Noting that the number of immigrants has grown steadily over the years, President Chen Shui-bian (
Since January 1987, more than 382,000 foreign spouses have come to Taiwan. More than 28,400 Taiwanese nationals married foreigners last year, accounting for 20 percent of the total number of married couples. Around 26,500 babies were born last year and one in every eight new-born babies has a foreign parent.
"A new immigration era has arrived," Chen said. "Marriage between locals and immigrants has become a trend in our society."
Chen made the remarks while addressing a public function at the Presidential Office.
The event, dubbed "Our Daughters-in-law, Our Sons," was co-organized by the Ministry of the Interior and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation Taiwan as part of the activities marking international Human Rights Day, which fell on Dec. 10.
Minister of the Interior Lee Yi-yang (
Human rights are a universal ideal and Taiwan is a country that attaches great importance to human rights, Chen said.
"Foreign spouses become a part of Taiwan when they marry into local families," he said. "It is the administration's duty to protect their rights."
To help foreign spouses better adapt to Taiwanese society, Chen said the administration must offer them a helping hand.
Chen said Taiwan's embassies or trade offices would offer assistance to immigrants before they entered the country.
Lena Lopez from the Philippines was one of the foreign spouses invited to the Presidential Office yesterday to deliver a speech in Mandarin.
The 65-year-old grandmother, who moved from the US to Taiwan seven months ago to be with her Taiwanese husband, said that language was the biggest barrier she faced.
"I want to learn how to speak Mandarin very much," she said. "It's very difficult because my pronunciation is so bad. And the characters, oh! If you compare it with English, it's entirely different. The easier part is the grammar -- [there is] no grammar."
Lopez said she had thought of giving up many times but her husband was the driving force that kept her going.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the