statistics from the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics show that 173,000 couples registered their marriage nationwide last year. Of the grooms, 168,000 were Taiwanese and 5,000 were foreigners. Of the brides, 128,000 were Taiwanese and 45,000 were foreigners. In other words, there was approximately one foreign bride in every four couples.
China accounts for the largest number of imported brides, followed by Southeast Asia. Foreign brides have recently attracted attention by taking to the street and protesting the policies on their rights to residency and work.
Because it is difficult for foreign brides to work, they can be full-time mothers and give birth to relatively larger numbers of children. Our future generations will be the offspring of foreigners. This has worried many people.
Cross-national marriages involve two issues -- the desire to marry and the question of one having to migrate to another country. If the migration is from a poor country to a rich one, it is relatively easier for the immigrating spouse to agree. The foreign spouses in Taiwan primarily hail from countries with lower average incomes than those of this country.
Among these marriages, however, there are also cases in which a strong immigration motive causes the two sides to tie the knot without being too happy with each other.
Back when Taiwan's economy was poorer and its politics unstable, there were cases of beautiful Taiwanese students marrying overseas Chinese laborers in New York -- "a flower was stuck in cow dung" for the sake of a green card. Now there are stories of young Chinese girls marrying elderly Taiwanese. Such marriages seem not to have resulted from people liking each other, but from the attraction of incomes to be gained after the husbands die.
In cross-national marriages that contravene the immigration motive, either the other spouse possesses extraordinary qualifications [a famous Taiwanese singer marries a tycoon in Southeast Asia, for example] -- or there is a special mission involved [as in the case of Wang Chao-chun (
Personal qualifications belong to the individual while the incentives for immigration are created by society. Because rich countries can attract immigrants from poor ones, Taiwanese men are taking advantage of the nation's wealth to marry Chinese and Southeast Asian women. They are using society's shared assets to make up for their own inadequate qualifications in order to marry.
In contrast, Taiwanese women share the same social assets but they find it difficult to attract rich foreign husbands because foreign men moving to Taiwan must tackle barriers in a traditional culture that views men as the center of the family.
Taiwanese men are thus sheltered by society's assets and gain "external benefits." They should be taxed for this. In contrast, Taiwanese women should be compensated for the harm caused to them by the men's preference for foreign brides.
Generally, one good policy for resolving trade imbalances is to change product prices, not to limit imports. Therefore, we should find ways to raise the cost of importing brides and lower the price of importing grooms so as to balance the numbers of foreign brides and foreign grooms.
Men who marry foreign brides should pay a "social stability tax" while women who marry foreign men should gain income tax reductions and exemptions. If this proposal sounds obtrusive, then at least preferential residency and work conditions should be given to foreign husbands in comparison to foreign brides.
Chen Tian-jy is president of the Chung Hua Institution for Economic Research.
Translated by Francis Huang
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS