Japan must completely revise its immigration rules to deal with a shortage of labour in an ageing society or risk losing workers to China, whose population is also greying, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara said on Wednesday.
Immigration
Number of local entertainers in Japan down
Deployment of Filipino entertainers to Japan is on a rapid decline ever since the Japanese government imposed stricter immigration policy for overseas performing artists (OPAs) more than three years ago.
Foreign employees in Japan up 15.5% to around 650,000 at end of Oct.
A total of 649,982 foreign workers were employed by 108,760 companies and other establishments in Japan as of the end of last October, up 15.5 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively, from a year earlier, the labor ministry said Monday.
The total included 259,362 workers in the manufacturing sector, up 15.6 percent from the year before, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the total, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said.
In explaining the rise, the ministry said that Chinese, Brazilian and other workers who were laid off amid the economic downturn are being called back for short-term jobs in the Chukyo area in central Japan, where a large number of manufacturers operate.
By nationality, Chinese workers accounted for 287,105 of the total, followed by 116,363 Brazilians and 61,710 Filipinos.
Tokyo, Aichi and Shizuoka prefectures had the three largest populations of foreign workers at 154,610, 78,723 and 38,802, respectively.
Ageing, insular Japan slowly discovers the benefits of immigration
It says much about Japan’s fortress-like approach to immigration that it made news when the country accepted 27 refugees from Burma late last year.
They were first of a group of 90 Burmese that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ office persuaded Japan to accept as arguably a first baby step towards creating an humanitarian immigration program
Figures from the UNHCR suggest that although Japan ratified the Refugee Convention of 1982, it has accepted just 500 refugees since then. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, it took three years for Japan to accept 500 refugees from the Indochinese exodus, although it eventually took in another 10,000.
Since then the number of refugees accepted each year (about 30) has been tiny for an industrialised nation, even though almost half of applications for asylum came from Asia between 2005 and 2009.
In comparison, Australia accepts more than 13,000 humanitarian migrants each year.
Unmoved, Japan has sat back in isolation, watching as Australia, Canada, the US and Europe’s societies became increasingly multicultural and, in many cases, more affluent.
Perhaps the biggest boost to productivity and growth in these countries has come from judiciously chosen skilled migrants, but refugees have made a startling contribution of their own.
Five of the eight Australian billionaires in 2000 were from refugee families and Australia counts Gustav Nossal and Frank Lowy among a host of humanitarian migrant success stories. Research suggests the children of refugees will produce an even greater impact.
Similar lessons exist within Japan, should it choose to heed them. Masayoshi Son, the head of multibillion technology company Softbank and Japan’s equivalent to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, is of Korean-Chinese decent. There are many other high-flyers within the country’s Zainichi Korean community, who are descendants of labourers brought to Japan (often unwillingly) during the country’s colonisation of the Korean Peninsula, and in the lead-up to World War II.
The government’s most significant recent attempt at an economic migration initiative was classically Japanese: faced with labour shortages in the boom years of the early 1990s, it imported workers from South America. But only those from the Japanese communities of Peru and Brazil, as it was felt they would assimilate better. Recently, with the economy in the doldrums, it began paying these people to go home, provided, in many cases, that they agreed never to return, a miserable end to a short-sighted experiment.
But it is precisely this economic stagnation that is the at the nub of a new push to establish a more comprehensive skilled migration program. The idea that immigration is of net benefit to productivity and economic growth is not universally accepted in Japan, although it is beginning to win favour in some quarters.
Projections suggest Japan’s population is on track to drop from 127 million to just 90 million in the next 45 years, by which time almost 40 per cent would be aged over 65. A look at a bar chart of the age distribution of the Japanese population in the 1950s looks like a Christmas tree, a wide base comprised of people of working age or younger, tapering off to a thin peak of older people.
Now the chart looks like the profile of a rugby player: bulging shoulders comprised of workers in their 50s or 60s, gradually thinning through the younger age groups.
Fast-forward to 2055 and the profile becomes more like an invertered pyramid, with relatively few young and productive workers supporting a host of retirees.
For the rest of the developed world, Japan is the canary in the mine of demographic change. Most wealthy nations will face the same challenges, although perhaps later than Japan, and perhaps not as severely. This grim reality is driving some pressure for change in Japan. There is now a cross-party group of MPs dedicated to radically (by Japanese standards anyway) upgrading Japan’s immigration program.
A needlessly pedantic Japanese language exam that was cruelling the prospects of foreign nurses from The Philippines and Indonesia (a rare example of a skilled migration initiative in Japan) is being revised to focus on technical proficiency rather than advanced linguistics.
Labour shortages in aged care (one of the few boom industries in Japan at the moment) and other less desirable areas of work are increasing pressure on authorities to look abroad for workers.
A recent paper by the Japan Forum on International Relations that argued for a heavily increased skilled migration program attracted 90 signatories, among them politicians, academics, business leaders and former diplomats.
One of the paper’s authors, JFIR president Kenichi Ito, says he sees Australia’s skilled migration program (which takes in more than 100,000 people a year), along with those of the US and Canada, as examples for Japan to follow.
But even a liberal such as Ito warns of the dangers of resettlement failures, pointing to tensions in France and Germany as a reason to proceed carefully down the path of opening up Japan.
Another co-author of the paper, Kwansei University academic Yasushi Iguchi, says the Japanese government needs to come up with a much more active policy on accepting refugees.
The Japan Association for Refugees says there have been some small steps towards fairer treatment for asylum-seekers in Japan, but beyond the agreement to take 90 Burmese, there are no moves for an increase in humanitarian migrants.
Associate secretary-general Eri Ishikawa says the UNHCR believes Japan imposes too great a burden of proof of persecution on asylum-seekers and the system is too strict.
The main applicant nationalities of the 1380 asylum-seekers in 2009 were Burmese, Sri Lankans, Kurdish Turks and Pakistanis. Most of these people’s cases are still going through the system, as it takes two years for a decision.
Ishikawa says rights of appeal are limited and the justice ministry judges both the first application and the subsequent appeal.
Japan, unlike Australia, doesn’t have mandatory detention, rather it is up to immigration officers’ discretion and some applicants do end up in detention centres. At the moment, there are 207 asylum-seekers detained in Japan. Many asylum-seekers are allowed to work, but few would earn enough to fund a court case, which is the final option of review.
“We don’t have specific numbers in mind that should be granted asylum, but we want the Japanese government to have fairer asylum procedures and fairer treatment of applicants,” Ishikawa says.
While Japan has a small but strong nationalist movement, Ishikawa says public sentiment is trending towards greater acceptance of foreigners.
“I think the public opinion is really positive about accepting more refugees and the media response is really encouraging. Japan’s media always criticises the low number of refugees accepted,” she says.
In risk-averse Japan there is a longstanding preoccupation with social cohesion and doubts over whether new arrivals will fit in. But this is seen as a two-way street, and Japanese expect their fellow citizens and their government to make efforts to assist refugees to settle down and learn the language and customs of the place.
Ishikawa says the tiny Burmese community has fitted in well and perhaps that’s why the government chose to accept refugees from there, above other places.
But you can’t run a skilled migration program with nationality as a criterion – whoever applies with the right skills should get the visa, regardless of where they come from.
If this is to be the way forward, it seems monocultural Japan must learn to embrace cultural differences while enjoying the much needed boost to the economy the newcomers will generate.
Japan Keeps a High Wall for Foreign Labor
Maria Fransiska, a young, hard-working nurse from Indonesia, is just the kind of worker Japan would seem to need to replenish its aging work force.
But Ms. Fransiska, 26, is having to fight to stay. To extend her three-year stint at a hospital outside Tokyo, she must pass a standardized nursing exam administered in Japanese, a test so difficult that only 3 of the 600 nurses brought here from Indonesia and the Philippines since 2007 have passed.
So Ms. Fransiska spends eight hours in Japanese language drills, on top of her day job at the hospital. Her dictionary is dog-eared from countless queries, but she is determined: her starting salary of $2,400 a month was 10 times what she could earn back home. If she fails, she will never be allowed to return to Japan on the same program again.
“I think I have something to contribute here,” Ms. Fransiska said during a recent visit, spooning mouthfuls of rice and vegetables into the mouth of Heiichi Matsumaru, an 80-year-old patient recovering from a stroke. “If I could, I would stay here long-term, but it is not so easy.”
Despite facing an imminent labor shortage as its population ages, Japan has done little to open itself up to immigration. In fact, as Ms. Fransiska and many others have discovered, the government is doing the opposite, actively encouraging both foreign workers and foreign graduates of its universities and professional schools to return home while protecting tiny interest groups — in the case of Ms. Fransiska, a local nursing association afraid that an influx of foreign nurses would lower industry salaries.
In 2009, the number of registered foreigners here fell for the first time since the government started to track annual records almost a half-century ago, shrinking 1.4 percent from a year earlier to 2.19 million people — or just 1.71 percent of Japan’s overall population of 127.5 million.
Experts say increased immigration provides one obvious remedy to Japan’s two decades of lethargic economic growth. But instead of accepting young workers, however — and along with them, fresh ideas — Tokyo seems to have resigned itself to a demographic crisis that threatens to stunt the country’s economic growth, hamper efforts to deal with its chronic budget deficits and bankrupt its social security system.
“If you’re in the medical field, it’s obvious that Japan needs workers from overseas to survive. But there’s still resistance,” said Yukiyoshi Shintani, chairman of the Aoikai Group, the medical services company that is sponsoring Ms. Fransiska and three other nurses to work at a hospital outside Tokyo. “The exam,” he said, “is to make sure the foreigners will fail.”
Tan Soon Keong, a student, speaks five languages — English, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien — has an engineering degree, and three years of work experience in his native Malaysia, a track record that would seem to be invaluable to Japanese companies seeking to globalize their businesses.
Still, he says he is not confident about landing a job in Japan when he completes his two-year technical program at a college in Tokyo’s suburbs next spring. For one thing, many companies here set an upper age limit for fresh graduate hires; at 26, many consider him too old to apply. Others have told him they are not hiring foreigners this year.
Mr. Tan is not alone. In 2008, only 11,000 of the 130,000 foreign students at Japan’s universities and technical colleges found jobs here, according to the recruitment firm Mainichi Communications. While some Japanese companies have publicly said they will hire more foreigners in a bid to globalize their work forces, they remain a minority.
“I’m preparing for the possibility that I may have to return to Malaysia,” Mr. Tan said at a recent job fair for foreign students in Tokyo. “I’d ideally work at a company like Toyota,” he said. “But that’s looking very difficult.”
Japan is losing skilled talent across industries, experts say. Investment banks, for example, are moving more staff members to hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore, which have more foreigner-friendly immigration and taxation regimes, lower costs of living and local populations that speak better English.
Foreigners who submitted new applications for residential status — an important indicator of highly skilled labor because the status requires a specialized profession — slumped 49 percent in 2009 from a year earlier to just 8,905 people.
The barriers to immigration to Japan are many. Restrictive immigration laws bar the country’s struggling farms or workshops from access to foreign labor, driving some to abuse trainee programs for workers from developing countries, or hire illegal immigrants. Stringent qualification requirements shut out skilled foreign professionals, while a web of complex rules and procedures discourages entrepreneurs from setting up in Japan.
Given the dim job prospects, universities here have been less than successful at raising foreign student enrollment numbers. And in the current harsh economic climate, as local incomes fall and new college graduates struggle to land jobs, there has been scant political will to broach what has been a delicate topic.
But Japan’s demographic time clock is ticking: its population will fall by almost a third to 90 million within 50 years, according to government forecasts. By 2055, more than one in three Japanese will be over 65, as the working-age population falls by over a third to 52 million.
Still, when a heavyweight of the defeated Liberal Democratic Party unveiled a plan in 2008 calling for Japan to accept at least 10 million immigrants, opinion polls showed that a majority of Japanese were opposed. A survey of roughly 2,400 voters earlier this year by the daily Asahi Shimbun showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed a more open immigration policy.
“The shrinking population is the biggest problem. The country is fighting for its survival,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization. “Despite everything, America manages to stay vibrant because it attracts people from all over the world,” he said. “On the other hand, Japan is content to all but shut out people from overseas.”
Now, in a vicious cycle, Japan’s economic woes, coupled with a lack of progress in immigration policy and lack of support for immigrants, are setting off an exodus of the precious few immigrants who have settled here.
Akira Saito, 37, a Brazilian of Japanese descent who traveled to Toyota City 20 years ago from São Paolo, is one foreign worker ready to leave. The small auto maintenance outfit that Mr. Saito opened after a string of factory jobs is struggling, and the clothing store that employs his Brazilian wife, Tiemi, will soon close. Their three young children are among the local Brazilian school’s few remaining pupils.
For many of Mr. Saito’s compatriots who lost their jobs in the fallout from the global economic crisis, there has been scant government support. Some in the community have taken money from a controversial government-sponsored program intended to encourage jobless migrant workers to go home.
“I came to Japan for the opportunities,” Mr. Saito said. “Lately, I feel there will be more opportunity back home.”
Though Japan had experienced a significant amount of migration in the decades after World War II, it was not until the dawn of Japan’s “bubble economy” of the 1980s that real pressure built on the government to relax immigration restrictions as a way to supply workers to industries like manufacturing and construction.
What ensued was a revision of the immigration laws in a way that policy makers believed would keep the country’s ethnic homogeneity intact. In 1990, Japan started to issue visas to foreign citizens exclusively of Japanese descent, like the descendants of Japanese who emigrated to Brazil in search of opportunities in the last century. In the 1990s, the number of Japanese Brazilians who came to Japan in search of work, like Mr. Saito, surged.
But the government did little to integrate its migrant populations. Children of foreigners are exempt from compulsory education, for example, while local schools that accept non-Japanese-speaking children receive almost no help in caring for their needs. Many immigrant children drop out, supporters say, and many foreign workers in Toyota City say they want to return to Brazil.
“Japan does not build strong links between immigrants and the local community,” said Hiroyuki Nomoto, who runs a school for immigrant children in Toyota City.
The country is losing its allure even for wide-eyed fans of its cutting-edge technology, its pop culture and the seemingly endless business opportunities its developed consumer society appears to offer.
“Visitors come to Tokyo and see such a high-tech, colorful city. They get this gleam in their eye, they say they want to move here,” said Takara Swoopes Bullock, an American entrepreneur who has lived in Japan since 2005. “But setting up shop here is a completely different thing. Often, it just doesn’t make sense, so people move on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/world/asia/03japan.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all
Trade pacts one thing, immigrant labor another
Japan, despite a decade of government, business, academic and media warnings that the aging population and lower birthrate mean millions of foreign workers are needed to maintain current GDP levels, has dithered, opting instead to emphasize the goal of wooing highly skilled migrant workers.
In July, Jusuf Anwar, Indonesian ambassador to Japan, told a public forum at Kyoto University that of the 500 Indonesians who took Japan’s national examinations in 2008 and 2009, only two passed and have since become certified nurses.
As of May, only one Filipino had passed the exam, even though the Philippines announced just before the EPA went into effect in 2009 that Japan might hire up to 1,000 foreign nurses by the end of 2011. In response, Tokyo has said it was open to easing the exam, especially the Japanese-language requirements.
Japan’s health ministry said in 2007 that an additional 200,000 to 500,000 long-term care workers would be needed by 2014, but even the most ambitious recruiting of foreigners would probably yield only a mere fraction of the total need.
Indonesian and Philippine government officials, health care groups and human rights activists have all heavily criticized the program for bringing foreign nurses to Japan, calling it overly strict and exploitive.
In a letter to The Japan Times on Feb. 11, 2010, Emily Honma, who has worked with Filipino nurses and caregivers who came to Japan, said the EPA had led to a nightmare for many Filipino health care givers, with a net month’s pay often only ¥60,000 and a nonsupportive work environment.
Hidenori Sakanaka, director general of the independent think tank Japan Immigration Policy Institute, says many Japanese are concerned that an open immigration policy for either low- or high-skilled foreign workers would mean a large influx of Chinese and South Koreans in particular, but a balanced approach could prevent many problems.
“An immigration policy that encourages people not only from Asia but from all over the world to settle in Japan should be pursued,” he said at a recent news conference in Tokyo.
Statistics from the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry show there were 562,818 foreign laborers in Japan as of October 2009. This includes 249,325 Chinese, followed by 104,323 Brazilians and 48,859 Filipinos and 25,468 South Koreans. About 17,600 Chinese and 4,900 South Koreans were working in Japan as technical specialists.
Although the Democratic Party of Japan said in 2008, when it was the main opposition force, that it favored eventually bringing in 10 million foreign laborers, its 2009 platform for the Lower House election made no mention of the issue or any possible numbers of foreign laborers in the future.
Sakanaka noted the economic crisis of the past two years has dampened enthusiasm not only in Japan but around the world for expanded immigration, while adding that the country doesn’t really have a choice, given its declining population.
“The only way for Japan to survive is to become part of this Pacific economic zone. America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the leading immigration nations in the Pacific region, and Japan should use the opportunity presented by the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement to join these traditional immigration powers,” he said.
Immigrants are equal citizens, not guests
There is no quick or easy way out, but Europe — and Japan — should start by making economic migration legitimate
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the 21st-century French president, have one thing in common: all are sons of immigrants. People have migrated to other countries for thousands of years — to escape, prosper, be free, or just to start again. Not a few enriched their adopted homelands by achieving great things, or producing children who did.
New waves of immigrants are rarely, if ever, popular. But they are often needed. Many people have migrated to western European countries from North Africa and Turkey during the last half-century, not because of western generosity, but because they were required for jobs that natives no longer wanted. They were treated as temporary workers, however, not as immigrants.
Once the job was done, it was assumed that the migrants would go home. When it became clear that most had elected to stay, and were joined by extended families, many were grudgingly allowed to become citizens of European states, without necessarily being treated as such.
Xenophobes, as well as leftist multi-cultural ideologues, regarded these new Europeans as utterly different from the native born, albeit for different reasons. Multi-culturalists saw attempts to integrate non-westerners into the western mainstream as a form of neo-colonialist racism, while xenophobes just didn’t like anything that looked, talked, or smelled foreign.
We who live in rapidly aging societies, such as western Europe or Japan, still need immigrants. Without them, necessary institutions, such as hospitals, would be unstaffed, and more and more elderly people would have to be supported by fewer and fewer young people.
And yet many politicians, especially in Europe, now treat immigration as a disaster. New populist parties garner large numbers of votes simply by frightening people about the supposed horrors of Islam, or of clashing civilisations. For the populists, however, the real enemies — perhaps even more nefarious than the immigrants themselves — are the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ who tolerate and even encourage these horrors. Mainstream politicians are so afraid of this populist demagoguery that they often end up mimicking it.
The failure of integration of non-western immigrants in such countries as France, Germany, or The Netherlands is often exaggerated by hysterical alarmists; Europe, after all, is not about to be ‘Islamised’. But the fact that some young people of African, South Asian, or Middle Eastern descent feel so alienated in the European countries of their birth that they are happy to murder their fellow citizens in the name of a revolutionary religious ideology, means that something is amiss. Children of immigrants in the past, however unwelcome they were made to feel, rarely wished to blow up the places to which their parents had chosen to move.
Politics in many Muslim countries is partly to blame. Islamist extremism is a handy revolutionary creed for vulnerable young people to latch onto, to gain a sense of power and belonging. Hindus, Christians, or Buddhists lack such a cause, which is why political extremism is largely confined to Muslims. But, as the occasional riots in France show, violence is not confined to Muslims. National policies have something to do with this, but so do the deeply flawed immigration policies in the European Union.
Apart from EU citizens, who in theory are allowed to seek work anywhere in the Union (Romanian gypsies in France might argue otherwise), three other categories of people have been allowed to settle in Europe: former colonial subjects, such as Algerians in France, Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, or Surinamese in The Netherlands; ‘guest labourers’ who arrived in the 1960’s and 1970’s; and political refugees, the so-called asylum-seekers. Unlike in Canada or the US, economic immigrants are not allowed to become citizens in exchange for their necessary labour.
Integration
Immigrants — not ‘guest workers’ — who come for work are more likely to want to integrate to some degree, and to be treated as fellow citizens, than people who come with the baggage of empire, or simply as refugees, or, worse, people pretending to be refugees because they have no other way to gain access to wealthy countries’ job markets. But European welfare states are better equipped to deal with asylum-seekers and other newcomers as needy dependents than as people in need of a job.
When European politicians claim that France, Britain, or The Netherlands are not traditional “immigrant countries” like the US, they are right only up to a point, as the examples of Spinoza, Disraeli, and Sarkozy show. What is true is that large numbers of de facto immigrants have accumulated in many countries in such a haphazard way that makes it seem as though no government was ever in control.
Children of guest workers feel unwanted. Refugees languish helplessly in welfare nets, or are suspected of being cheats. And former colonial subjects still bear the scars of imperial histories.
Japan, and even the US, is not immune to these problems, either. The Japanese government simply got rid of its Iranian guest workers when jobs dried up. But it won’t be as easy to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who live in Japan without the rights of citizenship. The same is true of Mexicans working in the US, often illegally.
There is no quick or easy way out of this problem, especially in bad economic times. But Europe — and Japan, for that matter — should start by making economic migration legitimate. This means working out what jobs need to be filled, and welcoming those who will fill them, not as guests, but as equal citizens.
http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/immigrants-are-equal-citizens-not-guests-1.735447
Japan modifies nursing licensure exam for foreigners
The nursing licensure exam in Japan for foreigners will be modified in February in the hope that more foreign nurses will be able to pass it and eventually work with Japanese patients, a Philippine official said Tuesday.
Philippine Overseas Employment Agency chief Jennifer Manalili said Japan has agreed to put English translations beside some Japanese technical or medical terms in its upcoming licensure exam following requests by the Philippine government.
“Japan has come up already with a commitment that for the next licensure exam, which is held every February, very difficult kanji words that are too technical for nurses will have English translations beside them, enclosed in parenthesis, so that they will be easier for our candidate nurses to understand,” Manalili said.
So far, only one Filipino and two Indonesian nurses have passed the Japanese nursing licensure exam — the one held in February this year — since foreigners were allowed to take it under free trade accords between Japan and other countries.
In February last year, none of the 82 foreigners who took the test passed. This year’s test was taken by 254 foreigners.
Since the implementation of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement in December 2008, more than 300 Filipino nurses have been deployed to Japan to undergo language training, fewer than the initial target of 1,000 for the first two years, Manalili said.
The language barrier has been regarded as the main stumbling block in the dispatch of Filipino nurses to Japan, and whether or not they could practice there.
“With this development wherein there will be translations in the exam, we hope that we can have more passers,” Manalili said.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20101214p2g00m0dm077000c.html
Diplomatic issues close door on families seeking status
Around 300 Kurds live in and around Kawaguchi and neighboring Warabi. Most came to Japan in the 1990s, and many have applied for refugee status due to persecution by the Turkish government.
But support organizations say not a single one of them has been recognized.
According to the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau, there were 1,599 applicants for refugee status in 2008, close to double the previous year’s figure. In 2009, there were 1,388. Only 57 were recognized in 2008, and 30 in 2009.
Japan’s refugee recognition rate remains in single figures and is low compared with other developed countries. That has given Japan a reputation for closing its door on refugees.
“Refugee recognition is closely connected to diplomatic relations,” said lawyer Sosuke Seki, a supporter of [a] Kurdish family [recently granted limited special permission for residence]. “Turkey and Japan enjoy a cordial relationship, so if Japan were to recognize these refugees, they would be acknowledging the fact that they have been persecuted by the Turkish government.”
The Japanese government’s unsympathetic treatment of refugees from nations it regards as allies has also generated feelings of disaffection among Tibetans and Uighurs living in Japan.
A member of nonprofit organization Japan Association for Refugees said, “Before accepting new refugees, we should be protecting the ones who have already sought refuge in Japan.”
The country’s poor record in accepting refugees and the opaqueness of its recognition criteria have given rise to suspicions that it will not grant refugee status to immigrants from countries it counts as allies.