The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday said it plans to nominate “new immigrants” to run for councilors in the six special municipalities in next year’s elections to advance their rights in Taiwan.
New immigrant is a term generally used to describe residents who settled in Taiwan through marriage or other means.
It is estimated that Taiwan is now home to more than 500,000 new immigrants and 350,000 of their offspring.
They are now the fifth-largest social group in Taiwan, after Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlanders and Aborigines.
Speaking at a press conference at KMT headquarters in Taipei, KMT Immigrant Affairs Committee chairman Hsieh Li-kung (謝立功) said that the party attaches great importance to the rights of new immigrants, having pushed for a series of legal amendments aimed at safeguarding their basic rights.
“When it comes to the protection of new immigrants’ rights, the KMT is ahead of other parties,” Hsieh said, citing as an example a draft new immigrant basic act proposed by dozens of KMT lawmakers in late October, including KMT Legislator-at-large Lin Li-chan (林麗蟬), an immigrant from Cambodia.
Lin, who serves as the committee’s vice chairwoman, is the first new immigrant to obtain a legislative seat in Taiwan.
To allow more new immigrants to participate in politics, Hsieh said the committee would recommend a list of new immigrants to the KMT’s local chapters as potential candidates for next year’s nine-in-one elections.
“It is our hope that the KMT can provide more space for new immigrants interested in politics,” Hsieh said.
Lin said the draft bill, which has 17 articles, has been sent to the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee for review after the KMT held several public forums to solicit the opinions of relevant groups and specialists.
“The main purpose of the draft bill is to protect the rights of new immigrants in Taiwan whether they settled here through marriage, investment, business or their high skills,” Lin said.
With the nation’s population declining, it needs a well-devised immigration policy to help restore it to its former glory as one of the four Asian tigers, he said.
Most of the nation’s new immigrants settled here through marriage, but the government should work to offer incentives to encourage foreign talent to come to the country through other methods, Lin said.
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:
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