The number of non-Taiwanese spouses settling down in this country has increased and foreign wives tend to have a lower level of education and are younger to marry on average than local wives, an official report released yesterday indicated.
The report was presented by and commented upon by Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) at the Cabinet's weekly meeting yesterday morning. The ministry tailored the survey to identify the needs of welfare programs for non-Taiwanese spouses.
"As of December, a total of 247,966 foreign citizens, composed of 148,098 Chinese nationals and 87,392 other-nationality wives have married Taiwanese and reside on the island," Yu revealed.
The report found that the percentage of newborns mothered by non-Taiwanese has doubled between 1998 and 2002.
Last year, a number of 30,833 citizens, or 12.46 percent of the all newborn babies in this country, were born by their foreign mothers, including women from China, Hong Kong, Macau and other foreign countries, whereas in 1998 only 5.12 percent, or 13,904 persons, were born by non-Taiwanese mothers, according to the minister.
The highest level of eduction obtained by about 40 percent of the foreign wives, either Chinese or other foreign nationals, was junior-high-school level or below compared to 29 percent among Taiwanese wives, the report showed.
The survey meanwhile noted that a significant number of these non-Taiwanese wives married when they were younger than 24 years old.
An overall percentage of 72 among the non-Chinese foreign wives married before aged 24, the report said, adding that up to 30 percent of them married their Taiwanese husbands before the age of 19.
The minister, during the presentation, unveiled working guidelines for improving the non-Taiwanese spouses' well being.
"The welfare policy should be implemented in six ways: to set up consultation services to help foreign spouses get used to life in this country; to provide health services; to safeguard labor rights; to help them upgrade their levels of education and cultural understanding; to protect their personal security and to offer complete legal protection for all non-Taiwanese spouses," he said.
Yu meanwhile proposed a governmental budgetary increase in order to carry out an all-out welfare policy to the foreign mates.
Official statistics about the divorce rate, the crime rate and the prevalence of domestic violence related to non-Taiwanese spouses should be filed to give future policy makers more background information, the minister advised.
Educating members of society to treat foreign spouses equally is important, too, Yu said. He said that the attainment would help Taiwan improve its human rights image.
The minister voiced his desire to establish to a new government agency in charge of monitoring illegal scams carried out in the name of multi-national marriages.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater