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.
Eight Chinese naval vessels and 24 military aircraft were detected crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait between 6am yesterday and 6am today, the Ministry of National Defense said this morning. The aircraft entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern air defense identification zones, the ministry said. The armed forces responded with mission aircraft, naval vessels and shore-based missile systems to closely monitor the situation, it added. Eight naval vessels, one official ship and 36 aircraft sorties were spotted in total, the ministry said.
INCREASED CAPACITY: The flights on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays would leave Singapore in the morning and Taipei in the afternoon Singapore Airlines is adding four supplementary flights to Taipei per week until May to meet increased tourist and business travel demand, the carrier said on Friday. The addition would raise the number of weekly flights it operates to Taipei to 18, Singapore Airlines Taiwan general manager Timothy Ouyang (歐陽漢源) said. The airline has recorded a steady rise in tourist and business travel to and from Taipei, and aims to provide more flexible travel arrangements for passengers, said Ouyang, who assumed the post in July last year. From now until Saturday next week, four additional flights would depart from Singapore on Monday, Wednesday, Friday
The Ministry of National Defense yesterday reported the return of large-scale Chinese air force activities after their unexplained absence for more than two weeks, which had prompted speculation regarding Beijing’s motives. China usually sends fighter jets, drones and other military aircraft around the nation on a daily basis. Interruptions to such routine are generally caused by bad weather. The Ministry of National Defense said it had detected 26 Chinese military aircraft in the Taiwan Strait over the previous 24 hours. It last reported that many aircraft on Feb. 25, when it spotted 30 aircraft, saying Beijing was carrying out another “joint combat
Taiwan successfully defended its women’s 540 kilogram title and won its first-ever men’s 640 kg title at the 2026 World Indoor Tug of War Championships in Taipei yesterday. In the women’s event, Taiwan’s eight-person squad reached the final following a round-robin preliminary round and semifinals featuring teams from Ukraine, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Basque Country and South Korea. In the finals, they swept the Basque team 2-0, giving the team composed mainly of National Taiwan Normal University students and graduates its second championship in a row, and its fourth in five years. Team captain
RSS