Over the past few years, Taiwan has seen slower growth in the number of “new immigrants,” a category that predominantly refers to the foreign and Chinese spouses of Taiwanese.
The slowdown is largely attributable to a sharp decline in the number of Chinese spouses of Taiwanese, although there has been a slight increase in the number of spouses from other nations, Hong Kong and Macau over the past few years, a report compiled by the Legislative Yuan’s Budget Center showed.
As of the end of March, the number of new immigrants in Taiwan totaled 533,159, including 338,940 Chinese spouses and 101,333 Vietnamese spouses, the report said, citing National Immigration Agency (NIA) statistics.
Over the past few years, the number of foreigners married to Taiwanese — a category that does not include spouses from China — has increased slightly from 3,277 in 2010 to 6,001 last year, with the number of spouses from Hong Kong and Macau rising from 308 in 2010 to 919, the report said.
However, in the same period, the number of Chinese spouses fell from 11,136 to 2,456, it said.
Overall, the growth in the number of new immigrants has slowed over the past few years, the report said, citing as an example the nation seeing a record 15,174 new immigrants in 2011, but only 9,376 last year.
According to an NIA report, the labor participation rate for new immigrants was 55.96 percent in 2008, but fell to 46.63 percent in 2013, both lower than the average labor participation rate for Taiwanese, which was 57.9 to 58.43 percent over the five-year period, the Budget Center report showed.
The NIA report indicated that new immigrants mainly work in the service sector as salespeople and entry-level technicians, with up to 75 percent earning a monthly salary of less than NT$30,000.
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