President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday condemned discrimination against migrants after Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) compared migrant workers to “chickens,” saying many of them are engaged in the sex trade and other illegal part-time jobs.
Everyone in Taiwan, whether they arrived a long time ago or recently, must be respected without discrimination, Tsai said at a Chunghwa Post event in Taipei when asked about Han’s remarks.
“Elected officials must avoid referring to immigrants and migrant workers using erroneous or stereotypical terms,” she said.
Photo: CNA
The controversy started on Thursday last week, when Han, the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate for next year’s presidential election, said: “All the phoenixes have flown away, while a bunch of chickens have moved in,” when commenting on Taiwan’s brain drain and the increasing number of migrant workers during a Facebook livestream.
In Chinese, a chicken is sometimes used as a derogatory term for a sex worker.
Although he immediately asked for forgiveness after being corrected by his policy adviser, Joyce Feng (馮燕), who told Han on the spot that “it is not right to discriminate,” the mayor on Wednesday claimed that his words had been distorted.
In an effort to explain what he actually meant, Han said during a Facebook livestream on Wednesday that he had received a complaint about illegal migrant workers from a customs officer.
Quoting the anonymous customs officer, Han said that officers at an airport have been struggling to screen Southeast Asian travelers who come in on visa-waiver programs launched by the Tsai administration as part of its New Southbound Policy.
Although some of them apparently traveled alone, had no money and could not speak Chinese or English, officers could not deny them entry because of pressure from the Tourism Bureau, Han quoted the officer as saying.
“Sometimes we suspect half of the passengers on a flight are up to no good, but there is no way we can possibly find out, because we are too understaffed to question them one by one,” Han said, quoting the officer.
“We recently caught many who had entered the nation [on visa waivers] and were engaged as sex workers or illegal part-time work,” Han said, quoting the officer.
Taiwanese are grateful to immigrants, but those who are staying illegally cause problems for the nation, he said.
Later on Wednesday, the Customs Administration issued a statement saying that Han appeared to have confused the responsibilities of the agency with those of the National Immigration Agency (NIA).
It is the immigration officers’ responsibility to screen travelers at the border, while customs officers inspect goods, it said.
Han’s campaign officer said that the point of the mayor’s remarks was not about the difference between customs officers and immigration officers, but “how to put an end to illegal part-time work and the sex trade.”
According to the NIA, 1.52 million people from nine Southeast Asian countries entered Taiwan last year under the New Southbound Policy, a 140 percent jump from 635,000 people in 2015.
Of that number, 3 percent were found to have breached Taiwanese laws last year, down from 4 percent in 2015, the agency said.
Most of the breaches were against administration laws, such as losing contact, overstaying or working illegally, it said.
The nine countries included in the program are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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