Migrant workers
As Taiwan continues to navigate the realities of its growing migrant workforce — especially in care and domestic roles — questions around the moral and practical dimensions of their lives remain pressing. The migrant workforce quietly sustains Taiwan’s aging society, forming the invisible foundation that holds countless households together.
As of last year, Taiwan had about 680,000 migrant workers, mainly from Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Many of them are women who care for elderly or disabled people — work that keeps Taiwan’s social fabric from fraying. Yet these same women often lose their contracts when they become pregnant, forced to return home and leave their children there before seeking work again.
It is a heartbreak repeated thousands of times: Mothers are separated from their families to care for someone else’s.
Public opinion splits sharply. Some argue that it is unjust for women to abandon their families to work abroad; others say that migration is their only escape from harsh economic realities.
Both can be true.
Host societies such as Taiwan, Japan and Singapore face their own crises — shrinking fertility and rising longevity. They must balance compassion with capacity, opening doors to migrant workers while managing finite resources. Taiwan’s long-term retention program for skilled workers, launched in 2022, was a step forward, but in the care economy, retention alone is not enough. Loyalty does not automatically equal growth.
Conflicts between employers and caregivers often stem not from cruelty, but from cultural anxiety. Some families, for instance, have asked Indonesian workers to remove headscarves. Many caregivers learn to read their employers’ moods like nurses read pulse rates, yet that emotional labor goes unseen.
Defensiveness is survival learned at home, while dignity is often the only resource they have left to protect, which are issues that are difficult to convey in training courses. No short training course can undo those issues, but cultural acclimation and understanding could help with the transition phase new migrant workers face.
Perhaps what is missing is not more training, but a way to understand each caregiver’s emotional readiness and cultural adaptability before they begin the training. After all, the same course can empower one person and overwhelm another.
Taiwan should begin treating caregiving not as “unskilled labor,” but as specialized work that demands emotional and cultural competence. If emotional readiness and cultural orientation were integrated into caregiver training, families and workers could meet each other halfway. Recognizing the differences early could make programs far more humane, ensuring that learning feels like an opportunity, not correction.
Care is the quiet labor that keeps societies humane. The more it is treated as a craft — and the people who practice it as professionals — the stronger the compassion that holds everyone together.
Gita T
Taipei
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