What The Immigration Service Agency Is Doing

Imagine — that’s the reality of Japan

     Close your eyes and imagine that you were in the following situation; You have been discriminated and persecuted for your religious faith in your own country for many years. One day, you feel afraid that you could be killed if you stay there any longer. You decide to run away to another country and you choose one of the G7 countries.
     You arrive in that country and file an application for refugee status. However, it takes months before your application is officially dealt with and with a high probability that it will not be accepted. You can file it again. During the screening process, you have a special stay permit but you are banned from working and moving to another area of the country even if you need to   ( only 0.7% of applicants are accepted).
     You could be deported, even though you are in the process of re-applying. You could forcefully be pushed into a plane seat. Sometimes you are handcuffed. If you refuse the deportation order, you could be detained in a facility of the Immigration Office. It had been said that various violations of human rights occur there; the office never lets you know about a period of time or when and how you will be released. Your right to see anyone you want and access to medical service is extremely limited. Quality of life there has been always a concern.

     You have to know that all those crucial decisions are made by one administrative agency without a court of law or any other third parties. What do you think about that?

Opposite things are done with one hand

     Screening of refugees and border control are relevant but with a different vector; the former needs to see applicants from a humanitarian point, and the latter needs to prevent crimes and protect its own people. Those two should not be done by one administrative agency.
     Further more, the Immigration Service Agency was derived from the Special Higher Police of Imperial Japan that used to supervise and exclude people with certain ideologies from societies. The US army occupied Japan in 1945 and it required regulation and an agency for controlling border and human migration. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Power, or SCAP, used former Imperial Japan thought police agency for the job, and it was there before the Constitution of Japan was established.
     Since then, the agency has been like an appendix or a hidden reservoir of the imperial DNAs — that’s xenophobia and racism. There are seventeen branch centers for regions and sub-branch offices of each one of them, which are located near important ports and airports. The main purpose of those faculties is controlling border and migration of foreign people. In fact, as the number of refugee seekers are increasing these years, the central agency gave an order to each center and office to set up an annual goal number of deportation cases. To meet the number itself becomes the main task for them and thorough screening processes for refugee seekers are ignored, as I see it.
     Therefore I would like to say that refugee screening operation should be done by another third party organization. Its officials should have a wider range of knowledge and up-dated information about world political, economical, social, cultural situations as well as the international humanitarian law. Plus, the officials are required to have a certain level of psychological, linguistic and communicative skills for interviewing applicants.
     The Immigrant Service Agency now doesn’t care about such a discrepancy. It was revealed that there are a few officials who don’t meet the standard of required skills and knowledge.

A revision of the law will be good for nobody at all

     All I discussed above is what is happening under the current law. In this regular session of the Parliament, which has just closed, a revision of the relevant law has passed; the application for refugee status is limited to three times only, and if you run out of the limit, you will inevitably be deported to your own country, even though you claim that you will be persecuted and killed back there.
     Not only refugee status seekers, the regulation could be applied to also children; children who come with their parents to Japan or are born in Japan but aren’t allowed to have Japanese citizenship. Undocumented immigrants who have already lived in Japan for long time also don’t know when they could be send back. They all are forced to live such insecure lives.
Not all those undocumented overstayers are criminals. The Immigration Control Agent treats them like criminals, sometime detained into a prison like place and treats them in inhumane ways. That’s arbitrary and torture.

I am deeply ashamed of my ignorance

     I am awfully ashamed that I didn’t know such inhumanity has been going on for years. However, as long as I now know that, I should watch and monitor the agency. The government that ignores human rights of other backgrounds and roots will harm its own people sooner or later.