The government is to ease restrictions on hiring white-collar foreign professionals, Minister of Labor Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文) said on Thursday.
Chen said restrictions on white-collar foreign professionals — two years of work experience and a minimum salary threshold, as well as a minimum paid-in capital by enterprises hiring them — are to be eased, with the scale of the restrictions to be finalized by the end of this year.
Chen said that Taiwan allows white-collar foreign professionals to work here, but imposes stringent restrictions.
He said that because of the restrictions, the number of white-collar professionals working in the nation has remained at about 20,000 per year at most.
“The brain drain in Taiwan is faster than the talent we can draw to the nation,” Chen said, adding that the Executive Yuan has asked government agencies to review the matter of easing the restrictions.
They initially discussed scrapping the two years of work experience restriction and removing restrictions on salary thresholds, respecting market mechanisms instead.
Chen said the government originally created the restrictions because it did not want foreign workers to affect the wages of domestic workers.
However, he said that currently, the average monthly salary for local workers is about NT$38,000, while the minimum salary threshold for foreign professionals is nearly NT$48,000.
“Even so, foreign professionals tend to see the threshold as too low, and the possibility of them vying with local workers for the same jobs is not high. The restrictions on salary therefore have little meaning in practice,” he said.
He said that lifting restrictions on the paid-in capital of enterprises hiring foreign professionals should not be decided by the Ministry of Labor alone and is to require further discussion among government agencies.
He said he expects the final results to come by the end of this year.
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