Immigration policy discussed in the legislature in recent months

by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Cheng-en Cheng/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 2.0

THE LAW APPEARS will debate the right of naturalization in the future. The possible outcome is likely to affect the naturalization rights of Chinese spouses and foreigners in Taiwan.

In particular, the Executive Yuan approved design changes will shorten the time for “high-level foreign professionals.” apply for naturalization for three consecutive years of residence in Taiwan. Residency means being present in Taiwan 183 days a year.

At the same time, it is questionable who would be defined as a ‘high-level foreign professional’. That the government has suggested that lowering the period required for residency to three years could help efforts to naturalize basketball players suggests that the scope of naturalization laws will be relatively limited. All but a few individuals may qualify as a “high level foreigner.”

This indeed reflects the historical trend in Taiwan. There is no real naturalization regime for Taiwan, which requires foreigners to give up their original citizenship if they intend to naturalize – something that could potentially leave them stateless if they fail to acquire ROC citizenship.

While some individuals have been granted citizenship, they are often individuals who have won awards on the world stage, priests who spent decades in Taiwan, and other similar individuals. While the government has been keen to tout the Gold Card program as a spectacular success in attracting foreign talent to Taiwan, it has excluded many people in this regard due to the limited scope of what the government will accept as required documentation to prove eligibility . for the program. Otherwise, there have been issues meeting the income requirements for maintaining Gold Card status.

In the meantime, white-collar foreigners can stay in Taiwan long-term by obtaining an Alien Permanent Residency Certificate. Yet this excludes foreign workers, better known as migrant workers. Migrant workers must leave Taiwan after twelve years.

And new measures have been introduced Allowing migrant workers classified as “medium-skilled workers” to remain as permanent residents remains restrictive. Who qualifies to be classified as a “medium-skilled worker” depends on the decision of employers, increasing the power employers have over migrant workers.

Photo credit: Cheng-en Cheng/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 2.0

Even though the rules seem comprehensive on paper: 208,351 of the 659,382 migrant workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand are eligible, the barriers remain steep. First, workers would have to work in their respective fields for six years, then another five years to qualify, and then the status of “medium-skilled workers” would have to be renewed every three years. The same can be seen in the fact that measures that supposedly make residence possible are in fact still very limited and restrictive in nature.

In the same time frame, opposition has emerged to the KMT’s attempts to shorten the naturalization period for Chinese spouses. The new rules proposed by the KMT would shorten the marriage period required for Chinese citizens up to four years of age.

There is resistance to the idea, including from the DPP, who cited security concerns. The same applies to a petition from a doctor from Taichung suggested the dangers of an influx of Chinese that could overwhelm the National Health Insurance System (NHI). The doctor in question, Tu Cheng-che, has also tried to draw attention to the fact that foreigners are currently not allowed to naturalize to Taiwanese citizenship without giving up their original citizenship, criticizing this as unfair.

Mobilizing fear that the NHI will go bankrupt would be one way to counter the idea. But more broadly, recent years have seen increasing hostility among the Taiwanese public and pan-Greens politicians are against the idea of ​​allowing Hong Kongerss to more easily obtain a residence permit in Taiwan. In fact, there is increasing resistance to outsiders in Taiwanese society, which is a particularly sensitive issue when it comes to Chinese nationals – or Hong Kongers, who in this context are thought to have become no different from Chinese nationals after adoption of the National Security Council. Security law in Hong Kong. This could perhaps also be observed in the resistance to the idea of allowing Indian migrant workers to enter Taiwan.

In this regard, there has been a relative lack of attention to cases where politically sensitive Chinese individuals attempted to renounce their nationality as a way to obtain Taiwanese citizenship, but were arrested after returning to China to do so. A prominent example of this is that of Fucha, the pseudonym from the editor-in-chief of Gusa Books, who has now been held in China for almost a year after returning to China to visit family and renounce his Chinese citizenship. Fucha obtained Taiwanese nationality by marrying a Taiwanese person.

Very likely, both issues – that of the naturalization of white-collar foreigners or high-ranking professionals and that of the acquisition of nationality for Chinese spouses – will be yoked together. It will not be surprising if the KMT defends the latter as opposed to the former, while the DPP does the opposite. This would prove to be similar to the dynamics evident during the elections, in which the DPP pushed for the idea of ​​allowing Indian migrant workers to come to Taiwan and attacked the KMT for suggesting that Chinese students should be allowed to take up jobs in Taiwan, while the KMT did the opposite by focusing its fire on the issue of Indian migrant workers coming to Taiwan.