Personnel from 12 government agencies on Thursday traveled with the National Immigration Agency’s (NIA) mobile unit to Pingtung County to tout the expansion of services to immigrants in remote areas.
NIA Deputy Director-General Ho Jung-chun (何榮村) said the NIA mobile unit is scheduled to visit Pingtung County every three months to process new immigrants’ applications for resident visa extensions and to provide consultations.
Since the Ministry of Foreign Affairs joined the government mobile service in October last year, it has also been serving Taiwanese, who can now submit applications for biometric passports to the mobile unit and receive the documents on the same day, Ho said.
He said the mobile service team would now be able to answer questions on topics such as health insurance, employment and social welfare, since the Pingtung County government, legal consultants and the ministries of Health and Welfare, Transportation and Communications and Labor have joined the service.
On Thursday, the mobile team processed visa extension applications and provided consultations for 52 immigrants and received passport applications from 50 Taiwanese.
Government statistics indicated that there are about 500,000 immigrants in the nation, 67.6 percent of whom are from China, Hong Kong and Macao, 28 percent from Southeast Asia and 4.4 percent from other nations.
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
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