How to Become a Taiwanese: On the long and short journey of

migrating to Taiwan

Yen-Fen TsengDepartment of Sociology

National Taiwan University

This presentation is about..

• Current situation of migrants in Taiwan

• Overview on immigration policy: - lower-class exclusion - family citizenship regime

• Implications for class selection

Who are potential migrants?

• Migrants come as workers or spouses

• Mostly likely women

Low-skilled guest workers in Taiwan

• Number: 353,800

• Major sending countries: Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand

• Gender: Male: 36.5% ; Female 63.5%

• Types of works: Manufacturing, care work, and construction

• Resident Status: three years per contract; allowed to renew contract only once and can never come in as workers again.

• Restrictions on changing employers: only under official recognitions on “mistreatments” and need to obtain employer’s agreement to be released from post.

• Immigration control: health check applied only to guest workers to determine the continuity of residency (contracting 5 communicable diseases such as AIDS, Tuberculosis will be ground for repatriating)

“Structural” Dependency

• Nearly one third of disable people in Taiwan are cared for by foreign workers. They work both at home and institutions. Almost all of these workers were women.

Spousal migrants in Taiwan

 • Number: 430,738; 18 % of total new couples in 2009.

• Major Sending countries: China(63%), Vietnam(19%), Indonesia(6%)

• Gender: 6.5% men, 93.5% women

• Socioeconomic profiles of their Taiwanese spouses: lower-to lower middle class, unskilled as well as skilled workers, farmers…

• Demographic future: In 2008, one out of about ten newborns was born to non-Taiwan origin mothers.

• Residence: metropolitan areas

• Marriage instability experienced: In 2008, divorce couples involving spousal migrants accounted for 20% of all divorce cases.

Table1. Number of Foreign Spouses by nationality and gender

Foreign andChinese Spouses

Nationality (region) Gender Total number of marriages

Year Total %intotal marriages

Mainland China

HongKong & Macao

South East Asia Otherregions

Male Female

2001 46,202 27.10 26,516 281 17,512 1,893 3,400 42,802 170,515

2002 49,013 28.39 28,603 303 18,037 2,070 4,366 44,647 172,655

2003 54,634 31.86 34,685 306 17,351 2,292 6,001 48,633 171,483

2004 31,310 23.82 10,642 330 18,103 2,235 3,176 28,134 131,453

2005 28,427 20.14 14,258 361 11,454 2,354 3,139 25,288 141,140

2006 23,930 16.77 13,964 442 6,950 2,574 3,214 20,716 142,669

2007 24,700 18.29 14,721 425 6,952 2,602 3,141 21,599 135,041

2008 21,729 14.03 12,274 498 6,009 2,948 3,516 18,213 154,866

2009 21,914 18.71 12,796 498 5,696 2,924 3,673 18,241 117,099

Growth rate(%)

0.85 4.68 4.25 -- -5.21 -0.81 4.47 0.15 -24.39

Source: National Immigration Agency, Foreign Spouses Statistics, various years.(http://www.moi.gov.tw/files/news_file/week9903.doc), accessed on 2010/3/9

Guest workers policy:

Foreign workers as unwanted citizens

• When Taiwan policy makers created the first policy scheme to legally import workers from abroad in early 1990s,they decided to reject the possibility of bringing potential settlers, allowing only “guest workers” .

Guest workers as non-members

• Foreign workers who are admitted should be “guests,” not immigrants seeking a new home and a new citizenship.

• The regulations that govern their admission are designed to bar them from the protection of citizenship.

The decline of guest workers program in Europe

• Initially, we thought we brought in workers; then we realized we brought in people.

• There is nothing more permanent than guest workers.

Policy learning chain

• Starting mid-1980, guestworkers policy gain its “new” life in Asia

• Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan….

• Guest workers policy is a compromise between forces desiring and forces fearing foreign workers. Such desires are formulated in economic terms and the fears are framed in foreigners’ social “incompatibility”.

• With guest workers policy, the state led the society to recognize foreign workers as economically desirable but socially fearful.

• In Taiwan, guest workers policy creates a legal category called “foreign workers (外勞 ) that separates them from foreigners of higher class background.

• 就業服務法第 46條第 1項第 8款至 11款規定工作之外國人（外籍勞工）

immigration policy

• Currently, Taiwan government offer permanent residency and eventual naturalization, to long-term foreign residents (living in Taiwan at least five years), with “middle-class” qualifications (i.e. monthly income at least twice as much as minimum wage).

Guest workers excluded

• For those foreigners recruited as guest workers(外勞 ), the years of their residence can not be counted to fulfill the required years of residence. Therefore, even though, they may have lived in Taiwan for more than five years and earn twice as much as the minimum wage, they are disqualified from applying for permanent residency.

Only “they” cannot be us

• Policy makers are determined to maintain a solid line between lower-class foreign workers who cannot change their status, and the rest of foreigners who can eventually apply for permanent residency and naturalization.

• Even when they marry to Taiwan nationals, they have to go back as guest workers, then apply to come back as spouses.

• The old policy measure required female guest workers to conduct pregnancy check every half year; pregnancy was the ground for immediate repatriation, even the father being Taiwan nationals.

• Brokers are critical agents for employers and governments to manage the timeline. They help employers to recruit foreign workers just in time and help the state remove foreign workers just on time.

Table 1 Number of foreign workers overstaying their visas by countries of origin (1992-2006)

Accumulated

NumberDeported Number

Still in Residence

Philippines 23,533 20,551 2,982

Indonesia 22,160 16,648 5,512

Thailand 30,624 28,785 1,839

Vietnam 25,466 14,755 10,711

Other 556 549 7

Total 102,339 81,288 21,051

Source: National Police Agency, Ministry of the Interior

• Harsh working conditions and loss of freedom to change employers are direct result of intensive surveillance on their mobility and residence.

Spousal migrants

Initiation and Perpetuation

• Initial stage: shortage of “brides” in rural areas due to rural women’s ‘marrying out to city’ expectation

• Following period: Effective commercial brokers match “foreign brides” with lower-middle class men living in metropolitan areas.

• Current stage: Increasing significance of spousal migrants from China as a result of intensifying economic and social interactions across straits.

The supply side

• Cross-border marriages to men in more developed countries perceived as opportunities to better women’s livelihood.

• For women from Southeast Asia, “marrying Taiwan men” are very often persuaded by parents as part of family strategy .

Mechanisms that perpetuate

• Kin/village networks

• Transnational commercial brokers

• Tourist/business visits

• Internet

“Endogenous” marriages

Ethnic Selection:

• Hakka women from Indonesia and Guandong, China

• Fujian women from China

The Road to Become Taiwan nationals

An impossible journey

• Guest workers

A Long Journey

• Out of “national security” reason, Chinese spouses are subject to more controls and procedures to apply for residency as well as citizenship.

• Family visit visa→family unification residency→long-term residency→citizens (minimum 6 years)

A Shorter One

• Other foreign spouses

Alien resident

(three years later) → citizens

or

(five years later) → permanent resident

Chinese Spouses

Total Female% Family visit visa %

Resident Naturalized %

274,945 95.7 40.7 Family Unification

%

Long-term

%

27.8

20.5 11.0

• Source: National Immigration Agency, 2010, http://www.immigration.gov.tw/aspcode/info9901.asp

The “cost” of new citizenship

• The current law requires all foreigners to give up their original nationalities before application for naturalization.

• A double standard that recognizes dual citizenship of Taiwan nationals

Naturalization is gendered

• Women outnumber men by a large margin to naturalize

• In the case of foreign spouses, 62.8% of all female and 4.8% of all male become naturalized respectively.

Foreign Spouses

Total Female% Naturalization

143,995 91.9 % Naturalizedmale

% Naturalized Female

4.8 62.8

• Source: National Immigration Agency, 2010, http://www.immigration.gov.tw/aspcode/info9901.asp

Marriages must keep going

• Along the process, the required qualification for continued residency hinges upon the continuity of their marrying to Taiwanese nationals.

• Before they obtain permanent residency, their legal resident status will be canceled if the marriage does not continue, except for the decease of spouses.

• The divorcees’ residency right can only be secured by obtaining the custody of offspring. This same principle applies to those who want to apply for citizenship.

• According to government survey, significant proportion of spousal migrants suffer abuses and even violence in marriages.

New Taiwan Children

• A public discourse initiated by mass media recognized the contribution of spousal migrants by referring them as mothers of “new Taiwan children.”

• To be caregivers to “new Taiwan children” serves as the only justification for their continued residency in the new country, once they break away from the original marital ties that granted their legal immigration.

Exclusion of non-mothers

• This discourse excludes migrant women who do not reproduce, from the politics of recognition

Family citizenship regime

• A state as “a political organization that creates intergenerational identities through kinship rules that distinguish between sacred and profane forms of sexuality and reproduction.”

Free from fear

• After years of women rights activist efforts, new regulation passed to protect those who experienced domestic violence.

• They can break from their marriages without having to lose their legal residency right.

Conclusion

What matters most to be “qualified”?

• Race? Class? Nation?

The effect of race

• Most arguments on immigration exclusion focus on racism in social constructions of “incompatible others”.

• For example, in East Asia, racial homogeneity has been considered as an important ideology in rejecting immigration.

• Although racial ideologies have played a major role in many countries’ immigration screening, I found that classism offers very powerful explanations towards Taiwan’s immigration policies.

Class selection

• Immigration channel exists only for the highly skilled.

Class superseding nationalism

• In DPP regime, such immigration scheme ,for the first time, extended arms to welcome Chinese highly skilled migrants

• “Modern notion of race, in so far as it is invested in a discourse of contempt and discrimination and serves to split humanity up into a ‘super-humanity’ and a ‘sub-humanity’, did not initially have a national (or ethnic), but a class significance, or even caste significance.” (Etienne Balibar)

Class, more than race

• I argue that in Taiwan, the “incompatible others” are the lower-class foreigners, but not foreigners in general.

• Among lower-class migrants, the Japanese differentiate those who are of Japanese descendant and confer them a more privileged legal status over those who are not, therefore, creating a stratified labor market for foreign workers, based on race.

• In Taiwan, working class migrants have become a pseudo-pariah, or an outcaste among lowest social strata as someone perceived to possess ‘sub-humanity’ as a result. The immigration policy thus becomes venues of marking or even making social class.

• The children born to cross-border marriages are at risk of stigma out of class marking, for the majority of them are born to lower socioeconomic migrant mothers.

What is behind the “worry”?

• Race? Class? Nation?