After a meeting at Japan’s lower chamber of parliament on April 22, Akira Hatate, an executive of the Japan Civil Liberties Union based in Tokyo, said the bills, which were submitted in early March, “divide” foreign residents from Japanese nationals.
“I could never agree to the [government’s] attitude to regard foreigners as criminals, in order to control them,” Hatate said.
The rights’ group has said the proposed immigration law is problematic because it enables “the matching of data on foreign residents against requests for their privacy and protection of their personal information, which would never be allowed for Japanese nationals.”
Concerns were also expressed at the meeting regarding the negative impact of the bills on many migrant wives, who the group says are victimized by domestic violence at the hands of their Japanese husbands.
Motoko Yamagishi, a representative of the Migrant Women’s Empowerment Centre in Kawasaki, south of Tokyo, pointed out that the immigration bill, if enacted, could enable the government to enforce fines of up to 200 000 yen, or about US $2,000. It could also result in the revoking of residency status for some women escaping from domestic violence if they fail to inform the government of changes to their addresses.
“Those are women, who are escaping [from their husbands] to shelters or the homes of acquaintances due to the domestic violence. They can be too afraid to inform about their [new] addresses because they fear these could be made known to their husbands,” said Yamagishi. “The laws would fly directly in the face of the protection of women’s rights.”
Said Leny Tolentino, the church-backed center’s staff member and a Roman Catholic from the Philippines, “I object to this policy.” She noted that while undocumented foreign wives and their children could get blamed under the proposed law, Japanese husbands harming women would not be held responsible.
Separately, a recent story that hit headlines in Japan and the Philippines centered on a Filipino couple who had to leave in Japan their Japan-born daughter due to their undocumented stay in that country. Arlan and Sarah Calderon faked their documentation to enter Japan in the early 1990s, and their daughter was born and raised in the country before they were deported.
