Saturday, October 31, 2026
National Interest
The obvious question to Suzuki is: Why should the Japanese government, which represents the interests of Japanese citizens, care? Obviously, once somebody is in Japan, even as a noncitizen, the government has a duty of care to at least a minimal standard.
But when setting up policies regarding who you bring in with an eye toward permanent residency, the interests of somebody living in Afghanistan or Pakistan shouldn't really be near the top of your list of concerns. Nobody expects Pakistan to ask, "If I do this, will it benefit a Japanese person?" That is absurd. Governments exist to serve their own citizens first, with others a distant second.
That runs counter to the core of the transnationalist ideology, which sees national borders as accidents of history and geography. We are all one big salad that should be tossed together, don't you know?
It's the sort of idea that got us the movement to make everybody learn Esperanto, and that assumes that the United Nations could really be a governing body.
In other words, it's a special combination of stupid and idealistic that we used to call sophomoric, because it has a superficial appeal that collapses on contact with reality.
But there it is; it's the reigning ideology of the people who own the cultural and economic high ground in developed countries.
