I agree with Feiren.
As an added point of anlaysis, the issue isn’t as much related with taking jobs away from locals as it is keeping the cost of engineer salaries low AND the expectation/quality/standards low as well.
Taiwanese are all about low cost and downward competition, whereas Westerners are often taught from youth how to create value and compete upwards.
Sidebar: Ever notice how many popular Western TV shows are about space and science ficition and reaching out into the unknown, whereas the popular TV shows in Taiwan are about longing for the past when ignorance, mediocrity, xenophobia, homogeneity and feudalism/cast system reigned?
Actually, there has been a proposal to import cheap Indian software engineers into the island to do tech work, similar to the racist way Taiwanese treat Filippino and Thai manual laborers. I don’t see a lot of objection from business owners on that one!
But what you do see objection to, for example, is higher salires paid to foreign Enlgish teachers at government schools. The local Taiwanese English teachers complain that they are paid too much. What they are reallly scared of is that they will be found out for their ineffectiveness and that the bar will be raised for English education standards, leaving them in the cold and unable to compete.
What it really comes down to (with my seven years of working for Taiwanese tech companies) is a resistance to treating knowledge workers like knowledge workers. Taiwanese managers still want to treat software engineers like they were assembly line workers of the 1970s. They want to make sure that there is always downward pressure in the culture that only recognizes the “boss” as the only knowledge worker in the company. When individual workers have knowledge of their own, they start to become a valuable resource in their own right, thus increasing their price in the employment market.
Therefore, not only is hiring of foreigners a last resort for many Taiwanese companies, they are also steered as far away from doing any job that could be misconstrued as being part of the knowlege creation business. Not only does it challenge the face of the boss, but I’ve seen it contaminate other young Taiwanese into thinking they can get away with thinking for themselves too.
This often why foreignes with PhDs and MBAs and a ton of experience can’t get any other job in any company expect for “English Work” … editing, seudo-marketing, tech writing, etc.