Taiwan’s Lack of Policies for Mainland Chinese Migrants and Refugees

• In Event: Migration and Citizenship in East Asia

Abstract

In this paper, I examine why Taiwan has not adopted formal immigration and refugee laws, particularly with regard to migrants and political asylum seekers from Mainland China. Taiwan has yet to define its migrant/refugee conceptual binary. Although Taiwan has many immigration laws and regulations, its government does not currently have a clear and consistent migration policy, and the country does not have a formal refugee law. I use process tracing and content analysis of Taiwanese visa policies towards Mainland Chinese migrants and asylum seekers as well as media debates to explain why. The primary factors highlighted in this paper are Taiwan’s national security ideology and the “One China Policy” supported by Mainland China and the United States.

Control over Mainland migration into Taiwan is more restrictive than for migrants from other countries because of Taiwan’s national security ideology. While Taiwan has a jus sanguinis immigration policy for Overseas Chinese, this policy does not extend to migrants from Mainland China. Within Taiwan, population movement between Taiwan and China is seen as a serious national security issue due to tensions between the two countries stemming from the end of the Chinese Civil War and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party’s retreat to Taiwan after its defeat by the Communists in 1949. Mutual exchanges between Taiwan and Mainland China were banned before 1985. Visits between the two countries increased after 1986 when the Taiwanese government allowed veterans of Chiang Kai-shek’s army to visit their hometowns in Mainland China. Marriages between Mainland and Taiwanese residents started taking place, and by 1997, the Act Governing Relations with Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area was passed to accommodate marriage migration.

Taiwan's activist New Power Party have unsuccessfully proposed a refugee law in 2016, 2017, and 2019. As a result, political asylum seekers in Taiwan only receive services from churches and other non-profit organizations and are unable to work legally. The arrival in Taiwan of Hong Kong protesters in late 2019 reignited a debate about Taiwan’s currently almost non-existent political asylum and refugee policies. In January 2020, two Chinese dissidents arrived at Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport without an entry permit and were stranded at the airport for four months before being allowed to enter on "humanitarian visas" after an outcry from local activists. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were nearly a dozen cases of desperate Mainland Chinese citizens hijacking commercial jets and crash-landing them in Taiwan in order to seek asylum. Most of these asylum seekers were imprisoned in Taiwan or sent back to Mainland China. The crux of the dilemma of Taiwan’s formal acceptance of political asylum seekers as refugees is the official stance that China and Taiwan are two separate countries that upsets the “One China” policy status quo favored by Beijing and Washington.

The implications of this paper are important because Taiwan’s democratic government and close proximity to China has made it a desirable place of sanctuary for Chinese political dissidents or for those seeking better economic opportunities.

Author

• Angela Ju, St. Edward's University