Japan, another quite homogenous country (demographically speaking), makes it quite difficult to immigrate there.
Contrast with the USA, where one of Americas greatest strengths is in welcoming immigrants. E.g. people like Andy Grove and Sergey Brin and countless others.
It doesn't anymore. Brin entered in 1979, and Grove in 1957.
Some extremely talented people (for example, one worked with Anders Hejlsberg developing C#) are still stuck in the extremely long green card process. And, other than H1B, I don't know of a decent way to get a work visa in the U.S. (forget about actually inmigrating).
Compare to Canada, where I know there's a sane system for entering, it's still bureaucratic, but at least it's clear.
Australia is even more open. And while Europe is heterogeneous in its inmigration policies, it's far better than the U.S.
Good point. Even by the time Brin entered in 1979, the rules of immigration had changed. Brin got in easily because we had special rules for Jewish families trying to get out of the Soviet Union. More recently (in the 2000's) we did the same thing for certain persecuted people from Africa (a colleague helped sponsor a family of these; sadly I don't remember the exact nationality).
But what happened to the "traditional" method of high tech immigration? I.e. come here for grad school, then stay. Is that all H1B stuff? I know quite a few people who came here for grad school and then stayed to work in high tech. They are now citizens. Their children are native born Americans.
I wasn't clear about what I meant. I'll accept your assertion that it's easy to get a work visa in Japan. It's certainly easy for Japanese expats to work in the USA for subsidiaries of Japanese companies. There are special visas for that.
What I meant by immigration is the whole totality of how an immigrant would become part of Japanese society. My understanding is that's more difficult in Japan than here in the USA.
E.g. this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_Japanese makes the perhaps unsubstantiated claim that "Probably because of the difficulty in gaining citizenship and because of cultural difference, foreign-born Japanese people account for a very small percentage of the population in Japan."
Contrast with USA where, as Butch in Pulp Fiction puts it: "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." And, by the time you get to children of immigrants, national origin "don't mean shit" either. Except, doubtlessly, to a small minority of WASPs who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.
Hardly anyone will emigrate to homogenous Japan if it's really hard to be accepted by the natives. I was interested in whether homogenous Iceland was similar.
I agree that the one of the USA's greatest strengths is in how it welcomes immigrants.
However, when it comes to actually welcoming immigrants, there are many (Western) countries where it's easier to immigrate to these days than the US if you take the route from work permit to permanent residence to citizenship.
