Difficult for immigrants (part 2)

Tokyo
I got to talk to a high ranking Japanese government official responsible for helping the resettled Latino-Japanese. He had a problem that I knew a little about.

Since the mid 1980s the descendants of Japanese who migrated to Latin America over the past century (mostly to San Paolo, Brazil) have been returning to Japan, mostly to Gumma prefecture and Okinawa.  The Japanese government encouraged this wave of immigrants because it hoped the Latino-Japanese would be accepted into the population by a nation on the verge of losing population (it is now, 2005, losing population).

Nearly a half-a-million Latino-Japanese have returned to Japan because they can improve their economic status over what they had in Latin America. Unfortunately they have not been welcomed, in spite of looking like the rest of the population.  Like most people in the world, the Japanese are xenophobic.  A native Japanese can know the exact social status of any other Japanese based on language and posture.  Latino-Japanese and other immigrants are instantly recognizable as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and are treated as such.

The Japanese official I met told me that the crime rate among the teenage Latino-Japanese immigrants was astounding.  Not a surprise to me, I told him.

Jews, who had no crime rate in East Europe beyond the Pale, became the source of a tsunami of crime when them immigrated to New York City in the first decade of the 20^th Century.  More than half of all crimes were caused by Jewish immigrants, resulting in the creation (by established Jews) of a Jewish criminal court system and Jewish prisons in New York. 

Crime is one of the problems inherent in immigration that America has learned to live with, and still lives with today as immigrants continue to arrive.