Immigrant Occupational Attainment in Japan and Its Determinants; Is It a “Structured Settlement”?

Japan as a “post-transitional society” has recently shifted into a “new” country of immigration as southern European countries. However there are few studies on the integration of immigrants in the Japanese labor market. The present study aims to reveal immigrant occupational attainment in Japan and its determinants by comparing their occupational distributions to those of the Japanese counterparts with the Japanese census micro-data conducted in 2010. As a result, the following findings are revealed; to the first question, we answered that socioeconomic compositional differences cannot explain the differences in the occupational distribution between immigrants and the Japanese, meaning that a migrant might have a different probability of occupational attainment from the Japanese who has an equivalent feature. On the second question, it is revealed that a return to immigrant educational attainments is higher than that of the Japanese, when a migrant is a highly-skilled or a long-term resident such as Vietnamese Refugees and Korean Residents. In addition, there is a gender gap in a return of educational attainment, which tends to be smaller for females than for males. To the third question, we can argue that the extension of residency in Japan mostly has a positive effect for migrants except highly-skilled ones. To the fourth question, the outcome of occupational attainments shows mosaic situation, implying that the same characteristic plays a different role in their occupational attainment depending on their mode of incorporation.Taken together, it is clarified that selection on human capital, duration of residency and gender difference are important for immigrant occupational attainment. Actually, the relations between those determinants are similar to findings in previous studies in western developed countries. However, it is also revealed that Japan has experienced multiple mode of incorporations of immigrants simultaneously, or a “structured settlement” as a feature of “new” country of immigration.