Migration for Work is About More than Economics: Reflections from Young Migrant Workers in Japan
The earning potential of employment abroad will always be a significant pull factor for many, particularly where opportunity at home is limited. Too often however this means that migration and migrant workers are viewed primarily through an economic lens: as a labour force powering economies abroad, and sending income home. This framing can obscure their identities, rights and lived experiences. Whilst the economic arguments are valid, viewing migrant workers only in terms of costs and benefits on a balance sheet is limiting. It reduces complex human lives to financial figures and overlooks the personal motivations, aspirations, and challenges that shape the decision to work abroad. Migration is not only an economic process; it is a human story. International Migrant’s Day serves as a reminder to see migrant workers not only for their economic role, but as individuals with rights, dignity and agency.
This year I was privileged to spend time as a guest of Caux Roundtable Japan in Tokyo and attend their annual Business and Human Rights Forum. CRT Japan supports businesses to promote best practice in alignment with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and other international standards. Whilst there we had the opportunity to discuss with Japanese businesses their engagement with migrant workforces both in Japan and in their extended supply chains overseas. For me the highlight of the trip however was a meeting we had with a group of young migrant workers employed on Japan’s Technical Intern Training Programme.
These young workers were all from Viet Nam. Some had been working in Tokyo for just a few months, a couple for more than 2 years. The details of their recruitment and involvement with the scheme were fascinating - usually involving the payment of money to middle men to ensure a position. As well as these payments the trainees had all had to pass a Japanese language test involving many hours of training. All were sending regular amounts of money back to Viet Nam, partly to service recruitment debts, which generally take 18 months to clear, and also to support their parents back home.
The name of the scheme is perhaps something of a misnomer. Technical Intern Training Scheme perhaps implies a structured programme of skill based training alongside employment, equipping trainees with the knowledge and skill set to be able to establish a future career on return home etc. This really did not seem to be the truth for the young people we encountered. The jobs that these trainees were undertaking were very menial. Several worked in industrial food processing preparing ready meals to be distributed to hospitals and care homes. It seemed there was little that they had learned that could not be taught in the first hour of the first day. The majority of them spent their days loading ingredients into machines and unloading cooked food into containers ready for distribution. Super-aged countries like Japan are in desperate need of a migrant workforce to service their aging populations and maintain the economic vitality to support them. As with many migrant labour schemes being used in countries to overcome these acute labour shortages but facing intense anti-migrant backlash from native populations, the name of the scheme and its operating procedures are undertaken in such a way to mask the reality.
The real benefit for these young people, it seemed, lay less in formal training and more in the experience of being migrant workers in a foreign country. For many, it was an eye-opening rite of passage—one that removed them from everything familiar and offered the chance to gain new perspectives, insights, and experiences. Coming from small rural communities with limited opportunities, and shaped by strong cultural and family expectations, living and working in a vast, buzzing city like Tokyo alongside other young people must feel like finally stepping into the wider world they had previously known only through television and social media.
The skills they acquire are maybe therefore rooted primarily in experience rather than technical instruction. They are the skills that come from trying new things, encountering difference, coping with the unfamiliar and with change, occasionally coming unstuck, and learning how to recover from mistakes and resolve problems. All of the things that we in the privileged West will often see our own kids do on Gap Year travels.
Roughly half of the trainees we spoke to said they would like to remain in Japan, and routes to permanent residence do exist. Others will return to Viet Nam, but they will do so profoundly changed by their time abroad. Their transformation should remind us that labour migration is rarely only about economics. It is also about the pursuit of a better and more interesting life—and about a deeply human instinct that a life well lived should include curiosity, growth, and a sense of adventure!
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