Forty-three percent of foreign spouses in Taipei County do not live where they are supposed to, according to a recent survey by the county's Civil Affairs Bureau released yesterday.
Since last October, the bureau stepped up the number of social workers conducting large-scale door-to-door visits to all 47,191 foreign and Chinese who live -- or are at least had registered to live -- in Taipei County.
"There are three reasons that a particular foreign spouse cannot be found. They no longer reside at their registered address, are not present at the time of a house visit, or have since divorced their Taiwanese spouse," Lee Chiu-lan (李秋蘭), an officer with the bureau's population affairs section said yesterday.
The survey showed that 10,211 individuals no longer reside at their registered addresses, 3,502 have divorced and 6,933 were no longer in the country.
With regard to the missing foreign spouses who are still in Taiwan, authorities are now seeking help from local police to locate them.
As of Aug. 31 last year, 11,894 foreign spouses and 35,284 Chinese spouses were registered as residing in Taipei County.
The door-to-door survey was part of the New Residents Education and Counseling Project undertaken by the county government's department of education, in cooperation with the police, transportation, public health, social affairs and labor departments.
According to 2004 figures provided by the Ministry of the Interior's Department of Statistics, Taipei County had the highest number of married couples where one of spouses was a foreign or Chinese national.
Last year, 5,062 cross-national couples registered to be married in Taipei County, which made up 16.17 percent of total number of cross-national married couples that year, followed by 2,961 in Taipei City and 2,937 in Taoyuan County.
By the end of last year, the total number of foreign and Chinese spouses in Taiwan was estimated to be at 338,000, with 122,000 registered as naturalized citizens.
The Central News Agency reported yesterday that the bureau's director of civil affairs, Chang Hung-lu (張宏陸), said that foreign and Chinese spouses who had been visited wished to seek employment security in Taiwan.
According to the report, the greatest needs expressed by the survey's participants were, employment services, vocational training and labor rights.
In addition, the majority of foreign spouses were also keen on learning Taiwanese and Mandarin and hoped to participate in language classes. Many were interested in understanding Taiwan's social welfare regulations, taking driving lessons and getting legal advice on national health insurance.
Pan Wen-chuang (潘文忠), director of Taipei County's bureau of education, said that in order to help foreign spouses learn Chinese, every elementary school in the county should offer special language programs for foreign spouses.
Taiwan is stepping up plans to create self-sufficient supply chains for combat drones and increase foreign orders from the US to counter China’s numerical superiority, a defense official said on Saturday. Commenting on condition of anonymity, the official said the nation’s armed forces are in agreement with US Admiral Samuel Paparo’s assessment that Taiwan’s military must be prepared to turn the nation’s waters into a “hellscape” for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Paparo, the commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, reiterated the concept during a Congressional hearing in Washington on Wednesday. He first coined the term in a security conference last
A magnitude 4.3 earthquake struck eastern Taiwan's Hualien County at 8:31am today, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). The epicenter of the temblor was located in Hualien County, about 70.3 kilometers south southwest of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 23.2km, according to the administration. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake's intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County, where it measured 3 on Taiwan's 7-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 2 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the CWA said.
The Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) yesterday announced a fundraising campaign to support survivors of the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck Myanmar on March 28, with two prayer events scheduled in Taipei and Taichung later this week. “While initial rescue operations have concluded [in Myanmar], many survivors are now facing increasingly difficult living conditions,” OCAC Minister Hsu Chia-ching (徐佳青) told a news conference in Taipei. The fundraising campaign, which runs through May 31, is focused on supporting the reconstruction of damaged overseas compatriot schools, assisting students from Myanmar in Taiwan, and providing essential items, such as drinking water, food and medical supplies,
New Party Deputy Secretary-General You Chih-pin (游智彬) this morning went to the National Immigration Agency (NIA) to “turn himself in” after being notified that he had failed to provide proof of having renounced his Chinese household registration. He was one of more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from China who were informed by the NIA that their Taiwanese citizenship might be revoked if they fail to provide the proof in three months, people familiar with the matter said. You said he has proof that he had renounced his Chinese household registration and demanded the NIA provide proof that he still had Chinese
RSS