The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) yesterday passed a proposed amendment to the Immigration Act (出入國及移民法) granting amnesty to descendents of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) soldiers in Southeast Asia who entered the country on forged passports.
Following the KMT’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War, tens of thousands of its soldiers moved across the Chinese border with Myanmar and Thailand. They became trapped there when the KMT regime collapsed in China and fled to Taiwan.
When the governments of Myanmar and Thailand refused to grant them residency or citizenship, they became stateless.
For decades, the Overseas Compatriots Affairs Commission (OCAC) and the Ministry of Education (MOE) had programs to bring descendents of the soldiers to study at Taiwanese universities.
As most of them were stateless, they entered Taiwan on forged or purchased passports, but were granted citizenship after residing in Taiwan for a period of time. That path to citizenship closed, however, when the Immigration Act took effect in 1999.
The OCAC and the MOE continued their recruiting programs, however, without explaining to new participants that they would not be granted citizenship after coming to Taiwan.
As a result, hundreds of students who arrived after 1999 on forged passports have overstayed their visas, but are unable to return to Myanmar or Thailand legally because they have no citizenship.
After several meetings with some of those left in this situation, the MOI decided to seek an amnesty.
“Those stateless people or [Republic of China (ROC)] nationals without household registration records who have entered the country to study between May 21, 1999 and Dec. 26, 2007 from Thailand and Myanmar with approval of the government bodies involved and cannot be deported will be permitted to reside [in the country] by the National Immigration Agency [NIA],” the amendment says.
The nationals referred to in the text are a small group of the stateless students who have documentation proving that their grandparents had ROC citizenship.
All of those who qualify would be cleared of legal responsibilities for entering the country on forged or bought passports if the amendment is promulgated.
“While those who have [other] criminal offenses during the past five years may not be granted residency, those whose offenses are related to passport forgery or using other people’s identities for the purpose of entering the country will not be subject to sanctions,” the amendment says.
“We asked these people to register last month and issued them temporary residency permits that were valid for a year,” NIA official Tsao Ku-ling (曹顧齡) said.
The amendment will be sent to the Cabinet and the legislature. Once it is passed, official alien resident certificates will be issued to the students, he said.
Eventually they could apply for citizenship under the standard regulations applying to foreigners in Taiwan.
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
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
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,