A Fee as a Filter
Japan announced this week that it will raise its permanent residency fee to twenty times its previous level. Twenty times. Not doubled, not tripled — multiplied by a factor that turns a modest administrative charge into something closer to a test.
A test of what, exactly? Not of character. Not of neighbourliness. Not of whether you show up for your shift or help an elderly neighbour carry groceries up the stairs. A fee like this tests one thing only: how much spare cash you can produce on demand. It is bureaucracy pretending to be virtue.
This matters because the quiet justification behind such policies is almost always the same: we want contributors, not freeloaders. It is a reasonable wish. The trouble is the instrument. A price tag sorts by wealth, not by willingness to work. A landed heir with no job and a struggling nurse with three are sorted by the same filter, and only one of them clears it easily.
The Glassmaker's Proof
Meanwhile, from Syria comes a smaller story that says more. A glassmaker, working his furnace through scorching heat, keeping an old craft alive one fragile piece at a time. Nobody asked him for a fee. Nobody needed to. The heat on his face and the shape in his hands were proof enough.
That is the comfortable case — labour you can see, sweat you can measure, a product you can hold. Most work is not like that. Most contribution to a society is invisible: the parent managing a chronic illness while raising two children, the caregiver who cannot leave the house, the asylum seeker legally forbidden from taking a job while a case grinds through a backlog for years. None of them produce a glowing piece of glass to hold up as evidence.
What a Form Cannot See
So here is the honest question, the one worth sitting with rather than answering too quickly: how do we actually know that someone who isn't working is simply lazy, rather than exhausted, sick, grieving, trapped by paperwork, or doing unpaid work that keeps a household from collapsing?
The uncomfortable answer is that, from the outside, we usually cannot tell. A government form cannot see a depression. A twenty-fold fee cannot see a caregiver. A deportation order — like the one Burundi has now agreed to accept third-country migrants under — cannot see what a person is capable of rebuilding in a country that is not theirs, with no language, no network, and no guarantee of a path to work at all. Sending someone somewhere and hoping they will "work it out" is not a policy. It is an assumption dressed as one.
Designing for Doubt, Not for Suspicion
None of this means a society should pretend capacity is unlimited, or that work is optional window dressing. Dignity through contribution is not a slogan to discard — people who can work should work, and a society that rewards idleness as a lifestyle choice eventually exhausts the goodwill of everyone still showing up. That instinct is sound.
But soundness cuts both ways. If we expect the able to contribute, we owe the rest of us — and especially the ones deciding who counts as able — real humility about how little we can see from a distance. The wise policy starts from the presumption of good faith, then builds narrow, honest checks for the cases where that presumption clearly fails. It does not start by pricing people out, or shipping them elsewhere, and calling the silence that follows proof of their laziness.
The golden rule applies here with unusual precision: none of us would want our worth measured by a fee we cannot pay, or our struggle mistaken for idleness because no one bothered to ask why. A fair society does not need to abolish the question of who contributes. It only needs to stop pretending that a price tag or a plane ticket can answer it for us.