The Social Structure

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capital investments in Southeast Asia intensified, and as a response the first labour inflow landed on the island, though mostly employed in the informal economy. In 1992 a general deregulation in the financial capital sector⁴⁰ allowed, for the first time, direct investment of Taiwanese capitals into the Chinese market, by-passing the usual back door of Hong Kong. As a consequence, the flow of capitals directed to the PRC grew enormously, especially in comparison with the one towards Southeast Asia; nevertheless the flow and counter-flow model was disrupted in this case, because Chinese labour was (and still is) barred from entering Taiwan. Therefore, the main workforce supply for Taiwan remains still today Southeast Asia.

5.4 The Social Structure

The over sixty million Italian inhabitants are mostly distributed in the central and northern part of the peninsula – with Rome and Milan among the most populous cities, while in the south the largest city remains Naples – resulting in 68 per cent of urbanized population. This distribution is also a reflection of the geographic shape of Italy, which has favoured settlements in the larger and more fertile plains of the north and centre, rather than in the narrower and more mountainous areas of the south, where important cities are mostly located on the coast. Today the Italian population – with a median age of 44.2 years – is aging quickly: over 20 per cent of it is at or above the 65 years of age, with a growing life expectancy, a result of better health care and living conditions, that averages 81.95 years for the total population (males: 79.32 and females: 84.73). At the same time the total fertility rate has plummeted to 1.41 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. As a consequence, the Italian population is increasing at a modest rate of 0.34 per cent annually, and recent estimates have projected that the population natural growing curve has already reached its top and is now on the decline side. The predicted drop in population will only be slowed down by new influxes of immigrants, who already contribute for most of the population growth and fertility rate in the peninsula.

40 Art. 35 of the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.

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Taiwan’s population is one-third of the Italian, but lives in a territory that is almost ten times smaller than Italy, which makes it the second highest population density in the world, after Bangladesh. Typically for a crowded island, this is a major factor to be taken into account when forming immigration policies, and even more so for Taiwan, as will be clarified further. Unlike in the past, today most Taiwanese population is concentrated in the northern part of Taiwan, as an effect of the shift – intervened after 1980 – from a dual-pole regional economy centred in Taipei and Kaohsiung areas to a single-pole pattern, coinciding with the New Taipei regional district, where all the driving high-tech and manufacturing industries are located (Lin 2010: 11). The major cities – Taipei, Taizhong, Tainan and Gaoxiong – are all lined along the border of the large and sloping plains of the western side. The Taiwanese population is relatively younger – the median age being 38.7 years – with only 11.6 per cent of it accounting for the 65-year-olders and above, and life expectancy is amongst the highest in Asia, at 79.71 years (males: 76.58 and females: 83.06). In 1984 the fertility rate, in constant decline for years, reached the 2.1 replacement level and today has dropped to 1.1, a figure lower than Italy’s. Therefore the population growth rate at present is also very modest, 0.23 per cent annually, which apparently would be a good prospective for an overcrowded island, if it were not for the bad consequences in terms of worsened shortage of domestic workers in the low-skilled sectors.

In sum, both countries, Italy and Taiwan, are mostly surrounded by poorer, younger nations, with the highest fertility rates in the world and the lowest standards of living (North African countries and the Philippines, to name just a few), therefore it is just natural that a constant need of fresh labour force on one side is met by migration flows from the other side. Strangely enough, though, evidence shows that the scarcity of low-skilled and young workforce is more acute in Taiwan – where the population is relatively younger – than in Italy. This unexpected finding can be explained by many factors, such as the lower fertility rate in Taiwan, but an important determinant is certainly the different geographic location and international positioning of the two countries. Italy’s land and sea borders have always been more porous to immigration, mitigating the stronger depopulation process of the peninsula; furthermore, being part of a supra-national

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entity like the European Union makes is easier for other EU nationals to come and settle in Italy at their pleasure, balancing up the lower birth rate of Italian nationals. By contrast, Taiwan as an outlying oceanic island, with strict national security policies that have been put in place in order to safeguard its territorial integrity, is certainly hard to reach and settle in. In addition, the diplomatic international isolation and the cross-strait disputes exacerbate the problem of the necessary labour supply for Taiwan. This particular situation gives also rise to another marked difference with Italy that in normal condition would probably not be expected. Italy’s language and culture are very different from those of its main immigration communities, but the debate on national identity is only a topic used by small extremist parties on the right during election times. On the contrary, the debate on national identity in Taiwan is very strong and lively, though the island shares a common language and culture with its closest neighbour, China, and a similar Asian way of life with its neighbouring countries. Obviously the distinction here serves to justify and support the separation claims at political and diplomatic level.

5.5 Origins and Development of Immigration Flows

As explained in the early chapters of this study, Italy’s first immigrants came mainly from the Mediterranean Basin, which is to be treated as a secondary reference bloc, according to the model adopted above. Countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and the Middle East region were the first to send migrants to a relatively more prosper and closer developed destination. Later also came workers from Central and West Africa, while those from East Africa (Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia) were mostly refugees and were granted special treatment for being from former Italian colonies. This pattern, which seemed to be well established and over time was bound to enlarge the already settled migrant communities in the peninsula, suddenly changed in the late 1980s with the end of the Cold War. The major migrant flows heading for Italy then started to come from the east not from the south: Albanians, Romanians and Ukrainians now replaced northern and central African workers in many sectors and occupations. The shift of labour source from the secondary to the primary reference block was dramatic and totally unexpected in its speed, so much so that the Italian foreign policy with the Mediterranean countries, traditionally based on bilateral friendly terms, took a

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while to change and adapt. Eventually the change came, but it was so abrupt and ill-conceived that it caused more damages than anything else. While Italy became more integrated and conformant to the policy lines drawn by its primary reference block – the EU of “Fortress Europe” – distance and closure towards its secondary and more natural reference area grew larger. On the other hand, the migration flows coming from this area have treated Italy as a transit country, a passage through which to reach other final destinations.

Since the beginning, Taiwan’s main sources of foreign labour have been the Southeast Asian countries, because access of Chinese into the island was totally barred for obvious political reasons. This choice was also a natural consequence of the delocalization of many Taiwanese companies into that area, where they moved the most labour-intensive production while maintaining other manufacturing lines in Taiwan. Eventually they found it more convenient to move their own workers from Southeast Asian operations to Taiwan to fill in labour shortages in their home production. As was the case for Italy, Taiwan’s labour source also came originally from its secondary reference block, and so has remained to these days, with some telling changes. In 1990 the Council of Labour Affairs set national origin priorities for workers, naming Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand as the most desirable countries, while Malaysia was added later (Selya 1992). The latter though was soon replaced by Vietnam, as Malaysia economy was performing better and showed the capacity of absorbing potential emigrants too. In addition, the presence of Thai workers has constantly decreased for many reasons: the great infrastructure projects – where most of them were employed – have been completed; the manufacturing industries have further relocated to countries with cheaper labour; the 2005 protest by Thai workers, which put a temporary stop in the recruitment of Thai workers, many of whom became disillusioned of the advantages of working in Taiwan. Today the average worker salary gap between Thailand and Taiwan is narrowing, and the general feeling among members of the Thai community I personally interviewed is that wages levels in Taiwan, though still competitive compared to the Thai ones, do not justify anymore the costs and inconveniences of migration. In this regard, many official figures have been released to compare an average Thai workers’ monthly pay in Thailand with the corresponding salary earned by them

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in Taiwan, but none seemed conclusive. Therefore I conducted more field research in the Thai community of Taipei and found out that the average pay for a low-skilled Thai worker in Taiwan is around 25,000 NTD, while the same worker would get about 13,000 NTD for that same job in a big city like Bangkok.⁴¹ Taking into consideration the higher standard of living in Taiwan, the difference is not that big though. If this process will continue and involve other Southeast Asian countries, the probability is that Taiwan will have to get its workforce supply either from very far (Myanmar, Sri Lanka) or from very close (China) sources. In the first instance, Taiwan will face competition from other migrant destinations in Asia where labourers are in great demand and average salaries for low-skilled workers are higher than on the island; the second alternative would be ideal in economic and logistic terms, but unfeasible for its political and security costs, unless a regime change would intervene on either side of the Taiwan Strait, on the scale of that occurred in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. How likely it is that Taiwan in the future will get its badly needed labour supply from its primary reference block – in the same pattern as Italy experienced it – is hard to predict. If the pace of economic integration and dependence with China proceeds at this speed, it will only be just natural that at a flow of capitals in one direction sooner or later will correspond a flow of migrants from the opposite direction, along the lines of classical migration theories. The early preference given to Southeast Asian workers rather than those from the PRC was clearly intentional from Taiwan authorities, as a way to mark the physical and cultural differences with Taiwanese and perpetuate the foreign workers’ isolation in the host society.

Conversely, the importation of mainland workers would have hardly served the same purpose. As Tseng (2004, as cited in Lan 2006: 39) has remarked:

In most societies, the ‘problem’ is unsuccessful acculturation among immigrants, but in Taiwan, the attitude toward Chinese workers is quite the opposite: We are worried that it would happen too soon, too easy for them to become ‘us’, unlike foreigners who just come and leave.

41 The minimum wage in Thailand has been fixed at 300 Baht per day, but in big cities it can be double as much.

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5.6 The Evolution of Legal Frameworks and Government Policies

It always takes time for governments and institutions to ascertain the dimensions of new social phenomena happening within the state borders and consequently choose the right measures to cope with them. In contrast, economic forces have constantly shown an uncanny ability to anticipate them with great foresight. This is certainly true of foreign labour migration, which has often been met with the same stepwise approach by nations at their early immigration experience: first, initial negation; then, partial admission, provided it is temporary; and finally, full acceptance as a necessary “evil” to sustain the national economy. Only frontier countries, such as the USA, Canada and Australia, were able to afford programmes to actively stimulate immigration in order to populate vast inhabited areas and consolidate their economies – not to say their mere existence as states.

Italy and Taiwan share a lack of experience in modern-times immigration and their respective approaches seemed to follow the pattern just described above.

Initially Italy tolerated the presence of undocumented foreigners as a consequence of its poor border controls and treated it as mere public order issue, negating it was a response to its economic and social restructuring. Taiwan on the other hand is an island and therefore access is restricted to ports and airports. For this reason it was unthinkable that someone could penetrate the heavily patrolled sea borders and land on the island illegally – the simple idea would challenge the authoritarian regime’s self-image of law and order. As a matter of fact, many foreigners became illegal just by overstaying their tourist or student visas, a practice well known since the 1960s, but shunned by the official statistics and police authorities as purely accidental, unable to tarnish the general orderly picture.

The early immigration laws that were later enacted by both countries seemed, at first, tentative solutions to contingent problems that afflicted the two economies at the time, with two important differences. Italy’s main purpose was to regularise the bulk of undocumented migrants that lived in its territory in order to rescue them from exploitation by organised crime and the informal sector, and in so doing – it was believed – definitely wipe out a problem that had accumulated over the years for sheer carelessness and inexperience from the authorities. To justify this first mass regularisation in the eyes of the public opinion, a law was

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also passed that regulated entry and stay of foreign labour migrants, but it soon proved inadequate to respond to the country’s actual economic needs. Taiwan’s first legislation was more structured and planned in its intentions, because it responded to real urgencies, such as the completion of the infrastructural projects, which were experiencing delays. However, regularisation was not seen as an acceptable measure by public opinion at the time, so illegal migrants were asked by the authorities to give themselves in for deportation, with the promise of a tax amnesty and the right to return legally after a regular migration procedure (Liu 1996), which actually happened in most cases. Furthermore, it was believed that the unprecedented immigration wave was due to a combination of exceptional events, and would ebb away by itself as soon as the projects were completed, returning the labour market to its normal capacity.

While the second stage of policy-making had a more functionalist approach aimed at solving structural economic problems for both nations, the third stage involved a more complex elaboration of immigration policies that would take into consideration definition of national identity in relation to foreign migrants, human rights issues and eventual integration and assimilation programs. Italy’s shift from a mere functionalist and legalitarian attitude to a more generous and inclusive policy was not particularly difficult and coincided with the first liberal governments that came to power, after the end of the long Cold War period enabled them to do so. At the same time the public opinion gradually came to accept the presence of large foreign communities as necessary and beneficial to the society. Furthermore, the examples of other European countries with a long tradition of immigration helped the Italian authorities to work out more realistic programs of quota-planning that would include patterns of integration and other measures towards a more open multicultural society. Unfortunately, this virtuous course was to be stopped, delayed and diverted several times with the enactments of new restrictive and repressive immigration laws by successive conservative governments that contradicted the initial spirit, with the aim to placate the deepest fears of their voters, who typically blamed foreign immigrants for the country’s problems, such as crime, unemployment and so forth. Conversely, the economic forces that traditionally supported the conservative governments were the same which advocated for more generous and welcoming immigration laws, evidence

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that labour migrants were seen as an important factor of the economy system which the country cannot do without.

Taiwan’s step into the third stage was more controversial and problematic because it came a long way from the initial assumption of a zero-immigration country, a view shared with other nations such as Korea and Japan, where ethnic homogeneity was regarded as one of the pillars of nation’s stability (Belanger et al. 2010). Furthermore, Taiwan and other recent Asian immigration countries wanted to avoid at all costs the conflict between indigenous population and foreign migrant communities – which had marred social harmony in many Western immigration countries – often sparked by competition for education, housing, health and social services. Therefore for Taiwan the transition into the third phase meant to depart considerably from its early legislation – inspired by the draconian immigration laws of Singapore and Hong Kong – at the base of which was the quasi-military control of foreign workforce and the absolute prohibition of settlement. Human rights considerations and protests from labour source countries persuaded the Taiwanese authorities to mitigate the harshest regulations, such as the ban to family reunion, the limit to the extension of work permits and the segregation of workers in factory compounds. This shift of policy was also part of the realization for Taiwan of two important points. First, Taiwan is a fully developed democracy with a multi-party system where majority and opposition parties alternate regularly in the rule of the country, according to ballots granted by voters in free political elections. This involves abiding to democratic principles and observing the respect of individuals’ human rights.

Secondly, unlike Singapore and Hong Kong – built-up as trade ports with limited

Secondly, unlike Singapore and Hong Kong – built-up as trade ports with limited