Politics of Difference in Taiwan by T. W. Ngo & Hong-Zen Wang

Author:T. W. Ngo & Hong-Zen Wang [Ngo, T. W. & Wang, Hong-Zen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Minority Studies
ISBN: 9780415564076
Google: -6kYQAAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13278412
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-15T12:34:59+00:00

Building the fear (input from demographers)

In addressing concerns about the social responses to the entry of a significant number of foreign workers into a society that remained literally closed to the settlement of foreigners,3 academic specialists were called in to help substantiate the argument that Taiwanese people needed to be aware of the kinds of negative impacts foreign workers might produce. A widely quoted report is a government-commissioned one entitled ‘Social Problems Caused by Foreign Workers: Evaluations and Policy Responses’ (Tsai & Tsai 1992), which was written by a team of demographers. Two main conclusions in this report confirmed the need for a guest worker scheme in Taiwan. Based on their surveys of undocumented foreign workers at that time, they found that foreign workers faced tremendous hardships in their work and personal lives. Although these problems and hardships were related to poor working and living conditions provided by employers, racial discrimination by Taiwanese nationals and other exploiting mechanisms, the workers attributed such hardships to personal problems in adapting to a new society. Actually, most adaptation problems pointed out by this report, such as long working hours, discrimination, unsatisfactory wages and treatment, and working environment, had less to do with individual characteristics or actions (Tsai & Tsai 1992: 43–7). Foreign workers were victims of structural and cultural arrangements. The report emphasized the possible negative ‘social’ impacts brought by foreign workers such as threatening local workers’ job opportunities, ethnic tension, increased crime rate and increased risk of epidemics (Tsai & Tsai 1992: 74–9). In contending that foreign workers would cause an increase in crime rates or that they would act as carriers of epidemic diseases, the report assumes foreign workers to be inclined to commit crime, break the law, cause a public health problem, and so on. They are seen as people prone to deviant behaviour in general.

With systematic input from economists and demographers, the knowledge gathered shaped the premise that Taiwan’s foreign labour policy would admit workers, not potential immigrants. Thus, creating a guest worker policy that recognizes foreign workers as economically desirable but socially undesirable was the only policy considered politically feasible in Taiwan in its first and historic policy to admit foreign workers. Guest worker programmes usually designate certain types of foreigners as necessary workers but unwanted citizens.4 This confirms the observation that countries adopting guest worker programmes generally perceive themselves as strictly mono-ethnic and mono-cultural (Hahamovitch 2003). However, unlike Japanese and Korean policies that preserve their perceived national identity by recruiting co-ethnic workers from overseas who are allowed to work a longer period of time, Taiwanese policy created a separate legal status for lower-class foreign workers to make sure that such workers’ visits to Taiwan were of a temporary nature. Lower-class foreign workers’ opportunities to become probationary immigrants are blocked by such a recruitment policy. The knowledge that helped in building political rationality, coincided with, if not originated from, the racialized classism of political elites by disallowing working-class foreigners from becoming permanent members of local society in spite of the recognition that such workers have been essential members of Taiwan’s labour force.

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