From notimp's link:
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But Yoshio Kimura, chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s special committee on issues related to foreign workers, said the number is not enough. Two years ago, the committee called for allowing more than 900,000 new foreign laborers be let in.
“Some 500,000 is not enough at all. Some people who don’t know about the reality (of the Japanese economy) must have just made up that figure,” Kimura told The Japan Times during an interview earlier this week.
“Over the next 100 years, Japan’s population will become something like 40 million (from the current 126 million). We definitely need foreign workers. We need young people who can support elderly people,” he said.
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And people wonder why I think open borders are generally a good idea Everything you see reported in Japan is pretty much the destiny of (every?) developed country(s). Even China is risking the drive towards depopulation in the long term. The funny thing is that Europe let in a lot of immigrants as temporary refugees who are supposed to return when their home country stabilizes (with a deadline of 3 years, IIRC), but long term they'd probably be better off with the people staying.
Assimilation, though, is admittedly a difficult thing to deal with en masse. Social safety nets are difficult to fund even in the best of circumstances. I do wonder, though, how you begin to qualify the damage that comes from chronic labor shortages.