Fearful states: the migration-security nexus in Northeast Asia

Abstract

How does the notion of state security inform national approaches to managing cross-border in-migration in the increasingly interconnected but volatile Northeast Asian region? This paper explores this question by focusing on the intermestic politics of labor importation. Specifically, it theorizes the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of security fears that inform Japan’s and Taiwan’s approaches to the admission of low-skilled foreign workers. The paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework that explicates these relationships and argues that Northeast Asian labor importation regimes were formed at the intersection of a threefold logic of state security. Whereas economic security acted as an enabling (inclusionary) factor in both Japan and Taiwan and motivated the acceptance of foreign workers, internal security in Japan and external security in Taiwan acted as constraining (exclusionary) factors, which directly and distinctively conditioned the resulting policies. Moreover, ever since their inception in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the divergent policy regimes have been interlocked in these economic-internal and economic-external dynamics of state security.