The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it was consulting with certain foreign representative offices in Taiwan to make it easier for Taiwanese applicants to secure student and immigrant visas.
The ministry was responding to a report in the Chinese-language Apple Daily that Republic of China passport holders had been forced to fly to Hong Kong to apply for long-term visas to other countries.
A high-school student headed to Sweden on a one-year exchange program, for example, was told to travel to Hong Kong in person -because Sweden no longer offers visa services in Taiwan.
Its visa services division was closed down because of a reduced workload after Taiwanese tourists were granted visa exemptions for short-term travel to Schengen area countries earlier this year.
Canada is another country that has curtailed visa services and the Apple Daily quoted one traveler as saying that in asking Taiwanese to apply for a Canadian immigration visa in Hong Kong, Canada was compromising Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The newspaper blamed the problems on the government’s push to secure visa waivers for Taiwanese travelers. Taiwan now has visa exemption or visa on arrival agreements with 114 countries or areas.
Ministry spokesman James Chang (章計平) said most long-term visas could be applied for by sending or delivering applications to designated offices or applying directly online, except in the cases of Sweden and Canada.
He said the government has been in contact with their representative offices to work out how to reduce inconvenient procedures when obtaining student and immigrant visas.
“All university students can apply for Swedish student visas over the Internet, but due to technical problems, the service is presently not available for high-school students,” he said, adding that the ministry was in talks with Sweden to improve the situation.
Chang rejected arguments that the visa application problems reflected a downgrading of Taiwan’s sovereignty.
“There are no other implications,” Chang said. “The closing down of foreign offices in the country is beneficial to human resource management, as there are more visa applications coming in from Hong Kong than from Taiwan.”
The Canadian Trade Office in Taipei concurred.
“The closing down of offices is to ensure more efficient use of resources,” an official in the office said by telephone.
The official said that all long-term Canadian visa applications should be mailed directly to Hong Kong for processing and that face-to-face interviews were rarely required.
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