Allowing all senior citizens over the age of 80 to employ foreign caregivers would make Taiwan over-reliant on foreign labor, Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said yesterday in response to calls by some lawmakers and members of the public to ease restrictions on the hiring of foreign caregivers.
If all 500,000 Taiwanese aged over 80 were allowed to hire foreign caregivers, the number of such workers in the country could rise from the current 420,000 to more than 1 million, Wang said.
In the long run, Taiwan would become overly dependent on migrant workers, which would cause imbalances in the supply of local labor, she said.
Wang said the council would review the restrictions from the perspectives of the long-term development of the nation’s caregiving system and the protection of local workers’ jobs.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yang Yu-hsin (楊玉欣) suggested yesterday that the council extend its foreign caregiver eligibility rules to include severely physically disabled people aged over 50 and households with two moderately physically disabled members of any age.
In response, Wang said an inter-ministerial meeting would be held early next week to review the terms of eligibility.
Currently, applicants seeking to obtain foreign caregiver services are evaluated using the Barthel Index, under which eligible applicants have to be almost totally unable to carry out the activities of daily life in order to qualify.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift