The number of recipients of Taiwan’s employment gold card, a special work and residency permit for highly skilled foreign workers, surged last year, reflecting the nation’s attractiveness as a safe haven amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Official figures showed that last year, 1,399 foreign nationals received the card that serves as a work permit, resident visa, alien resident certificate and re-entry permit.
That represented a sharp increase from 358 in 2019 and 188 in 2018, the year when the National Development Council launched the Employment Gold Card system to attract foreign professionals.
Screen grab from the Internet
The Gold Card system is open to foreign workers in the fields of science and technology, education, arts and culture, sports and economics, as specified in the Act for the Recruitment and Employment of Foreign Professionals (外國專業人才延攬及僱用法), which took effect on Feb. 8, 2018.
It has since been expanded to cover the fields of finance, architecture and law, said the Taiwan Gold Card Office, created by the council to serve as a single contact point to help foreign professionals with the process.
As of Jan. 31, a total of 2,127 gold cards had been issued to foreign professionals, including 1,468 people in the field of economics, 228 in technology, 164 in arts and culture, 132 in finance, 128 in education, six in architecture and one in sports.
“[I have] never seen so many people interested in coming to Taiwan,” Taiwanese-American start-up entrepreneur Dave Lu (呂曉龍) said in an interview last month.
A gold card holder himself, Lu moved his family from California to Taiwan last year. He has more than 20 years of experience working in technology, for companies such as Yahoo, Sony, Apple and eBay before joining start-up Pure Digital, which was later acquired by Cisco.
He is now the president and cofounder of Pared, a venture-backed restaurant labor market network.
Lu, who also founded Taiwan X, an organization that helps Taiwanese entrepreneurs, with YouTube cofounder Steve Chen (陳士駿), said that living in Taiwan allows him to connect Taiwan’s technology groups with those in the US.
However, there were several other reasons for his move to Taiwan, he said, including the serious COVID-19 outbreak and tense political environment in the US, and Taiwan’s safer and more stable environment that offers the increasingly rare commodity of “normality.”
Many people have come to Taiwan from around the world, including several without any connection to it, largely because of Taiwan’s “safety” and “normality,” Lu said.
Korean-American Danial Kang, who also moved to Taiwan from California last year, applied for a gold card in August and received it in late October.
The 28-year-old said that while many countries adopted lockdown measures to contain COVID-19 outbreaks, a friend of his living in Taiwan showed him photos of people gathering and dining normally at local restaurants.
He was yearning for that kind of “surreal normality,” Kang said, praising the Taiwanese government for taking effective measures in response to the pandemic, and Taiwanese for being highly self-disciplined and alert in facing the challenge.
An environment in which people can live and work without having to worry about outbreaks of disease is “very attractive,” he said.
Beyond gold card holders, Taiwan also saw a surge in the number of white-collar foreign workers last year.
There where 36,987 foreign white-collar workers in Taiwan as of Nov. 30 last year, nearly 6,000, or 18.8 percent, more than at the end of 2019 before the pandemic started, Ministry of Labor statistics showed.
Hong Kong singer Eason Chan’s (陳奕迅) concerts in Kaohsiung this weekend have been postponed after he was diagnosed with Covid-19 this morning, the organizer said today. Chan’s “FEAR and DREAMS” concert which was scheduled to be held in the coming three days at the Kaohsiung Arena would be rescheduled to May 29, 30 and 31, while the three shows scheduled over the next weekend, from May 23 to 25, would be held as usual, Universal Music said in a statement. Ticket holders can apply for a full refund or attend the postponed concerts with the same seating, the organizer said. Refund arrangements would
Former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Monday called for greater cooperation between Taiwan, Lithuania and the EU to counter threats to information security, including attacks on undersea cables and other critical infrastructure. In a speech at Vilnius University in the Lithuanian capital, Tsai highlighted recent incidents in which vital undersea cables — essential for cross-border data transmission — were severed in the Taiwan Strait and the Baltic Sea over the past year. Taiwanese authorities suspect Chinese sabotage in the incidents near Taiwan’s waters, while EU leaders have said Russia is the likely culprit behind similar breaches in the Baltic. “Taiwan and our European
Taiwanese indie band Sunset Rollercoaster and South Korean outfit Hyukoh collectively received the most nominations at this year’s Golden Melody Awards, earning a total of seven nods from the jury on Wednesday. The bands collaborated on their 2024 album AAA, which received nominations for best band, best album producer, best album design and best vocal album recording. “Young Man,” a single from the album, earned nominations for song of the year and best music video, while another track, “Antenna,” also received a best music video nomination. Late Hong Kong-American singer Khalil Fong (方大同) was named the jury award winner for his 2024 album
The Taipei District Court sentenced babysitters Liu Tsai-hsuan (劉彩萱) and Liu Jou-lin (劉若琳) to life and 18 years in prison respectively today for causing the death of a one-year-old boy in December 2023. The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said that Liu Tsai-hsuan was entrusted with the care of a one-year-old boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), in August 2023 by the Child Welfare League Foundation. From Sept. 1 to Dec. 23 that year, she and her sister Liu Jou-lin allegedly committed acts of abuse against the boy, who was rushed to the hospital with severe injuries on Dec. 24, 2023, but did not