TOKYO – Gloria Okafor Ifeoma arrived in Japan over a decade ago, claiming asylum from her native Nigeria. She left her homeland after her fiancé, a political activist, was killed, she believes by the government. When she was told she was being sought by the Nigerian police, she fled the country.

With hindsight, she says it was the worst decision she ever made. Gloria has since spent a total of about 30 months in detention centers. When not detained, she cannot work and depends on charities for help to control her diabetes and blood pressure. “I feel like the Japanese government wants me to leave – or die,” she says.

Japan’s refugee policies are notoriously restrictive. In the decade to 2013, about 300 refugees won permanent asylum. Last year, Japan accepted just 20 people. These figures are all the more striking considering the number of stateless people knocking on the door of the world’s rich countries. War and persecution have displaced more people than at any time since the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) began keeping records.

Some of this desperate flotsam appears to be washing up on Japan’s shores – a record 19,628 people applied for asylum last year. Yet these figures are misleading. Most applicants were from the Philippines and other Asian countries not typically on the refugee list. The Ministry of Justice says it handled just 29 applicants last year (January to September) from the five countries – including Syria – at the top of the UNHCR’s refugee list. Japan, it seems, is considered too far and logistically tricky for many.

Japan’s record is slightly less stingy than it seems. Hundreds of applicants are allowed to stay on humanitarian grounds. Syrian students and family members have been given visas. More refugees are brought in through resettlement programs. “The tolerance level is way more than the figure of 20 would suggest,” says Dirk Hebecker, the UNHCR’s representative in Tokyo. Indeed, some suspect that Japan is happy to have that bald figure publicized in the world’s media because it discourages all but the most determined.

Alarmed by a 77 percent jump in applications in 2017, the justice ministry is limiting job permits to asylum seekers it considers have a high chance of being accepted, closing a 2010 loophole that allowed all applicants to work while their claims were being processed. That had triggered a sharp rise in bogus applicants looking for jobs, says a spokesman. “Among the reasons cited for seeking asylum was ‘I don’t get on with my neighbors,’” he says. One concern is that detention centers, which have a combined capacity of just 3,400 people, could be overwhelmed.

Unlike many refugee sanctuaries elsewhere, Japan is becoming less crowded – at least outside Tokyo. The native population is shrinking by about 300,000 a year. Government projections say the labor force could collapse by 40 percent by 2060. If anywhere needs an influx of foreigners, it is Japan.

The problem, says Hebecker, is the lack of a clear immigration policy. “You need a strategy on how far you are prepared to let people in and right now they have a very narrow channel of very specific immigration, which also includes refugees.”

The justice ministry does not employ enough officials to gather and process information about asylum seekers and their countries of origin, says Eri Ishikawa, chair of the Japan Association for Refugees, a nonprofit organization. “Many claimants are being needlessly rejected,” she says. While other rich countries have specialist branches of government to process refugees, complete with legal and language experts, in Japan the task is lumped together with immigration.

Despite years of debate, there seems little political will to lower the drawbridge. One reason is the belief that Japan is ethnically homogenous, a closed island nation that is wary of the social disruption mass immigration might bring. Radical change seems unlikely: Under pressure from businesses amid an acute labor crunch, the government has proposed expanding the category of skilled foreign workers allowed into the country for limited periods – and without their families.

Japan is still one of the world’s most generous financial contributors to the UNHCR – $152 million in 2016. Yet under Shinzo Abe, the country’s conservative prime minister, it has slipped from second- to fourth-largest donor since 2013. Meanwhile, the experience of asylum seekers can be grim. Some are locked up for years while their claims are processed (screenings take an average of nearly 10 months, followed by an appeal that lasts nearly two years; failed applicants can reapply). Many detainees complain of medical neglect. In March last year, a Vietnamese man died from a stroke after reportedly being left lying alone for hours.

In 2015, 14 people at a single detention center tried to kill or harm themselves. Last year, two separate groups of detainees in Nagoya and Tokyo refused meals during a protest to demand an end to long incarcerations. In a letter to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau, the Nagoya hunger strikers demanded their release, saying their detentions constituted a “serious human rights violation.”

Claimants such as Gloria are stuck in limbo, unable to work and living on support from churches or other organizations, such as the government-affiliated Refugee Assistance Headquarters. International Social Services Japan, another nonprofit group, pays for her medical treatment. “We can’t guarantee we can pay it forever,” laments Mieko Ishikawa, the group’s general director. Without it, she says, Gloria could die.

Every two months, Gloria must present herself to immigration authorities. They can renew her temporary permission to stay or send her home (she has applied at least four times for refugee status). Her greatest fear, she says, is that she will be sent back to the detention center. A friend died there last year, she says. “I’m always afraid of something like that happening to me.” Her dream, she says, is to go to Canada and work as a caregiver. “I survive on charity here. I can’t live like this.”

JOHANNESBURG – Silindile Ndlovu was weeks away from finishing high school when she discovered she would not be able to sit end-of-term exams alongside her class mates. As a native Zimbabwean, 18-year-old Ndlovu found out she would have to produce papers proving her right to remain in South Africa to register for the exams.

Ndlovu had been living in Johannesburg since she was 11 years old, but like thousands of other undocumented minors living in the country she has no papers. Her family crossed into South Africa when Ndlovu’s father died and her mother came in search of work. They settled in Hillbrow, an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg.

“My mother couldn’t register us on the system because her asylum application was rejected. Several attempts for her to get a work permit also failed,” says Ndlovu. “We kept hoping something would change along the way so we continued going to school.”

Ndlovu hoped to enroll in medical school and become the first person in her family to qualify as a doctor. But without passing the school-leaver exams, known as the National Senior Certificate, Ndlovu would not be able to apply for university or continue her education. She’s been working illegally in a restaurant in Johannesburg ever since.

There were an estimated 1.5 million undocumented migrants living in South Africa at the end of 2016, according to a community survey by Statistics South Africa. Around 175,000 of those counted were aged 19 or under. Many more children are born in South Africa to parents without papers. Often these births are not registered because of legislative restrictions on migrant children receiving birth certificates.

Without a birth certificate these children have no means of obtaining papers to work or go to school in South Africa and they are likely to remain undocumented for the rest of their lives. At 18 years old they can be deported back to their parents’ country of origin, despite having been born or spent most of their lives in South Africa.

Last July, the departments of education and home affairs ordered schools to send home children who do not have proper documents and to stop them sitting exams. The government said the move was to preserve limited resources for South African children and those who have been given asylum. For undocumented school leavers like Ndlovu, the decision was devastating.

Child rights campaigners have called on the government to reverse the decision. They say tens of thousands of migrant children are being denied admission to school or are dropping out because they don’t have the right documents. They also say the current system unfairly punishes children of migrants for the actions of their parents.

“The implication for South African society is the creation of a significant population of undocumented youth who, if documented, could be actively contributing to the South African economy and society,” says Sindisiwe Moyo, the advocacy officer at Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, a faith-based nongovernmental organization that cares for migrants and refugees. The center’s recent survey on unaccompanied and foreign children found that some 40 percent were not accessing their right to education, with lack of documentation being the main reason.

The report also notes that laws governing access to education by foreign children in South Africa are contradictory. On the one hand, the South African Schools Act makes it compulsory for children aged 7–15 years old to attend school, but the Immigration Act makes teaching an “illegal foreigner” a criminal offence.

Moyo says that while migrant children could, in theory, obtain a study permit, most undocumented youth cannot meet the strict requirements or afford to travel home in order to apply from their country of origin. Further, she says, “they risk being declared ‘undesirable’ upon exiting the country with no permit – so they are almost trapped in a Catch-22 situation.

“For this specific category of youth [undocumented migrants from low-income families], getting valid documentation is almost impossible. A programme to document such youth would be beneficial to all parties,” she says.

Marc Gbaffou, chair of the African Diaspora Forum, a Johannesburg-headquartered migrants’ rights group, argues that barring migrant children from public schools is a “well-calculated” move “meant to continue relegating migrants to second-class citizens and discriminating against them.

“The government knows that if it legalized migrant children, it would also need to legalize their parents because they cannot have legal children and yet deport their parents,” he says. Legalizing their parents would give them easier access to the job market and social services, and the government wants to prevent them competing with locals in the job market, Gbaffou argues.

News Deeply contacted the government but they declined to comment.

So undocumented students have few options but to take informal work, with all the instability and risks that entails. While Ndlovu found work in the hospitality industry, where migrant labor is common, fellow Zimbabwean dropout Ephraim Nkosi found it impossible to find a steady job.

He hoped to study business administration before he was forced to drop out in his final year of high school. He still dreams of starting a restaurant business and estimates he would need R50,000 ($4,260) to start a small kitchen. But his earnings from short-term work are “gobbled up by rent and other basic needs,” Nkosi says.

To make ends meet, he sometimes resorts to street gambling “but success and safety are not always guaranteed there,” he says. Nkosi has so far managed to avoid the violence – sometimes deadly – that he’s witnessed among fellow gamblers. “I feel like this country hates foreigners and treats all of them like criminals,” he says.