Seriously, I got approved for a Gold Card with a mediocre finance job. I don’t have to keep my job when I move to Taiwan. I don’t need a health or background check. I can just show up and stay for up to 3 years from when the visa was approved. After 6 months, healthcare is covered. APRC requires some $$$ or an income that an English teaching job should provide, but after passing that hurdle, you can basically live there forever as long as you behave and keep getting healthcare coverage.
I don’t know of any other countries that don’t require health and background checks or provide healthcare to foreigners without requiring continual employment.
Why is Taiwan making it so easy for foreigners to move there?
Cause they are pragmatic. This is one of the things I love most about Taiwan and Taiwanese people.
They need more people and anyone with a clean record and ability to provide for themselves should be given a chance. No point in complicating any more than that.
If it turns out the system is being abused they will amend it somewhat at a later point.
Moving here on an ARC is the standard way to do it, and background and health checks are required. You moved here on a Gold Card which is kind of an exception meant for people with specialized experience and skills that are lacking among foreigners who come work in Taiwan. Most such people would otherwise skip Taiwan and choose to work in more competitive places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, etc.
I don’t know how you managed to move here on a Gold Card. I didn’t think “Finance” was one of the categories of people they needed.
Besides, give it a few months and you’ll realize the food here doesn’t nearly live up to its hype. That’s the main reason they are struggling to attract and retain foreign talent.
Taiwan makes it virtually impossible to immigrate here. Move here legally without too many hurdles? Sure. Immigrate? Only if you’re willing to renounce your citizenship from your country of origin first.
Taiwan likes the revolving door of foreigners because it makes the place seem much more “international” and “foreigner friendly” than it is. The reality is that people who have lived here for years have to deal with staring and “wow, that foreigner speaks Chinese so well” along with shop employers literally using their coworkers as human shields for fear of having to even look at that foreigner, who might speak English to them, on a daily basis. Taipei is not like New York where you can walk down the street yapping away into your phone in any language and no one bats an eyelash. Immigration is NOT the same thing as chilling out in a country for a few years and then “going home”. It’s establishing your life in the new country. That’s virtually (though not entirely!) impossible to do in Taiwan
Makes it easy to move for a few years, yes, if you have a certain white collar background from certain countries.
In case you haven’t noticed Taiwan isn’t the most popular place to think of when immigrating somewhere .
After you arrive you may still have to find a good finance job, but why would a global finance professional want to move to Taiwan. Have you seen the banks and the pay?
Their official goal is to have 10x number of new white collar residents than they are actually getting, so they are probably going very easy on the vetting process right now…
Anyway its good if they can attract peolpe but them sticking around and also the govenrnent welcoming them to become new citizens is a completely different story.
The answer is: collapsing demographics; no appetite for mass immigration from China (which itself has collapsing demographics); and competition with the other countries in the region with collapsing demographics (Korea, Japan, Singapore, with the latter as the outlier taking a huge number of immigrants).
Moving here is easy. staying here without you going crazy and ended up complaining about everything here is hard.
Taiwan needs international recognition and it has dwindling population.
It needs people to come here
It’s not easy for people from most countries to satisfy the ~5300 USD monthly income requirement. So they’re making it easy only for people from the high income and high cost of living cities. To make that much in India would require you to be some sort of manager or senior engineer at an international company. Definitely not mediocre.
There haven’t been THAT many gold cards issued in total over the last four years. IIRC, even with the COVID boost it has been under 8k this whole time. So this “low bar” is actually not causing any mass immigration.
My guess is most gold card holders have left Taiwan for good or don’t spend more than 90 days per calendar year here.
The intentions of Gold Card were good, but the long term problems of living in Taiwan (pathetic salaries, low # of vacation days, housing unaffordability to name a few) is defeating it’s original goal to get a lot of talented folks to stay here. This is super evident from the numbers.
I just read that workers at tsmc Arizona complained about long hours and poor treatment. Said Intel is much better to work for. I always thought 12 hour workday is mandatory at any tech companies.
Taiwanese people just say that Americans don’t buy their bullshit. But I heard tech companies all have no work life balance. Companies like Google might have buffets and stuff to get you to stay in the office longer but the work hour in tech companies is legendary. They also age discriminate like crazy too.
Apparently the American workers haven’t been told howTaiwan tech culture works. They’ll be worked like dogs until they’re sucked dry at about 35 or 40 and then discarded like trash with some nice stock options to see them thru the rest of their life.
Now I realize why Taiwanese companies give 16-20-month bonuses to their employees…
I wouldn’t work in a company that doesn’t prioritize work-life balance. Western and forward-thinking countries like Singapore proved you can be productive while not burning yourself out.
I feel like I can work many more years with a healthy work life balance than working 15 hours a day. Taiwanese culture thinks when you’re young your priority should be work, nothing else. But I don’t buy that. 20 month bonus sounds great until you realize that only hospitals will see that money because you won’t be a functioning human being after that.
Asia seems to be the wrong continent for work life balance.
Another challenge is compensation. TSMC pays up to $160,000 annually “for Ph.D.s with some good experience,” says an Arizona-based CEO of a semiconductor recruitment firm hiring for TSMC. That same Ph.D. can earn some $30,000 more at Intel, according to Payscale, a website that tracks company salaries.
TSMC’s American rivals, meanwhile, are defending against its recruiting onslaught. The recruitment firm CEO says candidates have gotten “counter-offers like we’ve never seen. Intel is… giving [people] $10,000 to $20,000 to stick around. We’ve lost people that way.”
