Perhaps, given what you say, being Taiwanese and being local should be treated as two separate things? Not sure how to express that difference in Chinese though in an intelligible way.
This subject is really complicated and terminology can lead to a lot of confusion.
I personally believe it is not a good practice to tell other people they are less local, or less Taiwanese, or less anything than you.
I personally believe we should seek to understand who people are before making such evaluations, otherwise we run the risk of behaving in possibly prejudicial, presumptuous ways that may be similar to what we dislike from other people.
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Yes I for one agree emphatically and 100% with this and did not mean to suggest otherwise.
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Dude you said you just spend a week or two a year here. That’s what you said.
I’m working and living here and studying and paying taxes for twenty years non stop through multiple shitty Presidents, credit crises, typhoons, sunflowers , earthquakes , and two SARS crises. I busted my ass in Taiwanese companies， working overtime， doing the 辛苦你 thing eating biandangs and drinking too much for years. I went years just wearing flip flops and not owning any jacket. 
It’s not really a debate who is more local especially at the time when you were getting your loan. 
It’s just a geographical fact x time x local interaction . It’s nothing to do with ethnicity . I don’t ‘look’ like a local but I am.
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That was in the context of the time spent using a TARC here, and is not the entire scope of my time or relationship to this place or the people here. I’m not going to get into my whole life in an online forum discussion about the local mortgage application process. As I said, I support your statement that you are a local.
I think it raises a good question of what is the definition of ‘local’, as @daoxiaomian pointed out. It might make a good separate discussion. I don’t really understand how raising a family and drinking too much are qualifiers for having a status as a local, as many locals do not have these attributes. I could produce similar arbitrary criteria like the first age and year I came here as a baby, which is related to time and geography. The possible ways people can define what it is to be local can be vast and apply to different people in vastly different ways. What is the exact number of years and days before someone is local? What makes the preceding number of days not sufficient enough? Is there an exact formula, based on a complex set of possible attribute combinations, which everyone agrees upon? Maybe I could learn more about this.
It also makes me think about cases like, is the Dali Lama not a local of Tibet since he was forced out by an arguably non-local government and not allowed to return to his home for decades due to forced exile? Did he not have interaction with the local environment by proxy, with people meeting him at his location and interacting with people remotely and via media? What is his impact and engagement in the local Tibet environment?
A similar experience has happened here to families from Taiwan and people being blacklisted by an arguably non-local government. Are their local memories and experiences, struggles and locally slain family members, and the way they shaped the local society and carried multi-generational trauma related to local issues, not worth anything relative to wearing flip flops and not owning a jacket?
If I support two families here, does that make me more local? Actually maybe we shouldn’t answer that.
We might be thinking about the definition of local differently, regardless of ethnicity. It’s possible my definition is more inclusive of a broader range of attributes. I tend to think different people can be local in different ways, and all of these diverse experiences are different ways of being local.
In the context of mortgages, there is no clear legal status of ‘local’ specifically as far as I know, but as you pointed out, it can come into play with discrimination, which is definitely not a good thing. I personally think this is why it’s best not to reduce the ‘localness’ of specific people or sets of people. It can have very real, very negative consequences on the lives of people, as you know first-hand unfortunately. I prefer to support people who assert they are local. What I’m hearing you say is that you are local because of the hardships you endured to become local, and you feel you have earned something which is attacked by other people. I can support that, but, why not offer the same understanding to others? Why assess someone else as not local or less local without having a full understanding of their life?
according to google a local is: an inhabitant of a particular area or neighbourhood
hope it helps.
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By this criteria I suppose we are both equally locals, assuming we have the same definitions if inhabiting and area.
Approved! 
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