The new immigration control system started July 9. The alien registration system, which covered both legal and illegal foreign residents and helped provide various administrative services even to the latter group was abolished.
Under the new system, alien registration cards issued by municipalities will be abolished and, instead, zairyu (residence) cards will be issued by the immigration authorities only to legal foreign residents and they will be incorporated into the resident registration system on a par with Japanese nationals.
This means that illegal foreign residents will have no publicly issued ID cards and will be excluded from resident registers. Such foreigners will face difficulty in finding jobs and receiving administrative services. One purpose of the new system is to reduce the number of foreigners illegally residing in Japan. As of January 2011, nearly 80,000 foreigners had overstayed their visas — a decrease of more than 70 percent from a peak of about 300,000 in May 1993, according to the Justice Ministry.