Such dickheads the Swiss voting public, how dare they exercise a direct democracy?! So inconveniencing!

It looks like they are proud of their country and want to keep it as is. They’ve seen what limitless immigration did to other countries and want none of it. Respect to them.

This is completely untrue, right after obtaining C permit, you can apply for citizenship since its also 10 year residency requirement. Language requirement is lowest in countries I know, written test is a joke, blindly I did it online and it was above 90% without preparing at all, threshold is around 70% IIRC. Rarely there is committee after that, most people around got it after passing test.

Of course if you have active criminal record no point doing that. If you keep going away for 6+ months often it gets reset. If you have obviously lied on your tax return thats an issue too.

I know this intimately since right now going through this proces. One american colleague is doing the same. Right now, its much easier than ie in France.

Speaking as someone who reads around N2 level but can barely ask for directions, this is on the mark. I self-study and have few means or reasons to practice speaking, so it's never been a priority for me.

But I think this arrangement is actually quite...realistic? Charitable? It's very hard to become conversationally fluent in a language - especially one as foreign for most learners as Japanese is - without the kind of serious immersion you can most easily get just by living in the country (though maybe I'm just making excuses for myself). Asking learners to do the groundwork and get the foundations at home before getting hit with that immersion is going to set them up for success, facilitate their smooth integration, and demonstrates a candidate's seriousness. My impression is that in such a situation most learners will improve quickly, but there's no getting around months and years of drilling kanji.

ironically the first people who would disagree with you are the people who passed this piece of legislation

slightly more seriously though work is one place where language acquisition happens organically, work is where culture emerges and despite the grievances I have with Anglosphere one great aspect of it is that they are never so frail to think that language can or must be imposed by a commissioner.

This is true that it primarily applies to jobs which say they need to know Japanese as an attempt to prevent fraud, but realistically it doesn't actually accomplish anything beyond punishing honest businesses. Companies will just lie about the language requirements, and visa holders will have no incentive to properly report the fraud because they run the risk of their visa being revoked and kicked out of the country.

There are smarter ways to implement a language requirement, and really this is part of a trend of Japan tightening up restrictions on foreigners to try and solve a perceived problem by a fraction of a fraction of individuals.

Teaching English is humanities though, not IS, so that doesn't work. (To clarify, teaching at any sort of private company. A K12 school has a dedicated Instructor class that can't be used for anything else.) And translating (which requires proficiency) is IS in some cases I think?

I think we need to acknowledge that all but the most transitory fruit pickers may want to settle permanently after working in a country for many years, and should not unreasonably be prevented from doing so.

Without knowing the numbers, I'd wager that the majority of work Visas worldwide are "dual-intent", to use the USCIS parlance. Restrictions might be higher or lower in different countries, but there's generaly a path dor moving from a work visa to permanent residency.