Japan sending home Latin American workers

In an interesting twist, Japan is paying foreign workers to leave the country.

This is the same country that revised the law in 1990 to allow Japanese descendants to receive long-term resident status -something that is very hard for foreigners to get in Japan.

The Japanese aren't fond of foreign workers, so when the export industry boomed in the 1990s, they cooked up a plan to bring Japanese descendants back from Brazil and Peru to fill the jobs.

Unfortunately, the experiment didn't quite work as well as officials had hoped. The Japanese descendants were a little too, um, Latin American for Japanese tastes. Now that factories need to lay off workers it seems like a good time to shift the policy. If the workers accept the pay to leave, they must also agree not to seek work in Japan again.





http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23immigrant.html?scp=1&sq=japan%20brazil%20workers&st=cse