At the eleventh hour of the recent extraordinary session of the Diet, a highly controversial amendment to the immigration control law — aimed at expanding the number of foreign workers employed in Japan — was enacted. In the course of the Diet deliberations, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeatedly said the amendment aims to accept qualified foreign workers to work in this country for a limited period of time in order to cope with the acute domestic manpower shortage.
The opposition parties bitterly criticized his assertion by pointing out that the amendment did not set an upper limit for accepting the workers from overseas and that large numbers of foreign students at Japanese-language schools are being hired at extremely low wages.
Even some Liberal Democratic Party members and conservative polemists complained that the government was effectively introducing an open-door immigration policy.