Sat, Sep 27, 2008 page2

• Forum highlights ‘new poverty’

  HARD LIVES Interviews with Vietnamese spouses revealed how immigration policy is linked to domestic violence and slave-like conditions for some women

  • By Loa Iok-Sin / STAFF REPORTER
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  It’s time for the government to rethink its social security and immigration policy as the nation faces challenges such as “new poverty” and an increasing flow of immigrants through marriage, academics specializing in labor, social welfare and immigration issues told a forum in Taipei yesterday.

  Wang Yung-tzu (王永慈), a professor at National Taiwan Normal University’s (NTNU) Graduate Institute of Social work, pointed out that while poverty has always existed in Taiwan, rapid urbanization and interconnection in people’s economic lives have created a “new poverty” that needs to be dealt with differently.

  “In the rapidly changing economic environment, people have developed different ideas on who is responsible for poverty,” Wang told the forum, which was organized by the Institute for National Policy Research and the Hsu Chao-ing Charity Foundation.

  “In 1997, more than 50 percent of the people considered personal factors such as not working hard enough and spending too much money to be causes of poverty,” she said, citing figures from Academia Sinica.

  Statistics also show that nearly 48 percent of people at the time believed “no employment opportunities” to be the cause of poverty — but the number increased to nearly 63 percent last year.

  Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of people last year said that the government should work harder to create more job opportunities.

  “This goes to show that when dealing with ‘new poverty,’ the government should not put responsibility completely on individuals and overlook social factors,” Wang said.

  Saying that the government has not offered a complete social security system to help people escape poverty but only tried to hand out pensions, Cheng Li-chen (鄭麗珍), a social work professor at National Taiwan University, said that the government should quit its “patronizing” mentality and provide job training or assistance for families in poverty to participate in economic activities.

  Getting rid of the patronizing mentality could also resolve defects in the social welfare system, she said.

  “The existing social welfare system is exclusive — only those who are qualified as ‘low-income households’ may receive help,” she said. “In turn, many such ‘low-income households’ would do anything to keep the title so they can receive cash.”

  Other academics at the forum focused on immigration. In their joint research interviewing 15 Vietnamese immigrant spouses, National Sun Yat-sen University professors Wang Hong-zen (王宏仁) and Anna Tang (唐文慧) discovered that immigration policy is connected with hidden domestic violence cases involving immigrant spouses.

  “Under the current system, immigrant spouses need signatures from their husbands to renew their Alien Resident Certificate, and thus they depend heavily on their in-laws for their legal residency in Taiwan,” Wang said.

  “Because of that, many Taiwanese husbands take their immigrant spouses as slaves — many of them are not allowed to leave the house, do household chores all day long, and are not given any allowance,” he said.

  He urged the government to reform its immigration policy according to the US model, which he said grants almost every right of a citizen to an immigrant spouse pending to become a citizen.
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