One of the most eye-opening, but also disheartening, takeaways from Professor Schneider’s course on anti-immigration sentiments in the United States is that many of the arguments used against immigrants in the 1800s are still perpetrated against immigrants today. One notable and welcomed change in rhetoric is the shift away from using social Darwinism to justify nativist arguments against immigration. As an international relations major with a deep interest in Japan, I decided to utilize knowledge acquired from the course and extrapolate it to a completely different case. As such, I focused my research on anti-immigration sentiments in Japan—a highly homogenous country with entrenched xenophobic sentiments. Through my research, I was surprised to find that anti-immigration arguments used by politicians and the media in Japan mirrored those used by American nativists in the 1800s, except in Japan it was and still is veiled in the pseudo-scientific concepts of Nihonjinron (Japanese people theory). Intrigued by Japan’s continued use of racial superiority in the immigration debate, I chose to analyze the factors that allowed America to phase out social Darwinism in mainstream immigration debate and how that might be applied to Japan.
DAVID (TA-WEI) HUANG is a rising junior at the Pardee School, majoring in International Relations with an independent major in Human Rights. Though he was born in Taiwan, David spent a majority of his childhood abroad and has lived in Suzhou, Prague, Los Angeles, and El Paso. His experience with immigration led him to pursue Professor Schneider’s WR 150 course. David thanks Professor Schneider for her close guidance and instruction and for providing him with plentiful resources, suggestions, and grammatical edits for this paper. He would also like to thank his peers in the WR 150 course whose comments helped further refine his paper.