On behalf of about 2,000 Republic of China (ROC) “nationals without citizenship” in the country — who are excluded from all benefits reserved for citizens and are only allowed to stay in the country for up to six months despite holding ROC passports — immigrant rights activists yesterday urged the government to revise pertinent laws to resolve the problems.
“I don’t think it’s common around the world that a country would consider people who hold its passports as only nationals but not citizens, and as such exclude them from all benefits reserved for citizens and allow them to stay for up to only six months each time,” Scalabrini International Migration Network-Taiwan executive director Lorna Kung (龔尤倩) told a forum in Taipei. “This is ridiculous and the relevant laws must be revised.”
She said that ROC passport holders could be granted citizenship immediately before the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法) was amended in 1991, “but after the 1991 revision, a new category called ‘nationals without citizenship’ was created.”
Those who fall into this category — usually those who were born and raised overseas and do not have families in Taiwan — are allowed to stay in the country for up to six months at a time and once they have resided in the country over a certain number of days for seven consecutive years, they can be granted residency in the country.
After becoming legal residents, they have to go through another process before receiving their national ID cards.
“But many of them can not afford to travel out of the country every six months, so they overstay and thus become illegal residents,” Kung said.
A man surnamed Huang (黃), who was born and raised in the Philippines, is one of the victims of the 1991 revision of the Immigration Act.
“My father fled to the Philippines from China during World War II and met my mother there, so he decided to stay in the Philippines,” Huang said.
“The entire family could become Philippine citizens if we wanted, but my father wanted to keep his ROC nationality, so he declined to do so and we had to pay high fees to the Philippine government each year to stay as foreign residents,” he said.
Huang then decided to move to Taiwan in May 1991, since he was also an ROC national. However, he discovered he could no longer simply become a citizen by virtue of being an ROC passport holder.
“Since then, I’ve started my life of having to exit the country every six months,” he said.
Reached for comment by telephone, National Immigration Agency deputy director-general Chang Chi (張琪) said the situation was quite complicated and that he could not comment on individual cases without seeing the details.
“But as far as we know, many such people actually hold valid foreign passports — mostly Filipino passports,” Chang said.
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