Caregivers no longer need leave after 3 years

Ok a step in the right direction. Caregivers no longer need to leave after three years and again pay goons 80,000 to 120,000nt fee to re-enter. Goons in the racket in Philippines and Thailand and Indonesia are sure to not be pleased.

But, this step in the right direction is followed by a step in the wrong direction.

Apparently this non need to leave in 3 years is because of a new law that prevents these same workers from seeking Taiwanese citizenship !

So there you have it. Human rights Taiwan style. Give one thing , take away another.

Definitely a step in the right direction, but the government really needs to get rid of the predatory brokers altogether. It doesn’t help that the brokers are a bribe-paying constituency and the caregivers aren’t. Of course they won’t allow citizenship unless it involves marrying a local and cranking out Taiwanese babies. Gotta maintain that racial purity.

Actually you don’t need to make a baby but it certainly seems to be part of the deal in most cases.

So those workers were allowed to seek citizenship before? They could have worked 2 three-year contracts and applied for citizenship during year 5?

No they weren’t I’m pretty sure.

They had to leave after three years. Which meant the clock resets on the five year residency requirement.

Then that was probably the original intent of leaving after three years. So these workers actually aren’t losing anything, just not gaining anything in regards to citizenship.

Yes they get to stay 14 years and that is an improvement. But what is questionable is whether blue collar workers should be denied a privilege given to white collar workers.

I understand white collar workers can apply for ROC citizenship after five years continued residence. But they have to give up their original citizenship?

What we have now is that the law was amended to say that blue collar workers will not be given this privilege.

That is at least somewhat racist as blue collar workers are mostly from SE Asia, Phillippines, Thailand and other “less desirable” ethnic groups. And white collar are more likely from more advanced nations and are more likely non SE Asian, Philippino, Thai? And also there is no flood of white collar immigrants to Taiwan who want to get citizenship and give up their original citizenship. There may be a flood if they open up to SE Asians.

This is like the plight of the Turks in Germany. Who I am not sure to this day are given citizenship? They were given the right to live and work in Germany but to my knowledge, not citizenship/ Someone tell me if this has changed.

So it is an infringement of human rights.
Blue collar workers are not given a lot of free time, are discouraged from being able to have relationships with other blue collar workers and if they do get married and have kids, their kids are not able to get Taiwan citizenship. I am not sure if they are even allowed to get married?

There is a lot that is not right here.

Blue collar workers in Taiwan are thus less human.

And that is not “right”.

Slavery comes to mind.

Except they are free to leave (but unable because they have no money in most cases and have mouths to feed).

Blue collar workers should be able to reside in Taiwan for the same number of years as white collar workers , and then be able to obtain citizenship. And all the rights that offers.

Yes Taiwan is overcrowded already but the low birthrate will lead to stagnation . And yet they wont open up the gates to young people who want to become citizens.

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Maybe when the population hits a sharp decline, starting in 10 years, they might change their minds as they might see a need to replenish the population.

I agree the current system is flawed, but racist? :ponder:

Taiwan has many Southeast Asian spouses. They’re also welcome to immigrate as white collar workers. Countries with ROC embassies have extra privileges, and they’re not exactly light skinned countries. There was even a plan to bring Papua New Guinea into the club, not so long ago.

The problem as I see it is that the system has been built around a sort of caste mentality, rather than a race mentality: if you wear a blue collar once, you will always wear it, or at least you should always wear it.

They could give everyone equal points-based opportunities, accounting for things like education, language abilities, IQ, health, EQ, cultural affinity, etc., inviting people to immigrate on the basis of actually bringing useful things to the table. But no, if you’ve ever had a blue collar job in Taiwan while foreign, you have a permanent black mark in your record, even if you want to come back as a tourist. You’re obviously not worth much, or you would have already had a good enough job that you wouldn’t need to do “dirty” work to support your family. After all, the children of good people prove their worth in their 20’s by managing to get important jobs right away! :smile: And we all know that one-job-for-life is how it should be. (Anything else is disloyalty to your employer!) Advancement in one lifetime is not possible, nor should it be. The end!
:idunno:

There is a lot of truth there about blue collar “disease”. TAiwan is considering offering visa free entry to some SE Asians but “only if they have NEVER been Blue Collar workers”

So yeah, there is definitely the “caste” stigma here.

Tommy making a lot of sense here. I think Taiwan would benefit enormously from allowing permanent immigration from SE Asia.

They could really add something to the mix and help the place be less isolated and inward looking. Taiwan needs a bit of fresh blood IMHO. It’s also only right that after using these people as cheap labour Abdul abusing SO of them for so many years they can join society as equals and gain access to social security programs that they may have paid into. It is a matter of treating people decently.

Even some migration from mainland china would be fair given that Taiwanese have also moved there en masse.

I agree with this.

Taiwanese (and probably most ethnic Chinese and even East Asians) use a caste system to perceive themselves and others.

Questions are asked to derive your social standing mostly by how much wealth you have. They will then associate with you or not. That is why the perception of having wealth here can be very important especially for people in business (same in other places but can be more pronounced here)

As for foreigners , they get judged in this way. If from a wealthy country they get a higher grade. If they are known individually as being wealthy also the same. If they have a passport some a certain country it can give a boost in standing.
If don’t have money they are looked down upon. It’s often really that simple.

Not everybody is the same…but it’s a significant aspect of life here. My wife gets asked sometimes where she lives, what’s her background, my background…if they think you are not too far from them in wealth they may open up more then (some have extreme paranoia about kidnapping…jealousy or what…I guess there are a lot of old stories).

To get back to the original point, if all blue collar workers come from SE Asia, and they are almost all darker color and of different race; and then they get discriminated against…isn’t caste discrimination and racism then just two sides of the same coin?

A bit like the old plantations in the US saying we weren’t racist to blacks it just happened to be that all our slaves were imported from Africa (not to offend any blue collar workers here who often do the hard work here).

What the hell? People can move up in life. How does having been a blue collar worker determine whether you are a tourist or not. If the Taiwan government really thinks like that, it’s really some backwards thinking.

Plus at least in the USA, some blue collar jobs can make some decent money.

Yup, station agents at BART in the bay area have been known to make 90,000 plus dollars a year with over time and there was this janitor at BART that made 230,000 dollars last year, by bidding for all the over time he could get and basically worked every single day. But 230,000 US DOllars ! That’s a nice chunk of change when the average janitor job brings less then 30,000/annum.

One reason BART fares are higher then the MRT !

Whether or not caste can be regarded as race depends on the definition of race, which some scientists tell us doesn’t even exist… But if we take the simple view that race is something visible, and people who look the same belong to different castes, then it’s hard to say the caste system is racist.

I’m not an expert on the old American South, but when I try to imagine relatively wealthy blacks being invited to immigrate, a “New Eastbound Policy” for better relations with Africa, the importation of thousands of black wives and acceptance of mixed children, and even black husbands, not to mention government services in African languages and plantation workers having recourse to the labor department… the analogy seems to fall apart. :idunno:

You missed my point. I’m saying a policy can be racist even though it is officially based on different premises. The end result
Is the same. Australia didn’t need to say it had a ‘whites only policy’, all it had to do was favour immigrants who need to prove European ancestry.
In Taiwan exactly the same policy is pursued, where those who can prove ethnic Chinese ancestry have an easier route to immigration (which results in racial discrimination in practice).

Also just because some people are imported as wives doesn’t mean there are not discriminatory policies applied to them. After all buying wives is only a step above trading in humans is it not.

Oh yeah the vast majority of imported labour here is NOT covered under the standard labour law. I see that as an extension of racism to be honest.

The Chinese ancestry thing is simply the ROC version of jus sanguinis. If that’s racist, most of Europe is also racist. (The ROC’s disputed existence is a problem, but it’s a political problem.)

The White Australia policy’s facade of legitimacy was quite thin. The language test could be in any European language, but not of the applicant’s choosing. Does Taiwan have anything like that?

I don’t dispute that there is racism in Taiwan, but again, the law says nothing about ancestry other than Chinese ancestry, so an Indonesian can take the same path as an American, assuming neither of them has committed the unpardonable sin of working a menial job (unless it was outside Taiwan).

Do you have a source for the “vast majority” of foreign workers not being covered by the LSA? We’ve had discussions here in which people claimed all sorts of things about labor law, like white collar workers not being covered and so on, so I’m a little skeptical when I hear claims like that.

Btw about the foreign wives, I know what you mean, but as long as all foreign spouses have the same rights regardless of race, it’s not really what the dictionary defines as racism. Even if there were racist intentions, the result is that a light skinned American husband has the same rights as a dark skinned Vietnamese wife (gender exceptions aside), and the same again for an American wife or Vietnamese husband.

Even in original premise, 3 years, leave, then another 3 years, these workers can’t apply for APRC.
One of the requirement of APRC is minimum salary of 2x of whatever designated as minimum salary for the locals. Their salary would never qualify them for APRC let alone citizenship.
The same situation applies to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Arab states, Korea and Japan.

Unlike them, the blue collar workers/immigrants in Europe (US probably) have a chance to be naturalized. So the situation are rather different.