ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyze the governance of Asian migrants in Japan, focusing on the issue of the unskilled labour force in the period from the 1980s to the present. The governance of such migrants embraces aspects of both immigration and of residence as well as the contestation between the two. Immigration and residence are closely connected as the former necessarily leads to problems with the latter of those migrants who establish residency in a new country. The illegal residence of unskilled foreign workers forms a particularly important area of overlap between the governance of immigration and that of residence. In other words, whether legal or not, as foreigners both come under the legal control of the Japanese state (see Figure 8.1).
