Should foreigners in Taiwan care about Taiwan if Taiwan doesn't care about foreign residents?

Personally I love Taiwan as a country and the people, (for the most part.) The government completely sucks, couldn’t be more unhelpful, and i personally couldn’t care what happens to them with China or foreign recognition from allies. I certainly won’t be writing to my country’s representatives to support them. In other words I love Taiwan in spite of the government.

They have done little to stem systemic discrimination against foreigners, only allow super foreigners to be citizens, only give discounts and credits to citizens, treat SEA workers like crap, private business like banks are allowed to discriminate, don’t recognize disability benefits to foreigners, The stupid ARC changes that made things worse. Everything is 外國人不行 and the government takes a hands off approach and it’s not their problem they say if one complains

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You don’t understand Taiwan then. :grinning:

Taiwan has been solidly moving slowly (too, very?) in the right direction, but there’s always a friction of reluctance, of I guess protectionism and fear that will rear its head, and even when things are peachy overall it pops out at individual levels when things are not.

It’s rooted in the older generation obviously, and the bureaucrats whom policies are at the whim of, but also bleeds into other parts of society.

I think it’s more a reluctance to change the way of doing anything, in many cases, and also frustrates many locals. For example, many parents and teachers wanting to focus on a more modern way of thinking and evaluation in public schools. Geezers don’t want to make waves though…

I think intentions and sentiment in TW are generally good relating to moving forward, but too often policy makers either have no clue how to do that, or are so paralyzed in fear to change anything.

Much of the country does want to live in 2021, but the paper pushers are stuck in 1950.

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I’m holding my temper here.

Foreign domestic workers in Taiwan do not have a weekly mandatory rest day, despite this being a global standard already enforced in Hong Kong and Singapore. According to statistics by the Ministry of Labor (MOL), 34.7 percent of foreign domestic workers did not receive any days off last year.

I was not exaggerating when saying you may well face human trafficking or kidnapping or prosecution for abuse for what is a fairly common story in Taiwan - not allowing caregivers to exit their place of work (one case I know was five months last year, seven months already this year) or residence for months on end ,isolating them, holding their passports , giving them duties that are not in the employment contract, no room of their own …And worse.

Again I’m not just saying they aren’t getting a day off (which is bad enough and actually legal in Taiwan according to the above article ) ,but that they aren’t even permitted to exit their house (since the pandemic last year this has become more common ).

And the treatment of fishermen is horrendous .

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It’s going to be Taiwan’s problem in the future not mine. I’m no longer interested in getting my aprc or citizenship here. (At 1 point I was ). I’d rather use my skill set in another place, which has a proper path to citizenship for everyone.

In the future the supposed advantages of Taiwan will be gone for sure - many places will have cutting edge chip design factories. And that’s pretty much it, isn’t it :slight_smile:

I don’t count for much personally. Let the hukou holders enjoy here. I won’t. I’d rather live in a real country where the daily news isn’t about who apologized for mentioning it as a country! If I have to choose doing business with Taiwan vs China, you bet I’m gonna do business with China and earn the big bucks. Don’t care about Taiwan’s hypocrisy and racism.

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This is my wife’s opinion and I think it’s shared by many Taiwanese who tend to say this whenever poor statement of foreigners are brought up. And it’s mostly true. The society has active discrimination built in according to what city /county you live and where your hukou is by what house you could afford etc.

But that doesn’t deal with the reality of foreign residents getting shafted and being deliberately excluded in a systematic way. Whether it’s dual citizenship , inability to get a Taiwan ID which governs a lot of life here , not being able to get your own hukou , the new ARC number debacle ,inability to access benefits that you paid tax and labour insurance for , open banking discrimination , the constant digital apartheid feeling, higher testing fees during the pandemic , being barred from entry to hotels ,restaurants and bars during the pandemic and nothing being done about it. And that’s just the things white collar working foreigners and spouses face.

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Maybe they need to be united with China and get the same treatment.:joy:

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So it is time to charge them for everything. Never give free lessons in English, guitar, IT whatever, never give free advice on studying abroad, never give advice on emigration , just take what you can get when you can get it. Help each other with legal issues …:grinning:
China Taipei

You’re right.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen people in Taiwan I consider to be the nicest, kindest, fairest, most forward thinking people turn ugly against foreigners when the chips are down.

I’ve seen them turn on foreigners they’ve known for many years just because of something else some other foreigner did.

I don’t mean turn on like completely backstab, but a very ugly ‘side’ clearly came out momentarily, very unreasonably so.

It is clearly baked in to degrees, where a kind facade drops the second a relative peachiness in life does.

Again I think intention and directions in TW are generally good, but this stuff is like a tapeworm in society from another era that needs removing. I’ve often wondered aloud what year it is in TW after witnessing certain responses, again from well-meaning people I assume do not walk around with a xenophobic chip on their shoulder usually.

A lot of it seems to stem from an eagerness to project and assign blame, sometimes in concert with deflecting responsibility and reluctance for inward criticism. It’s not about foreigners specifically, but more a side effect of what some might consider an unusually high societal propensity to assign/deflect blame.

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Agree but it also includes foreigners specifically. The things like “America just protects us to sell us weapons” “Foreigners are here to F our women” “Foreigners are here to steal our jobs” …That is only for the westerners the hell the SE Asian workers go through must be unimaginable.

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You forgot ‘Foreigners are LOSERS because they come to Taiwan’. That one is my personal favourite.
There’s a lot going on in that statement. That’s a fairly unique Taiwan one. :sunglasses:

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I’ve said this before …. It’s a bureaucratic undercurrent which enables this to happen. The people are not that stupid or incompetent. ( well some are!) but I think some just pretend to be incompetent so that they can say “oh sorry. It’s coming soon!”, just to keep denying.

Let’s be realistic … in 2021, school kids design websites to take info from a database and display dynamic charts. You don’t need effort to process a freakin string correctly !

At the moment the Nos have it in the poll.

It looks like Taiwan has shot itself in the face when it needs support the most. Let’s see if a late rally can turn things around for Taiwan.

The new ARC number is a perfect example of how Taiwan treats the vast majority of foreigners.

With an arm extended , with little comprehension and care and yes a deliberate policy of exclusion.

Making sure that foreigners will be locked out due to non compatibility with Taiwan ID recognition systems is the main thing.

After that the issues with whether it works or not … who cares. Those officials have moved on

I honestly believe the whole new ARC number thing was just cooked up by an official to issue more ARC cards and make some people money in their back pockets.

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Exactly. I think everything was known to them beforehand about how it’d not help in anything really but just create problems.

Wonder what they got out of it though, other than a high of displaying covert racism.

Money from issuing new ARC cards. When something is unclear I always follow the money.

By the way I had fun reading this BBC NEWS article but replacing the words customer and pandemic with ‘foreigner’ and imagining it was in Taiwan because it just describes daily life for foreigners here lol.

Taiwan News - Foreigners should get used to being a Foreigner as an excuse for bad service

A quarter of those asked said that some organisations had used being a Foreigner as a good excuse for poor service.

Saying 'because you are a Foreigner ’ is really a excellent phrase," said Joe Chen, the institute’s chief executive for Foreign Discrimination . “Organisations must be proud to stand behind this blanket statement.”

:joy::joy::joy:

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Yes, because they’re an easy target, you’re much less likely to get pushback pointing fingers at someone who isn’t ‘like everyone else’.

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Yup. Plus institutes like amcham, which praised it, don’t bother following up to see if it actually works:

https://topics.amcham.com.tw/2021/03/new-numbering-system-arcs/

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And apart from the Xenzhuming where did they come from ? Oh yeah China , so what would that make them? Especially the KMT soldiers in 1949? I seem to remember they lost the civil war, losers.

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Yea, in the US the government does not listen, they only listen to the billionaires, but not the people. Laws on foreigners may seem more forward but there are still many active discrimination built in to the system and the government will show no compassion at all in enforcement to those discriminatory rules.

Also how many billionaires in the US would purchase vaccines for donation to their people? If anything they’d further exacerbate American’s suffering to profit off of it.

Such a shit article . Disappointingly written by a local resident , somebody who is quite intelligent and knows better.

The numbering system used on foreign nationals’ alien resident certificates (ARCs) changed in January to match that of Taiwanese citizens’ IDs, removing a longstanding hindrance to carrying out everyday activities such as online banking, ticket booking, and registration for medical appointments.

Before the change was made, whether an ARC number could be entered successfully online depended on the particular organization’s IT system. That piecemeal approach meant that a foreign national in Taiwan might be able to sign up for online banking at certain banks but not others, or to register online for appointments only at certain hospitals.

match that of Taiwanese citizens’ IDs,

No, it doesn’t

removing a longstanding hindrance to carrying out everyday activities such as online banking, ticket booking, and registration for medical appointments

No it caused even more digital apartheid than before.

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