Foreign maids and caregivers are frustrating efforts by the government to "localize" social welfare services for the elderly, as the Cabinet rolls out a decade-long, NT$81.7 billion (US$2.5 billion) plan to care for the nation's aging population, a Cabinet official said yesterday.
However, while foreign workers threaten to derail such efforts, the Cabinet views immigrant spouses as the key to "localizing" the services, the official added.
Speaking to nearly 200 nurses, social workers and local-level government officials from across the nation yesterday, Minister without Portfolio Lin Wan-yi (林萬億) warned against households hiring foreign laborers to take care of their elderly family members, as he discussed the nation's most extensive policy yet to address the exploding elderly population.
Overseeing the "Long-term Care for the Elderly and Infirm Plan," Lin briefed his audience on its implementation in a training seminar held by the Ministry of the Interior.
"The Council of Labor Affairs is working with us to employ more locals -- and replace foreign workers -- as caregivers for the elderly," Lin said.
The government also seeks to train more immigrant spouses as caregivers because they tend to be more "localized" than foreign laborers, he added.
Matching the elderly with caregivers with whom they can easily communicate, Lin said, was critical amid a worrying boom in the number of retirees.
Home to more than 2.3 million people aged 65 or older, or 10 percent of its population, Taiwan is struggling to care for its elderly as that demographic grows at a rate second only to Japan's in the region.
The Council for Economic Planning and Development warns that the demographic could quadruple by 2051, posing acute strains on an already declining economy.
With birth rates plummeting, an influx of foreigners could either help to solve the problem of properly caring for the elderly, or exacerbate it, depending on what kinds of foreigners make their home here, Lin said.
"I go to Da-an Park every morning, and I always see many wheelchair-bound elderly who have been abandoned by the duck pond, their heads tilted as they snore and drool," he said, adding that such retirees' caregivers, mostly Filipinas, ignore their charges to socialize with one another.
"Caregivers like that stay for two years to make some cash, and then they go back," he said. "They don't represent a real solution."
Immigrant spouses, however, typically speak Chinese and understand local culture, allowing for genuine bonds to form between them and the elderly, he said.
The interior ministry has teamed up with the Council of Labor Affairs to train immigrant spouses -- among nearly 400,000 such foreigners -- as caregivers for the elderly, he said. The council also seeks to employ 7,400 locals as caregivers as part of the plan, Lin added.
The policy would not only provide jobs to locals and permanent residents, but would also foster the "localization" of welfare services, as caregivers under the plan would not be "outsiders" or "strangers" to their charges, he said.
Peter O'Neil, a chaplain who runs the "Migrant Concern Desk" at Hsinchu Catholic Diocese, agreed with Lin during a telephone interview that the priority should be on employing locals or long-term residents amid a "nearly 5 percent employment rate."
"But Minister Lin needs to ask himself why there are 160,000 foreign laborers here," he said. "They're cheap labor, and they're easier than local caregivers to exploit -- that's why they're so in demand."
"It works both ways," O'Neil said, adding: "Minister Lin may be concerned with the quality of service provided by foreign caregivers, but they're routinely subjected to slave-like conditions."
"There're not enough incentives for households to hire locals when they can so easily exploit foreigners," he added.
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