondent wrote an article about it when he finally left, and I’m pretty sure he’s fluent.
… BBC’s long term Japan correspondent wrote an article about it when he finally left, and I’m pretty sure he’s fluent.
I wouldn’y be too sure about being fluent part. I am an Indian and I have seen bulk of so called indologists (professors in American and European academia) unable to pronounce common sanskrit words - despite writing bestsellers on the subject.
Never felt unsafe is a very low bar. Not feeling unsafe now
He’s not wrong but also I believe there’s a saying in English about stones and glass houses.
Even the most bigoted parts of the US are nowhere near as xenophobic as Japan. Housing discrimination based on race is still perfectly acceptable over there, many people will refuse to rent to foreigners.
perfectly acceptable
At least some governments in Japan appear to disagree:
Japan signed the “International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)” in 1996
Tokyo Metropolitan Government educates real estate agents on the illegality of nationality-based rental refusals, considering them discriminatory
And the article itself seems to contradict with those statements…
Do you think there isn’t housing discrimination happening in the US?
Black families often have their homes appraised for less than white family homes.
Housing applications often get denied if the person has a non white last name.
Hell, the last time I was looking around for a room to rent I got asked multiple times over the phone. “You’re white right?”
Xeno Biden doesn’t care.
Don’t let your stones hang out if you live in a glass house? /s
I swear I’ve heard balls referred to as stones likely by a British person, but I don’t know if I’m making that up.
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About all 3 tbh. China and russia are literally in the middle of committing genocides. Doesnt get much more xenophobic than that lol
I mean he’s not wrong, but where does he expect China to get immigrants from? They’re 20% of the world.
He’s also cherry picking data. It’s a weird flex.
The proportion of immigrants in the US isn’t exactly high compared to somewhere like Canada.
I mean the US is 15% immigrants, or about 50 million people. I know we like to shit on the US but that’s a ridiculously big number.
In terms of raw numbers thee US has a huge population so it has more of everything, whether that’s immigrants or murderers or doctors or pedophiles.
In perms of the percentage of its population tho, 15% is somewhere in the middle of the pack, well behind countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland etc.
Boasting that you have more immigration than random countries like Japan is just odd.
Boasting that you have more immigration than random countries like Japan is just odd.
He’s not boasting; he’s saying that immigration would do a lot to solve their problems; and he’s correct. I hate Biden’s guts but he’s correct here. For context Japan is a notoriously xenophobic country and currently sits at a 2%. They’re not “a random country”.
In perms of the percentage of its population tho, 15% is somewhere in the middle of the pack, well behind countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland etc.
I mean people deciding to come to your country isn’t proportional to your population, or really related at all. It’d be like expecting China to have the same 15% as the US (for context that’d be about 250 million people). That’s just not how that works.
There are also different immigration rates for different states, some of which are as big as major countries. There are many states in the US driving the national average down because they have such a low percentage.
Edit: added some stats.
I agree he specifically called out Japan to contrast with the US because its immigration was weaker.
people deciding to come to your country isn’t proportional to your population
Are you saying fewer people decide to come to the US than to those other countries?
Seems unlikely. Pretty sure the US could let in a lot more immigrants if it wanted to.
Pretty sure the US could let in a lot more immigrants if it wanted to.
I mean yes that’s the case for everyone. I’m saying the number of people applying to immigration to the US isn’t four times that of Germany, for example, so even if they accept people according to the exact same criteria Germany will have a bigger percentage.
Are you sure? I’d expect the number applying to the US would be hundreds of times higher than the number applying to New Zealand.
I don’t especially love or hate Biden btw, I mean I can’t stand US foriegn policy on the Gaza Genocide but it’s not like their other mainstream politicians wouldn’t have done more or less the same. It’s a real pity the US hadn’t been able to elect someone like Bernie Sanders.
For the same reason we can’t take 15min without the context of the US’s size, smaller countries having larger percentages also need to be contextualized. The raw number does have some meaning here. It’s also about annual rate of immigration.
The US has been wavering between 16% and 15% for about a decade which is when I started taking an interest in this stuff. It’s a fairly steady state.
My country has risen from 25% to 27% first generation migrants in that timeframe.
Per capita is a much more useful for comparing effects on total workforce etc.
It’s not necessarily good or bad per se. I think there are so many variables at play, everything from type of migration, underlying birth rate of host country through to effect on housing stock and whether taxes and infrastructure can keep pace.
But yeah Biden’s speech was just strange given that context.
It would be much more useful to look at it state-by-state as a few states are doing the heavy lifting. I say this as someone is decidedly pro-immigration. The logistics are no small matter
I live in Louisiana. Our only major experience with immigration was hurricane Katrina and they basically rebuilt our communities. I am eternally grateful.
As neat as Japan sounds and as much as I’d like to be there, I mean, he’s not wrong
I watch YouTubers who moved to and live there talk about how they’re just indefinitely treated like a tourist
China xenophobic? I don’t think Biden knows what the word means. The oldest mosque outside of the Middle East is in China of all places built in 627 CE, and still standing.
What happened to the mosques in Spain and Occupied Palestine? Turned into bars and chicken coops.
Okay I hate the West as much as any other guy, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. China 1400 years ago isn’t in any way the same as China today. Nowadays it’s that most Muslim Chinese groups are accepted as Chinese (the Hui are about as Chinese as the Han, for example) and that’s why they can practice Islam in peace; otherwise you’re treated like the Uighurs. Also foreigners in China are absolutely treated as outsiders; that’s just a fact.
dynasties and ideologies came and went in China and the mosques still stand
what happened to mosques in Spain? what is happening to mosques in Occupied Palestine and India right now?
Islam is xeno (foreign) to China and yet you have mosques from the 7th and 8th centuries still standing
otherwise you’re treated like the Uighurs.
here’s an interesting fact, they are the only Turkic people who still use their centuries old script, and haven’t been secularized and westernized unlike Turks in the former USSR or Turkiye.
The issue for the Uyghurs is separatism, not Islam or culture in particular. No nation will tolerate separatists. https://dkiapcss.edu/college/publications/uyghur-muslim-ethnic-separatism-in-xinjiang-china/ https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/east-turkestan-islamic-movement-etim
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation report on the Uyghur did not find anything concerning, though the OIC has been criticized by Western rights groups. Interestingly, when it comes to Palestine the situation is reversed, where the OIC is speaking up but Western rights groups have been mostly silent. It is confusing seeing Anthony Blinken criticize China for the alleged genocide of Uyghurs, I haven’t seen any images or videos that suggest it is real, but unabashedly defend Israel’s actions which are clear and evident genocide.
Okay honestly as a fellow Muslim (I think you mentioned that somewhere else before???) what you’re doing right now is actually shameful. Just a week ago one man was arrested because he was advising people to not drink or smoke. Uighurs are literally sent to concentration camps and are subjected to forced labor and there you are defending their treatment because you don’t like the West. You need to rethink your priorities, seriously.
here’s an interesting fact, they are the only Turkic people who still use their centuries old script, and haven’t been secularized and westernized unlike Turks in the former USSR or Turkiye.
I mean yes that’s the problem. Islam is no longer foreign to China; again the Hui are as Chinese as the Han. Islam is not, in fact, xeno in China. The Uighurs are, being Turkic people.
Western rights groups have been mostly silent.
What? The Palestinian cause has progressed light years thanks to the work of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They came late to the party but they have not been silent, no way.
not demolishing a single mosque isn’t exactly the kind of standard one sets when determining xenophobia
still a higher standard than many modern Western states such as Israel, or a modern democracy such as India, if the Chinese were xenophobic they could have demolished the mosque at any point in history, they didn’t
Pretty much every country in the world where citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity are the same thing you find xenophobia.
I think “extremely ethnocentric” is a more fair description/criticism of Japan. Close to 98% of their population is ethnically homogeneous, so it kinda makes sense.
You’d be wrong
Lmfao
Partly true about inviting foreigners. Japan has a trainee visa system that is abusive, as they always are, and is designed so that those employees (victims) never get citizenship. And it’s a single citizenship country, because of course it is. But hey, employers are very willing to bring in those laborers, since it’s cheaper than paying what the law requires.
And you can’t fix demographics with people who only stay for a year or two.
Who cares what this genocidal fascist has to say. The sooner he kicks it the better it will be for everyone else.
I don’t live in Japan. But, I don’t see the issue with Japan being ‘xenophobic’.
Xenophobia is a bad thing, so being xenophobic is bad too. 👍
