The Politics of Migration Care Worker Policy in Taiwan

• In Event: The Politics of Immigration Policy in East Asia

Abstract

In the past two decades, many East Asian countries have used migrant care workers to solve the challenges of labour shortages in the social welfare sector. Migrant care workers are recruited into families to provide care service that used to be considered a familial obligation. At the same time, government policies to expand social care provision have resulted in a huge increase in demand for care labour that cannot be met by the local workforce. Migrant care workers are now a pivotal element of the workforce in the care sector in East Asia, ranging from Filipino care assistants in Japanese nursing homes to Indonesian live-in caregivers in Taiwan. As Taiwanese government has actively utilized migrant care worker policy as the solution to the crisis in the social welfare section, this paper investigates the policy mechanism and explore how the local political contexts—including civil society and political parties—have influences on the development of migrant care worker policies in Taiwan. In this paper, I investigate why Taiwan differs from Japan and South Korea and shows a different pattern of employing migrant care workers. The data used in this paper draw from my fieldwork in Taiwan between August to December in 2014 and the follow-up research trip from Nov to December in 2015. This paper also uses documentary analysis of legal and policy changes in immigration policies, and in-depth twenty-five interviews with government officials, public service providers and civil society organizations. Drawing from the data, I argue that institutional path dependency and unique national identity politics have shaped the policy development of migrant care worker policy in Taiwan.

Authors

• Alex Payette, University of Toronto

• Yi-Chun Chien, National Chengchi University