IMHO all problems in that regard come from Taiwanese looking down on migrant workers.
They must take care of the elderly and work in the factories for minimal wage! They don’t get to enjoy Taiwanese perks!
They don’t want them to get credit cards, free rides, vouchers. The excuses are always ridiculous!
Non married (western) ARC/APRC holders are collateral damage, so that the discrimination it is not too obvious.
Yep I think they can’t stand to think of migrant workers getting some benefits so throw everybody under the bus.
It was not a big deal to treat foreigners with covid for free. Until those foreigners were migrant workers.
Well they could have saved almost all that money by not relying on crooked brokers for their labour pool. There are reputable diagnostic labs they could have worked with there from the start !
So be sure to mention APRC when complaining to the government, else they’ll think we are trying to solve too many problems at once.
Because there is no CEDAM, only CEDAW.
Actually it all makes perfect sense if you look at it from the
perspective of a dog food company:
Of course we would be giving free samples to dog owners, leaving good
impressions with them. Hoping they will remember us the next time it
comes around to buying dog food.
As to directly feeding random runaway dogs on the street, are you
crazy? Even if their tails wag faster, without any owners around to
see that, it won’t be helping my bottom line. (Votes in the
next election. Dogs (APRC foreigners) can’t vote. Only their owners
(their citizen spouses.))
(As far as students go. Maybe the logic is they might set roots and
vote one day. Or perhaps attracting students is good for business.)
if your goal is just all of APRC holders are included, it shouldn’t be hard so much with some effective approach.
Yes, just APRC holders, whose official address, as registered with the National Immigration Agency (內政部移民署), is Taichung City. Even ones that aren’t married! (I didn’t research other J… etc. card holders.)
What you need to do is just to create loud enough noise to make authorities recognize that APRC holders in your city without local spouses are excluded, imo.
There may not be any resistances to change the policy to APRC holders and foreign spouses of citizens.
Well, we aren’t even citizens. So we don’t have any constitutional protections. Also I think they are too busy celebrating:
to notice us.
you could make your argument based on Immigration Act. Or you could simply tell them the plain fact that it is unfair and illogical that non citizen students can get the free ride but permanent resident foreigners with registered address in the city cannot. With enough number of complaints, they will change.
Um, isn’t that actually “not necessarily NOT discriminatory action”? There are two 不s in that sentence.
I have always found it beyond irritating, however, that everything is for those who are married to Taiwanese nationals. Way back in the day, when Richard Hartzell was doing a lot of work on it, it was all for married people and dependents. Not that those people are not important – but the rest of us are out here, working and paying taxes and meeting the same or higher standards to achieve residence rights.
It’s too easy for marrieds to ignore issues that don’t affect them. I don’t care about whether one person or another gets a discount on the bus. But once that line is drawn, it’s drawn – and then it can apply to residence rights, pensions, insurance, anything. Being told back in the day that I (as the only foreign faculty member at the university) would have to get a syphilis test annually and no one else would was when I decided not to stay and make a career there. It would have been just too easy for that to morph into “you don’t get sabbatical”, “you don’t get a pension”, “you don’t get an office” (well, they already had reached that last one, but the janitor I shared with was a really nice guy…and no, I am not making this up.)
you could make your argument based on Immigration Act.
Article 62 perhaps? Doesn’t usually work.
Or you could simply tell them the plain fact that it is unfair and illogical that non citizen students can get the free ride but
permanent resident foreigners with registered address in the city cannot. With enough number of complaints, they will change.
Hmmm, well anyway, today I got their response:
承辦單位：交通局/臺中市公共運輸及捷運工程處/運籌管理科
答覆內容：
親愛的市民朋友丹尼先生:您好，
您透過交通部部長信箱及本府陳情整合平台反映，市民限定政策一案，案件編號：109-C001971、109-E038713、109-E038718、109-E038719，本府甚為重視，茲以書面向您說明
如下:
考量整體大眾運輸發展均衡與市府資源更有效運用，本府配合捷運綠線通車期程，並參考多數民眾贊成市民、學生、老人等族群免費等意見，滾動式檢討公車優惠政策，推出「市
民限定」新政策，本府將持續滾動式檢討公車政策，並將您的建議納入未來規劃之參考。若您有其他公車相關建議或問題，歡迎與本市公共運輸及捷運工程處聯繫(04-22291716)，
或致電臺中公車聯營管理委員會免付費專線0809-000-995，請多加利用。
感謝您關心本市交通建設，倘有其他建議，歡迎您提供本府交通局，您的寶貴意見將會納入交通建設的參考。
承辦人：郭羿伶
連絡電話：(04)22289111分機61121
I bet they didn’t even look up the word CEDAW that I sent them.
You are sharp at logic. So perhaps you can engage with them better than me. I have trouble with things like this.
Speaking about pensions, they changed this too:
教師之遺族外國籍配偶申請撫卹金事宜， 係依現行「公立學校教職員退休資遣撫卹條例」第75條及第95條規定…
Wow, that’s a lot of verbiage for a non-answer. What a steaming pile of manure.
They are basically saying, government knows best and if we deem it suitable to give you a deal in the future we’ll let you know. They aren’t even speaking to the main concern nor giving you any idea who to speak to if you disagree with it. Typical non answer
And they don’t legally even need to reply, especially to non-citizens. So I should be grateful. Anyway, this exercise in arguing for rights is coming to a close for me. Exercise, as in I already qualify for free bus rides. I was just seeing if let’s say I didn’t, would I be able to get a word in edgewise into their brains. Result: no.