Japan doesn’t restrict the right of non-Japanese to own property here (although there is some talk of doing so in order to prevent overseas interests from monopolising important rescources such as water etc.). Basically, if you’ve got the cash you can buy it. If you need a loan, that’s where it may become more difficult, but I’m a non-Japanese and I’ve secured two home loans (not without lots of hoop-jumping, mind).
And if you want to rent then there is often a problem because Japanese law and custom (where does one end and the other begin…?) protects the right of the landlord to exclude any group of people from being potential renters. So “no gaijin” is an often seen sight in the rental ads.
There are some kind of racist laws in Japan (such as non-Japanese public sphere workers not being able to have a job where they exercise power over a Japanese person), or rules that protect racist practices (like being pulled over in the street, due to people thinking you can still tell who is Japanese just by looking at them. You really can’t, but many people will not acknowledge that fact, even today.)
UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and possibly others in the region are pretty good picks. There is significant discrimination in the laws on the basis of citizenship, but no path to citizenship for most immigrants(a significant percentage of the population) to the country. De-facto apartheid on race/nationality is widely reported, going in the order Arab>white>brown/yellow
Depending on how you define “on the books”, there are probably plenty of examples to be found in the United States. Though many racially discriminatory laws have been overturned by the courts as unconstitutional, many of these nullified and unenforceable laws remain “on the books”. For example, by 1967 there were still at least 17 states that prohibited miscegenation (mixed-race marriages), and while these laws were struck down by the Supreme Court, some of them were not formally repealed until relatively recently (2000 for Alabama, 1998 for South Carolina). It wouldn’t surprise me if toothless references to slavery, racial disenfranchisement, etc. persist in the laws of many states.
The second one isn’t viewed as a “law of return” locally, though, as there is no “leaving”. Privilege in the sense of special treatment yes, but not return.
Spain does also have a proviso for the children of foreign-born people who would themselves have been eligible for citizenship but who never did the necessary paperwork. This is usually called the “grandchild of emigrants” law: one or more grandparents were Spaniards, their children could have been but never did the paperwork, the grandchildren can claim nationality. The recently approved Sephardic Jews law you mention is viewed as an extra-long extension of this for people who were forcibly removed of nationality (inasmuch as the concept of nationality existed in the 15th century). Many of the intervening ancestors of eligible people lived in Spanish territories (southern Italy, the colonies).
Oh, and re that second case again: it doesn’t cover all “Ibero-American” citizens, it doesn’t differentiate by any cultural markers other than nationality held (no requirements regarding ancestry), and those countries to which it applies also provide similar privileges to resident Spaniards. It’s actually a series of bilateral treaties, which has been codified into the Civil Code to make it easier to have a single document of reference rather than a slew of them (Spanish law is actually pretty keen in trying to reduce the amount of references needed).
Well, it’s not all that unusual. The same applies to Parsis, Druze, Basques, Galicians, Romani, Laz, Hui, Assyrians, and a number of other groups.
In fact, given that human ethnicities even classified quite broadly number at least in the thousands, and for the past several centuries the entities recognized as “countries” have numbered at most in the hundreds, there have probably always been more ethnicities without some kind of national majority status than with one.
You are right, though, that Jewishness as an ethnicity is unusual among the subset of ethnicities that currently have a national majority status in not having had one for a long time, until recently.
In what way? I’m pretty sure that being born in Israel does not automatically make one an Israeli citizen—and of course that’s true for many other countries as well—so in what sense do you mean that birth “qualifies” one for citizenship?
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Likewise, rules about acquisition of citizenship by descent are similar - if you’re born to an Israeli citizen, the consequences are fairly analogous to those of being born to an American citizen.
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AFAIK that’s not quite true: the difference is in the Law of Return. A child of an Israeli citizen, whether Jew or non-Jew, acquires Israeli citizenship even if born abroad, by virtue of the parent’s citizenship; but individuals in the second generation born abroad do not do so. For immigrants applying for citizenship under the Law of Return, though, both children and grandchildren of Jews are automatically eligible.
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The understanding of “Jew” for this purpose is interesting, because it doesn’t quite align with the religious understanding (male-line descendants qualify) but it also isn’t ethnic (converts to Judaism qualify). But, regardless of the details, the class of people preferenced by this rule will mostly comprise ethnic Jews in much the way that, in other countries, the class of people preferenced by a jus soli rule will mostly comprise a particular ethnicity.
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What, though, does “ethnic Jew” mean in this context? Because, as you rightly note, Jews have long been widely dispersed without a common racial/linguistic/cultural/geographic background other than shared religious identity and practices, they are very diverse in race, language, diet, dress, and so on. Ethiopian Jews, say, and Russian Jews are not obviously of the same “ethnicity” the way that “ethnic French” individuals are, even if one’s from Normandy and the other from Provence.
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But in fact the preference enjoyed by ethnic Jews is not based on their being descended from someone born in that territory (and as we know there is controversy over the extend to which Jews are in fact so descended); it’s explicitly based on their being Jewish, and it’s tied to the fact that Israel is explicitly conceived as a national homeland for the Jewish people.
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Which is why I noted that it’s dubious to claim that this counts as specifically racial discrimination.
I think you can make a case that countries that do not have Jus Soli (citizenship by birth) for people legally in the country have racist laws. The purpose of those laws is almost always to make sure that it protects the ethnic makeup of the country. Lets take Japan. There are Korean families that have lived in Japan for three generations, but their children will never be able to obtain citizenship unless they marry a Japanese person (then the child of that union gets japanese citizenship, but the Korean still won’t). Same applies to Qatar and other countries, south asians living in the country can never get citizenship for their children no matter how long they live there. The purpose , to keep their country “racially pure” is obvious even if its not explicitly stated.
I can’t answer for other countries, but for Spain it’s to avoid conflicts with whichever other country that person’s parents are citizens of: if those countries have indicated they’re happy with their citizens having dual Spanish citizenship it’s automatic.
It’s the same reason why if someone who is not a Spanish citizen wants to get married in Spain, they can do it if the marriage is legal in their country but not if it’s not. One of the consequences of the federal recognition of SSM is that two American citizens of the same sex (or an American and another person of a country also having SSM) can now be married in Spain: so long as there was only piecemeal recognition they couldn’t, in order to avoid causing conflicts “back home”.
Note that some of the cases you mention make it very difficult or impossible for the parents to become citizens. Spain does have some countries whose citizens have it easier to become our citizens, but anybody can.
Take a look at the situation between Greece and Turkey. In the Greko-Turkish War, “Ethnic Greeks” were driven out of what is now Turkey, and “ethnic Turks” out of what is now Greece. Guess which ethnicity is allowed a “right of return” to Greece? Hint: not Turks.
Look again at the relevant “laws of return”:
Greek:
Note that Greece has yet another expulsion issue to face:
Turkish:
Take another example discussed above: the Spanish Shephardim. Spain expelled two groups: Shephardim and Moriscos (basically, Jews and Muslims). There was allegedly a debate over whether to include the latter - but they were not.
In fact, one-sided “laws of return” are common, a result of situations of ethno-nationalist formation or consolidation (again, the same thing happened at the end of WW2 in numerous countries regarding ethnic Germans, Slavs and others - whole populations got moved around).
Whenever you are offering a “right” to one group, you are not offering that “right” to others (in your words, you are ‘defining its concept of “ancestral homeland” specifically to exclude’ the non-favored group). If you expel Muslims or Turks but later accept ‘returns’ of ethnic Greeks, you are ‘specifically excluding’ those Muslims and Turks: many of whom have ancestors who lived there centuries/millennia/etc.
I say again: what happened in Israel/Palestine/Rest of ME is absolutely not different from what happened elsewhere where ethno-nationalist conflict occurred. One-sided ‘laws of return’ are common. It is just that one doesn’t hear as much about (say) the plight of the Cham Albanians. Who here has even heard of them?
What makes the Palestinian issue at least sort of unusual (the Cham example aside) is that, for political reasons, the ‘right of return’ of Palestinians is something they still allege to want. Not many ‘ethnic Germans’ really want to “return” to the ex-Soviet Union; not many “ethnic Turks” want to become Greek citizens; and for that matter, not many Mizrai Jews want to return to the rest of the ME from which they were expelled, to go to Israel. The reason is obvious: for all their “centuries old ancestral ties” to wherever their ancestors lived in the past, they face worse conditions if the ‘returned’ than if they stayed where they are (in the case of the ME Jews - if you were an Iraqi Jew, would you want to return from Israel to your “ancestral homeland” currently overrun with ISIS?).
Now, one can question whether those Palestinians wanting a ‘right of return’ actually want to become Israeli citizens, or simply to politically pressure the Israeli state for concessions for a new Palestinian state (in fact, when those in east Jerusalem were offered citizenship, they mostly rejected it - as doing so would be incompatible with being part of a Palestinian state). The situation there is a bog-standard ethno-nationalist conflict, and that other examples of exactly the same thing exist (as pointed out here).
Its a bit more complex then that - Johnson-Sirleaf has mixed Kru, Gola & German ancestry, but both her parents where raised by Americo-Liberians, and she is considered by some to be culturally Americo-Liberian.
Sure. Same deal with India and Pakistan after Partition, and a bunch of other examples of ethno-nationalist conflicts including the ones you mentioned.
But you still haven’t acknowledged the crucial basis of differentiation that I pointed out: the Israeli Law of Return defines its concept of “ancestral homeland”, as I said, “specifically to exclude the vast majority of people who have actually been native to its land, or descended from natives of its land, for the past two thousand years and more.”
That’s not in fact totally analogous to national neighbors such as Greece and Turkey duking it out over which of their longstanding sovereign peoples gets to reside in which parts of their territory.
The situation in Israel, where a land that had been the homeland of one group literally thousands of years ago was claimed as a homeland by people identifying with the same group thousands of years later, with corresponding ethno-nationalistic exclusion of, as I noted, the vast majority of all people whose homeland it had been for the intervening thousands of years, is not really “exactly the same thing as” the other situations you mentioned. In terms of its actual post-Biblical history and demographics, Israel is basically a colonial/immigration movement that became a national homeland based on ancient religious identification.
I don’t say that to diss or attack Israel in any way: the world is full of examples of colonial/immigration movements that have become national homelands for people other than the people who had previously been living there for thousands of years, such as, say, Australia. But I do say that it makes Israel’s exclusionary concept of the “right of return” somewhat different from the other examples of the concept we’ve been discussing.
But anyway, isn’t this kind of hijacking the OP’s intended discussion (which I suppose was my fault in the first place)? We’ve all already agreed that the Jewish Law of Return is arguably not a specifically racial form of discrimination, and we’ve all agreed that the concept of racial/ethnic exclusionism in citizenship/immigration laws is by no means unique to Israel. The extent to which the Jewish Law of Return in Israel is or is not precisely analogous to “right of return” laws in other nation-states is not really germane to those points or the general subject of the thread.
It’s not, IMO. While I understand the historical and political reasons for the Bumiputra policies, the fact remains they’re not available to the majority of the population despite many members of that population also needing support as well.
Also, the laws are not strictly race-based. It’s possible to be Chinese or Indian and be a Bumiputra - you just have to have a Malaysian-born Muslim parent (or be one of what they call Orang Asli; basically the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Malay Peninsular or Borneo). It’s not common, but its also not unheard of, either.
While not at the national level, non-Guna (Kuna) people are prohibited from owning land in the indigenous homeland of Guna Yala in Panama. It is also my understanding that outsiders (non-Guna) are prohibited from staying overnight without official permission from the Guna.
A lot of Australia is off-limts to outsiders: you aren’t welcome in my house or in my back yard unless we invite you.
There are large areas of Australia where “my land” is defined on a “racial” basis, and the law and regulations require you to carry a permit card if you are a white person in a black area.
I thought it was kind of odd that these laws and regulations were brought in at the same time that students in my university were demonstrating about South African permit laws. The White South Africans who knew felt kind of hurt about it.
(In reality, there is a difference. I was only struck by the principle of the thing)
I have to say, I’ve been living in Australia for more than a decade and I’m not familiar with the situation you’re describing, except for a handful of extremely remote Aboriginal communities which most people wouldn’t be likely to go anywhere near anyway.
It’s not like there’s huge swathes of the country with “NO WHITEFELLAS” displayed in large, unfriendly letters or anything like that.
In fact, there’s something in the Australian constitution about guaranteeing freedom of movement, which is why Sydney can’t put a big “Fuck off, we’re full” sign on the city’s outskirts.