The Social Exclusion/Inclusion of Immigrant Groups in

Taiwan: An AnalysisChin-Fen Chang

Department of Social Work,Soochow University, TaiwanEmail: cfchang@scu.edu.tw

Introduction

new immigrants in Taiwan

Broad concept ： foreign laborers and foreign spouses.

Narrow concept ： strict on foreign spouses who are from Mainland China and foreign, especially Southeast Asia.

This paper defines new immigrant groups according this narrow definition:

the native nationalities of foreign spouses are from Mainland China and Southeast Asia.

The main purposeis to discuss the issues of social inclusion of new immigrant groups,

to focus on the risks of the social exclusion suffered by new immigrant groups in Taiwan, and

to view actions for social inclusion under a multicultural society

The Changing Structure of Social Phenomena

One of the most striking phenomena of social change is the great movement and immigration of people due to marriage in 1990s to Taiwan. The population of Taiwan is 22.880 million and has been decreasing year by year, especially when the birth rate is taken into consideration. The gradual increase in population in recent years was due to the immigrant population.

The Taiwanese population is mainly composed of four ethnic groups[1], namely Holo (Min-Nan) (over 70% of the population), Hakka (about 10% of the population), Mainlanders, and aborigines (about 2.08% of the population).

[1] The categorization are usually used in Taiwan, see (Chang, 2003:216-245).

Viewing the immigration situation in 2006, there were more than 384,000 foreign spouses from

Southeast Asia (34.9%)

and Mainland China (65.1%).

This fifth ethnic group is increasing quickly in Taiwan; society calls them “foreign spouses.”

The population of foreign spouses is 1.68% of the total population. As Table 2 shows, the number of marriage immigrants has increased. Comparing the number of marriage immigrants, the percentage of foreign spouses, 7.13% in 1998, increased to 15.47% in 2004. The number of foreign spouses is decreasing from 2005. The percentage of new marriage immigrants was 6.67% in 2006.

Table 2 Number of Marriage: 1998-2006

Year Total of Marriage (Couple)

Foreign Spouse

Percentage of Foreign Spouse (%)

1998 145,976 10,413 7.13

1999 173,209 14,670 8.47

2000 181,642 21,339 11.75

2001 170,515 19,405 11.38

2002 172,655 20,107 11.65

2003 171,483 19,643 11.46

2004 131,453 20,338 15.47

2005 141,140 13,808 9.78

2006 142,699 9,524 6.67

Source: Interior of Ministry（ 2006）

The decrease in foreign spouses is due to three reasons: first, the decrease of Vietnamese brides was due to the Vietnamese government prohibiting illegal marriage agents to buy brides; second, in Taiwan, the government passed the “Rule of Management on Marriage Agent”; and third, a strict immigrant Law and National Law was passed.

Under the gradually increasing numbers of foreign spouses, the state faced the challenge of the need for welfare provision.

However, the increase in the divorce rate also is faced by international marriages, the same as for Taiwanese couples.

Table 3 points out that the percentage of foreign spouses who divorced was 4.43% in 2001 and increased to 6.86% in 2006.

Table 3 Number of Divorce: 1998-2006

Year Total of Divorce (Couple)

Foreign Spouse

Percentage of Foreign Spouse (%)

1998 43,603 -- --

1999 49,003 -- --

2000 52,670 -- --

2001 56,538 2,506 4.43

2002 61,213 2,643 4.32

2003 64,866 3,025 4.66

2004 62,796 3,541 5.64

2005 62,571 3,910 6.25

2006 64,540 4,425 6.86Source: Dept. of Household Registration Affairs, Interior of Ministry（ 2007）

Under the ideology of family, most foreign spouses face “producing” the next generation as part of the usual custom.

Concerning mother’s nationality （ Mainland, H.K., Macao and Foreigner ） , Table 4 shows that the percentage of birth is 5.12% in 1998 and increases to 13.37% in 2003. The slight decrease in the percentage of birth began in 2004, from 13.25% to 11.69% in 2006.

Table 4 Number of Birth

YearNo. of Birth

R.O.C. Registered Area of Mainland, H.K., Macao and Foreigner

( by Nationality of Mother)

( by Nationality of Mother)

Personspercentage of Birth

Personspercentage of

Birth

1998 271,450 257,546 94.88 13,904 5.12

1999 283,661 266,505 93.95 17,156 6.05

2000 305,312 282,073 92.39 23,239 7.61

2001 260,354 232,608 89.34 27,746 10.66

2002 247,530 216,697 87.54 30,833 12.46

2003 227,070 196,722 86.63 30,348 13.37

2004 216,419 187,753 86.75 28,666 13.25

2005 205,854 179,345 87.12 26,509 12.88

2006 204,459 180,556 88.31 23,903 11.69

Source : Dept. of Household Registration Affairs, MOI. （ 2007）

Although the total number of immigrant groups is not large, the host society of Taiwan, indeed, needs to take it seriously.

New IssuesThe increase in the immigrant population and following issues, such as feeding kids under low social support, earning a low income without income assistance, suffering domestic violence, becoming single mother, getting divorced after receiving citizenship, has forced Taiwan to face changing circumstances as a multicultural society.

The issue of inclusion is raised when a foreign spouse immigrant is without basic language ability and understanding of the culture. The turning point in the debates of social exclusion took place at the beginning of the late 1990s, when the number of foreign spouses increased so fast and faced obstacles to participate in society.

Also, the host society of Taiwan faces the new issue of cross-culture understanding, for example, the relatively ‘sharp rise’ in the number of Vietnamese and the lack of experience of foreign spouses.

Citizenship, Identity and Exclusion

Those changing conditions and fast increases in immigrant population forced the Taiwanese government to examine what is required in Taiwanese society, which would allow some forms of citizenship and identity.

The number of foreign spouses holding residential cards totals 88,044, 66.2% of all immigrants.

From 1987 to June 2006, 133,064 foreign spouses applied to immigrate including 9,677 male spouses and 123,387 female spouses.

About 45,020 persons change their nationality to Taiwanese, about 33.8% of immigrants, including 266 male spouses and 44,754 female spouses.

The growing concept of citizenship reinforces the view that foreign spouses should be provided with citizenship as a general benefit.

For those foreign spouses, getting an identity is their target so they can have the same treatment as citizens.

In Taiwan, some social resources and welfare services can be used when people are citizens. In other words, even when those immigrants have residence entitlements, some welfare services are not provided.

Furthermore, there are different social rights for citizens and residents.

Risks of Social Exclusion

Taiwan tried to follow the road to build a welfare system that provides service under the consideration of maintaining a liberal economic market. However, the traditional social protection systems deal less effectively with new immigrant groups.

Facing Economic Insecurity

Under social assistance-related regulations, citizenship, affects immigrant groups’ income security. In other words, residential foreign spouses suffered economic exclusion as an institutional exclusion.

Although the regulation is open to foreigners who can work in Taiwan with legal resident cards, the labor market does not really give the same opportunity to foreign spouses for reasons of communication difficulty.

Although the market provides some jobs for those foreign spouses, almost are low-wage, heavy work, part-time jobs, and they sometimes face discrimination in the labor market.

The growing needs of residents without ID affect the construction of social security systems and the approaches of social policies.

Family is an important source of income support for foreign spouses.

Obstacles in Accessing to ServiceTraditional welfare service provisions challenge the state and society to develop different ways of welfare provision and fix people’s need.

The weaknesses of welfare design did not consider cross-culture understanding and make immigrant groups face obstacles to access to service.

The services of interpreters are limited due to increased demand. Even when those immigrant groups go to language classes to learn Mandarin, they learn only basic words.

The language ability learned from these social educations may useful for basic communication, but they cannot really read documents.

Lacking Social SupportSome family members and husbands treat foreign brides as “material” to buy.

Foreign spouses may take no paid jobs and need to take caring work. In hence, even though there is social education on the topic of “language learning” and “knowing living style and customs” usually run by local government, they could not attend and reach those resources.

A general survey conducted by the Ministry of Interior in 2003 tried to know immigrant groups’ living conditions. This report showed that only 2.8% of foreign spouses from Southeast Asia attended the class of knowing living style and customs.

On average, 85% of foreign spouses did not attend any service.

The main reason they did not attend these services is lack of social support from their families (Ministry of Interior, 2003; Wu, 2004; Chang, 2005 & 2006).

Especially, some foreign spouses give up learning the language and attending courses for the following reasons: her family members wonder if she makes “bad friends”,” no one helps her to do domestic work, especially care jobs with old people or children”, and “pregnancy” (Chang, 2005 & 2006).

Policy Responses: Inclusion Action

Once social security system is confronted with the growing risk of social exclusion, the state has to decide how to adapt the welfare system to respond to the impact of a multicultural society. Under these conditions, the state needs to rethink its social policy and reformist tendency to raise its capacity to keep social cohesion.

Initially, the government tries to develop an action plan and cooperate with Non-Profit Organizations to help excluded groups.

The following actions have been taken: individual counseling and translation services,

language course and social education;

strengthening prevention system on domestic violence,

providing temporary economic service,

and getting into National Health Insurance.

Although the above action plans indeed help foreign spouses approaching social inclusion, not every local government provides these services. It depends on the area in which foreign spouses live.

Also, if the traditional service system did not reform welfare under the consideration of those groups, some actions could not resolve the exclusion situation that foreign spouses faced.

Hence, the state modified the policy and law. For example, the family welfare policy was modified in 2004, with more consideration for foreign spouses.

The concept of social inclusion was also put into this policy and become one of the principles of implementing the family policy.

The following modification was the “Living Assistance for Special Suffering Women” and “Social Assistant Act” in 2005 to resolve the risk of economic exclusion.

Further IssuesMeasuring Social Exclusion

Although the concept of social exclusion and inclusion has been discussed in academia field (Wang, 2001; Chang, 2001; Chang, 2005), policy maker still not faces the important of these issues immediately. Also, the measurement of social exclusion needs to be taken into consideration to build social indicators to understand which groups have been excluded at what level and in what ways.

Evaluating the Action of Social InclusionAlthough the state tries to provide action plans to help foreigners be included in mainstream society, those action plans are not evidence-based to make policy. Also, the action plan did not evaluate. Hence, based on the evidence, designing action plans is essential for Taiwan to do. Moreover, developing an evaluation system for those programs is necessary.

Interaction IssuesLanguage differences and cross-cultural communications bring up the question of meaning-equivalence during service provision. Especially, some service users could not speak Mandarin, and service providers could not understand foreign spouses’ native tongues. Although an interpreter can be employed when a user is in need, there are not many interpreters.

Conclusion

For developing sustainable welfare society, socio-cultural issues need to be taken into consideration.

Thank You!!