The White House held an event on Tuesday to highlight success stories of immigrants who were brought to the US illegally as children, including one 28-year-old woman who emigrated from Taiwan.
Esther Yu-Hsi Lee (李御璽) was among 10 young immigrants labeled Champions of Change, all of whom have benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by US President Barack Obama’s administration.
The program grants reliefs from deportation and the opportunity for employment and education for illegal immigrants who were brought into the country before they reached the age of 16 and stayed, though it does not provide a pathway to citizenship.
Lee, an immigration reporter for online publication ThinkProgress, said that she was only two years old when her parents brought her and her older siblings to California from Taiwan in 1988.
Undocumented and residing in the country illegally, she has never been able to travel overseas because she knows that leaving the US means she will not be able to get back in.
Lee said that her roots are in Taiwan, and she holds a Republic of China passport, but she identifies culturally as an American first.
If the opportunity arises, she added, Taiwan is one of the places she hopes to visit.
Lee grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and Middle East studies, and a master’s degree in psychology.
Before the program gave her a way to work legally, she got by as a nanny, a Mandarin tutor and occasional housekeeper in New York.
With her current job in Washington, she hopes to raise awareness of immigration-related news as it happens across the country and to highlight the personal stories of undocumented immigrants.
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
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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