As the COVID-19 epidemic spreads around the world, people have been diligently following the disease-control measures announced by the government.
The Central Epidemic Command Center on Feb. 26 reported Taiwan’s 32nd confirmed case of COVID-19 — a runaway migrant worker who was working illegally as a caregiver. She was infected by a coronavirus patient while caring for him in a hospital.
The center traced the woman’s activities from Feb. 16 to 24 and published a summary, which shows that, while already infected with the virus, she visited various places, saw some friends off from Banciao Station’s high-speed rail platform and made a number of trips by train, bus and MRT, all of which carried a risk of infecting other people.
The Ministry of Labor’s inaction has turned Taiwan into a paradise for runaway migrant workers. There are more than 50,000 such illegals scattered nationwide. As well as those working as caregivers in hospitals, such as the 32nd patient, others are domestic helpers and restaurant or factory workers, while even more work at construction sites.
These people have no legal status. Without National Health Insurance cards, they cannot legally seek medical treatment. If they become ill, they have to visit small clinics at their own expense or buy medicine from a pharmacy.
They have become a unique category of foreigners in Taiwan. With an epidemic looming, these thousands of runaways have become an unknown quantity and a potential breach in the wall of disease prevention.
In the case of the 32nd patient, the authorities should not just investigate her two illegal employers, but also ferret out any labor brokers involved and subject them to stringent penalties, because who knows how many more potential virus carriers might be working in jobs arranged by them?
Her landlord and the hotel where she is known to have stayed must explain why they accepted her as a tenant or guest without checking her identity. They, too, should be investigated and penalized.
The existence of runaway migrant workers moving around and working all over the place has become a hot potato for the National Immigration Agency (NIA).
The ministry’s laws and regulations governing the management of migrant workers are lax. It blames labor brokers for the absconsion and makes the NIA responsible for catching them. It has never reviewed its own management or the weaknesses of existing laws and regulations.
As a result, runaways feel that they have nothing to fear. If they are caught, they are deported to their home countries, with a free airplane ticket added to the bargain.
The NIA gets the blame for all this trouble.
The amount of personnel and resources that it devotes to catching runaways detracts from other aspects of maintaining national security.
The NIA should tell the ministry to respond to this crisis by proposing amendments to the law.
As well as making illegal migrant workers criminally liable, these amendments should impose heavy penalties on shady brokers and illegal employers.
Like Singapore and Hong Kong, Taiwan should do more than just impose fines. Only then can it shake off its reputation as a paradise for runaway migrant workers and close the disease-prevention loophole that such people might create.
Steve Kuan is a former chairman of the Taipei and New Taipei City Employment Service Institute associations.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
For fans of the aesthetic, Taiwan is hailed as a pilgrimage destination for all things cute. Not just Hello Kitty, but cutesy characters of all kinds are just as common in the alleys of Taipei’s trendy Ximending (西門町) area as on the desk of a bank employee. Visitors are sometimes taken aback by its ubiquity, especially in the hallowed halls of business or government, but the cognitive dissonance resonant in the minds of many Westerners appears to be absent in Taiwan. The aesthetic of cuteness seems entwined into the nation’s very fabric. The trend is by no means exclusive to Taiwan. Neighbor
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this