The Control Yuan yesterday censured the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Labor and the National Immigration Agency over cases involving the exploitation of foreign students.
They were reprimanded for dereliction of duty, failure to fulfill supervisory responsibilities and not enforcing rules, among other transgressions.
An investigation by the Control Yuan focused on several cases over the past few years in which recruitment firms and labor brokers colluded with school officials to use foreign students as cheap labor.
Photo: Taipei Times file
“These cases have ... severely harmed Taiwan’s international image,” Control Yuan members Wang Mei-yu (王美玉), Yeh Ta-hua (葉大華) and Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲), who conducted the investigation, said in their report.
In one prominent case cited in the probe, 16 students from Uganda in 2019 were promised scholarships and internships if they enrolled at Chung Chou University of Science and Technology in Changhua County
The university told the Ugandans upon arrival that they were each NT$100,000 in debt and would have to pay it off while studying by working at a factory in Miaoli County.
A judicial investigation led to the indictment of 10 people last year, including Miaoli County Labor and Youth Development Department deputy head Tu Jung-hui (涂榮輝), other local government officials and Chung Chou University of Science and Technology Vice Principal Tsai Fang-wu (柴鈁武) for corruption, forgery and breaching the Employment Service Act (就業服務法) and the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
Control Yuan members in April approved a motion to impeach Tu and three other Miaoli County officials for covering up repeated labor standards contraventions, limiting the scope of an internal school investigation and colluding with a Miaoli-based foreign labor brokerage firm to exploit the Ugandan students.
The Control Yuan said in a statement that the government officials had been negligent; the education and labor ministries should have, but did not, cooperate on administrative tasks related to overseeing foreign student programs; and checks and balances had not been set up.
It also cited failures in management and rule enforcement.
Top officials at the education and labor ministries “did not strive to solve these problems and issues ... [and] took few proactive measures to prevent rights violations and unfair labor exploitation,” the statement said.
A National Immigration Agency official in central Taiwan leaked confidential materials when colluding with the university, which they gained by accessing the internal database to track the Ugandan students’ whereabouts, enabling the university to demand payments, it said.
Other cases in which foreign students were exploited as low-paid laborers involved Yu Da University of Science and Technology in Miaoli County, University of Kang Ning in Taipei and Chienkuo Technology University in Changhua City, the statement said.
“Taiwan’s programs recruiting foreign students to obtain degrees and training have good intentions,” it said. “However, unscrupulous businesses and brokerage firms used these programs, finding loopholes to exploit students as a source of cheap labor. In doing so, they profited by conspiring with schools to saddle the students with debts, forcing them into low-paid factory jobs.”
‘CHARM OFFENSIVE’: Beijing has been sending senior Chinese officials to Okinawa as part of efforts to influence public opinion against the US, the ‘Telegraph’ reported Beijing is believed to be sowing divisions in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture to better facilitate an invasion of Taiwan, British newspaper the Telegraph reported on Saturday. Less than 750km from Taiwan, Okinawa hosts nearly 30,000 US troops who would likely “play a pivotal role should Beijing order the invasion of Taiwan,” it wrote. To prevent US intervention in an invasion, China is carrying out a “silent invasion” of Okinawa by stoking the flames of discontent among locals toward the US presence in the prefecture, it said. Beijing is also allegedly funding separatists in the region, including Chosuke Yara, the head of the Ryukyu Independence
UNITED: The premier said Trump’s tariff comments provided a great opportunity for the private and public sectors to come together to maintain the nation’s chip advantage The government is considering ways to assist the nation’s semiconductor industry or hosting collaborative projects with the private sector after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on chips exported to the US, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. Trump on Monday told Republican members of the US Congress about plans to impose sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, steel, aluminum, copper and pharmaceuticals “in the very near future.” “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said at the Republican Issues Conference in Miami, Florida. “They
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
‘VERY SHALLOW’: The center of Saturday’s quake in Tainan’s Dongshan District hit at a depth of 7.7km, while yesterday’s in Nansai was at a depth of 8.1km, the CWA said Two magnitude 5.7 earthquakes that struck on Saturday night and yesterday morning were aftershocks triggered by a magnitude 6.4 quake on Tuesday last week, a seismologist said, adding that the epicenters of the aftershocks are moving westward. Saturday and yesterday’s earthquakes occurred as people were preparing for the Lunar New Year holiday this week. As of 10am yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) recorded 110 aftershocks from last week’s main earthquake, including six magnitude 5 to 6 quakes and 32 magnitude 4 to 5 tremors. Seventy-one of the earthquakes were smaller than magnitude 4. Thirty-one of the aftershocks were felt nationwide, while 79
RSS